Last weekend marked the end of an amazing 54 hour startup extravaganza,  Startup Weekend Szczecin ‘Smart City.’ Young entrepreneurs could create and develop their innovative startup concepts, working alongside experienced mentors.
Startup Weekend, the world’s biggest startup community, organises startup events in around 150 countries. They partnered up with Lemon Demon to organise the workshop in Szczecin. Over 60 people took part in the event. Programmers, marketers, graphic designers and businessmen came to Szczecin not just from Poland, but also from Germany, Netherlands, and even Israel, Gwatemala or the US.
The participants had 54hrs to build their startups from scratch. Literally. At Startup Weened everyone is welcome to pitch in their startup idea and receive peers’ feedback.
Then, everyone teams up choosing the best (by popular vote) ideas and develop them in a presentable manner. They could choose the concepts they wanted to work on based on 60-second presentations.
Then, the teams embarked on a three-day frenzy of business model creation, coding, designing, and market validation. Which means that during that time they had time to decide the business model and create as much as possible around their idea; some even attempted to build prototypes. To get better insights, they could also gather opinions from their potential clients and investors, and try to improve their concepts with the help of the mentors, experienced entrepreneurs and experts.

After demos, judges chose the two best projects. First prize went to “Gramy na hali” (Playing in the Gym) who created a programme for booking gyms and other sports venues. Tractako, offline analytics based on tracking people and objects in stores with iBeacons, got second place.
“This year’s Startup Weekend proved yet again how advanced tech specialists are in Szczecin. We’ve got a few really innovative projects which haven’t been developed by any big hats. This time the project that won isn’t extremely complex and its implementation will be easy. But next time any, even the most outrageous ideas, has a chance to win”, says Sławomir Pucia, juror from Lemon Demon company.
However, all the participants definitely benefitted from the workshop. They began working on their ideas and got some hands-on experience in working on a startup. They met really creative people and hopefully they’ll continue working together and some new cool startups will result from the workshop. Maciej Jankowski from Netcamp Fundation, organiser of Startup Weekend Szczecin hopes “their support and the prizes will make the future work on the projects much easier.”