Full Recap of First Shenzhen BootUP! Weekend

What a rollercoaster weekend, sitting here Monday afternoon still recovering from an exciting and exhausting weekend full of creativity and passion!

We started 7pm Friday, and some coming from Hong Kong and other parts of Shenzhen arrived a bit late. Bruce and Mike went over how the weekend would roll out, with Friday night being team formation and “getting to know your group”.

With 16 members by 8pm, we divided by 3 and came up with 5 startups.

So after putting ideas up on the board, we had the top 5 votes startups form and build teams

Yi Shou Yi (later re-branded fan fan zhuan)- quality online platform for buying/ selling businesses

A List - social network for luxury oriented Chinese

Bargument (later re-branded trade bidder) – B2B reverse auction platform

Veggie Fast Food (later re-branded salad club)- Delivering health-oriented fast food in Shenzhen

Tour guides – social platform for connecting new friends and fun trips.

most teams we 3 people, some 4, but somehow the Veggie Fast food ballooned into 6 people.

Friday night people sat in their groups and outlined their weekend plan, roles, and brand.

Saturday people started arriving at 9am, 10am we had a checkin, going from each group explaining what developments they had.

Then Bruce went over business model generation, passing out templates for the teams to use to best lay out their businesses. we used dropbox to share templates, photos, and tools.

With lots of passion in the room, some team members had differences of direction in the startup – splitting into different departments but continuing on.

Check-in at 5pm, groups explaining where they had gone that Saturday, market research, feedback from mentors and visitors and other startup members. Some teams stuck around in the szteam office, but many moved to bars and cafes to meet with their groups.

Sunday checkin again at 10am…and being the last day with judges there to pitch, we had to push things to prepare. Sunday we were lucky to have Jon Buford from boot hk coworking space there to help mentor and later judge.

Bruce had shared a great few pitches with everyone there, and we had some teams working in cafes to focus together. The sense of pressure and urgency was really brewing Sunday afternoon.

By 6:30pm all 5 judges had arrived and we setup the room. We got a great balance of judges from various backgrounds, as below:

Paul Tittmann, American spending 38 years in Asia. CEO of Pacific Access a large Turkish trading company in Shekou district, previously executive in Global Sources and TNT China

Yoyo – Director of Media for Phoenix TV (HK)

Mr Pang, a successful Chinese businessman, the first China CEO of Cisco Systems, also many years in Sun Microsystems and spent 5 years living in USA

Marshall Taplits – Local Tech guru, owner of 2 bars in Shekou and Implementation Manager for TradeStone Software

Jon Buford – Founder of boot.hk coworking and CEO of his new startup makible

They voted on 4 criteria: business model, scalability, marketing strategy, and uniqueness. on a 1 – 5 number system, #1 being low, #5 being high.

Each startup had 10 minutes to pitch, and the judges had 5 minutes of questions and feedback.

The winner was the Salad Club

Salad Club

Founders:

• Alice Zhang
• Sammi Chang
• Donald Han
• Max Sim

A-List

Founders:

• Kris Jane
• Rodrigo Balotin

Trader Bidder

Founders:

• Mitch Davis
• Rafael Iaia
• Conan

Travel Buddy

Founders:

• Attila Csanyi (Steven)
• Kathrine Lau

Fan Fan Zhuan

Founders:

• Lucian Lacau
• Vladimir Pashkov

Startups Shenzhen

• Patrick Wong
• Michael Michelini
• Jon Buford (Founder of Boot.hk)