Photo: Erin Atchison pitches her winning company, Barn Raiser, on Sunday evening.
Erin Atchison had an idea brewing in her mind for the last year. Through her job and volunteer experience, Atchison knew there was a gap in community resources and event planning. She just wasn’t sure she could fix the problem.
But, on Friday evening, Atchison pitched her idea in front of 70 strangers at Startup Weekend Waterloo Region, Community Edition.
The weekend helped budding social entrepreneurs form teams on Friday night, create companies focused on making Waterloo Region a better place to live on Saturday, and pitch to a panel of judges Sunday evening.
Atchison’s idea, called Barn Raiser, is a website designed to provide a meeting ground for local business, community builders and non-profit organizations to share resources, ideas and connections to support community building. It wowed the judges and landed her team a first-place win.
“I find it almost ironic that the thing we were creating is similar to what Startup Weekend is,” Atchison said. “I have lots of big ideas, ideas that could maybe go somewhere, but don’t have a place to put them. This weekend did the same thing for me. It gave me a reinvigorated sense of validation for ideas, especially with [Startup Weekend] mentors. It was an outlet to put our passions.”
Atchison’s team, consisting of herself, Tammy Bender and Charlotte Chan, impressed the judges with their minimum viable product, extensive market research and viability in the community. Eleven other teams built wildly different companies ranging from GLIDR, a “random app of kindness” platform, to Saferide, an app that allows youth to track, score and improve their driving skills.
“It was exhilarating and a whirlwind,” Bender said of the Startup Weekend experience.
Startup Weekend keynote speaker and community enabler Hilary Abel kicked off the weekend with an inspiring talk about Waterloo Region and the faces, places and events that have redefined the region in the last few years.
“Startup Weekend is just a perfect microcosm of what Waterloo Region is about," Abel said. "People coming together, working on something their passionate about, finding solutions to problems, working collaboratively (AND competitively,) and making things happen – it’s really lovely. I think it should be a mandatory exercise for everyone living here!"
Over the event’s 54 hours, 12 companies formed to try to inspire change in Waterloo Region. While the newly formed companies are not guaranteed to survive past the weekend, they act as a catalyst to inspire people of all walks of life to make a living by changing their community.
"The amazing journey that an entrepreneur embarks on can be incredibly rewarding and inspiring," said startup mentor John Stix, co-founder of Fibernetics.
Members of the Barn Raiser team plan to continue with their product, and like many other teams, are trying to figure out how their real-life commitments will mesh with their idea and product development needs. However, the theme that resonated most was that any person with an idea has the potential to make positive change.
“We created a product to solve our problems,” Chan said on the Startup Weekend experience.
