I’m Armin, part of the team behind the 24 Hour Startup Challenge!
Over this weekend, there are over 300 founders building products live on Twitch in 24 hours. As I post this, there are almost 90 people live streaming their work from all over the world! You can watch them on 24hrstartup.com.
The idea behind this live-streamed hackathon event comes from Pat Walls. He challenged himself to do a 24-hour startup twice this year and live-streamed his process. He is currently moderating and interviewing people from the maker community in our main stream.
Initially, we planned for about 50 participants but were overwhelmed with sign-ups. People are motivated to do this, and you can see that in their streams! We think it’s great to watch everyone make their crazy ideas reality, so we wanted to share :)
A few products being built right now:
* Heartbeat Canvas - Generate art from your heartbeat
* Privacy First Products - A curated list where you can discuss privacy first products
* EpilepsyBlocker - Disable GIFs that may cause epilepsy
I browsed the streams. Fun projects! Lots of opinions expressed here and I would tend to agree that none of these folks seem to be doing anything with customers. I'd love to see a challenge where the goal was to have 5 customers in 24 hours. With that said this seems more like a distributed hack-a-thon and a good one. I think that's an idea worth repeating. Venues and wifi and food and security and all the other things we have to do for meatspace hack-a-thons means we can only do one a year. Twitch hosted hack-a-thons seem like a great way to put something together fast.
People could pay to play and gain a shot at the prizes.
Hey... that sounds like a startup. Maybe there is one startup in your event. ;)
> I'd love to see a challenge where the goal was to have 5 customers in 24 hours.
I tried this (https://www.twitch.tv/louisswiss) last week and failed. The weekend just isn't good for b2b sales. With no extra work I did reach 4 sales ($600) within a week though.
Thanks for the mention of Privacy First Products, I will probably post that to Hacker News later, but here is already a sneak preview: https://privacyfirstproducts.com
It's quite a challenge to keep focused all the time, but it's super fun to test out what you can do in one day. The code will reflect the fast coding of course, but I'm surprised on the progress of maybe streamers!
Seems like a less descriptive privacytools.io. The focus is on the comments I take it? I guess my concern is whether the commenters will write insightful, useful things or whether it will be all speculation.
Twitch is a great platform for this. I really believe you could turn this concept into an always on 24/7 channel ;)
One interesting trend are features built on top of remote team management tools such as slack, airtable, gitlab, etc. I use G Suite everyday. And would definitely look to build on that platform with their huge user base ;)
Good question. On something that's minimal impact to lose, I like the https://spike.news model of saving state: you're given a token (a string of a few words) to log back in with later. No email, no risk, everyone's happy.
To get even more pedantic, they are building apps, not launching them.
Not that I want to dismiss the efforts - a group of people all challenging themselves to build out a side project in 24 hours is commendable. But building an idea into an MVP on a Saturday is not the same thing as launching a company.
Then we wouldn't need the word "startup" at all. But since people intuitively see a difference between opening up a deli and starting a social network, I think the word has a use.
I think people associcate startups with technology, high risk (compared to a proven business model that has worked a thousand times for other people), and potential for fast growth (with regards to the investment).
I think that's a post appstore or post web definition. I'm all for unsexy startups if they can turn the entire city into a customer and yet not be relevant outside of the city
Quite some irony in the fact that while some people are trying to build products quickly, Hacker News (run by startup incubator YCombinator) has a 20-comment thread debating what 'startup' means.
That's not what I'm advocating. Just arguing against the parent who said some equivalent of "while others are building products, you wannabe entrepreneurs are all talks here on HN".
How do you propose anyone will have a MVP within a day? Which is the purpose of this event. I mentioned giving them a month to develop and build some level of product and anticipation for what it is they're proposing. Nothing about calling them a 'start-up' based on any level of randomness. Or perhaps you don't understand the word 'maybe'.
We should take back the word 'startup' from people who want to make us think it is reserved for something that involves a business plan and raising money.
Having been interested in business since before the dot-com book, I've seen "Startup" transform from "New business, dealing with new business problems" to the very SV-driven notion that it's a new business expressly designed to scale quickly.
Words might need to mean something, but there's already been a lot of drift here.
That's of course not just happening now, it has always been a problem with the term. There has never been wide industry agreement as to what it means, going back decades.
That's how you end up with the media referring to 10 year old type companies that have thousands of employees as start-ups. I don't think a definition for it is going to get narrowed now, it will probably always be a broad/loose term.
In trying to “take back the word
startup” and redefine it to fit your own preferred meaning. I expect you will find, most on HN will take a more conservative position in it’s definition.
I agree that the term "startup" is not strictly defined. But often the nuances are "can we only call a quickly growing company a startup" (a la Paul Graham) or "can we call any young company a startup".
What the definitions agree on is that a startup is company, a business. Making a business involves a lot more than creating a product and is a much more complex undertaking.
I did this too. 5 hour stream, started with google docs, trello then figma before building. Lot of fun and having the camera rolling kept me focused instead of getting distracted by twitter or notifications.
I found a number of charities that directly equate an action (do x things for y people) with a dollar amount. I pulled together a list of the charitable actions and chose a base product that people were familiar with (the cost of a pumpkin spice latte). Then I sorted them by how many lattes you would have to skip to be able to donate to compelete the charitable action.
It was a lot of fun and I hope to do something similar again.
Hi Everyone, I'm Smakosh and I spent 24 hours coding my REST api, React app and a Gatsby site. Obviously this needs more improvements but here's a funny fact:
-Rest API is deployed on Heroku for free
-Db is on mlab for free
-React app is deployed on Netlify for free
-Gatsby site is deployed on Netlify for free
-Design made with Adobe XD for free
-Illustrations from Undraw.co for free
Please slow down on my app hahaha, you know how Heroku crashes easily...
BEAF - Share your Before/After pictures and get unbiased feedback from the people you love.
For a couple of tips as someone who uses Heroku, mlab (mongolab), etc:
- Something like https://cloudinary.com/ can automatically compress those images. Will speed up the load and make the project shine even more, since it is loading now a 1390px image in a 320px space.
- A redirect from the netlify.com to the main domain would also be a good idea.
Oh no, this is setting a bad precedent. If founders can launch a startup within 24 hours, then sometime soon a sadistic tech company will replace their coding challenges with making a startup. \s
>Not surprisingly most thumbnails look like..... VSCode :)
I'd say 99% of my viewers always ask "Oh! Ubuntu!" and we chat about Linux or open-source till they leave.
So yes, code streaming is heavily macOS and Windows (for good reason). Streaming software, specifically OBS, is way behind on Linux and is missing a key feature (VSTs) and has been for a year+, along with lots of other streaming software shrugging when asked for Linux support.
Hi guys, I've finished my run in ~13 hours. I've made an MVP Starter Kit https://21daysmvp.com/. That was a fun ride, but there's a lot of work ahead to make it a full-scale project. Time to go and get some sleep finally.
Heyo, I finished my project in 23 hours. In hindsight I really should have done more planning. Didn't know how I wanted to do this until the time was almost up haha.
I used react, preact (for the first time ever in this project), go, graphql, postgres
Can someone explain what kind of exposure livestreaming like this brings? Is it actually beneficial, what are some success stories (eg something interesting happening due to the stream)?
>Can someone explain what kind of exposure livestreaming like this brings?
I don't think the goal is exposure for anything that's created, it's more of a live streaming hackathon. If creating a web app is a startup then I've founded more startups than I can even keep track of. The title is somewhat of a misnomer. Check out this comment from one of the team members who organized it.
Hah at first I thought Shodan started hosting projects github-pages style, then realized you're the founder. Actually, hosted pages on Shodan would be kind of cool.
I think it would be a nice place to host a collection of infosec-related materials, tutorials, white papers and write-ups. I'm not sure if there's a go-to place for the security community to host static pages for these types of things, but it seems like the kind of thing I'd enjoy browsing.
Not really sure why this was downvoted. The website is incredibly unclear as to whether it’s an ongoing thing or just a certain day/month/whatever. Sorry for daring to ask techbros a simple question.
Or just call them startups if that's what they are. If someone is starting a business selling something then it's a startup, no matter how small initially.
What is the startup doing heartbeat generated art selling?
I agree 100% with OP, the term startup has been totally devalued by this trend towards ‘everything is a startup’, when a lot of things (such as some of these projects) would be better described, and I think receive better recognition, if they were considered cool projects or units of work.
Some of them may morph into businesses but it is disingenuous to try and call everything a startup.
I see it as part of a deeper trend where fake-it till you make it/style over substance world where ‘everyone is an entrepreneur’.
I get that some degree of faking it is necessary, maybe the product doesn’t exist, maybe elements of it are done by hand rather than automated, and clearly some degree of this is necessary. But too much of it as an ethos devalues the entire ‘innovation culture’
I've never seen a definition of a startup that I like. Here's my personal sniff test... To me, a business is an entity with paying customers. To me, a startup is an entity that wants paying customers before it has them, or has them now but once did not (and it remains a startup until people stop calling it that).
99% of business in this situation, you would never call a startup.
New law firm.
New dental office.
Your uncle started doing roofing, asks your little brother to work his summer off from Uni with him on roofing.
A new golf course installed in a coastal area.
A 50 new homes going up in the suburbs.
The empty spot on the corner is now a little corner store - beer, wine, chips.
New taco restaurant down the street.
Nobody is calling these situations (i.e. the vast majority of new business) 'startups. So clearly there is a kind of de-facto popular lexicon - and it's not 'startup'.
And many new businesses are just called new businesses. Like the guy who started selling modified skis at the ski resort. That's usually referred to as 'small business'.
A group of people doing some kind of new thing who are maybe not seeking funding but could possibly seek VC funding ... this is more in the realm of what we call 'startup', wherein there is generally a larger market opportunity, and possibly higher growth ... this is startup.
I'll add that the differentiating factor between a startup and a small business (or freelancer, contractor, etc.) is the ability to scale and do so quickly without increasing the company overhead, initially at least.
Wow, the Silicon Valley arrogance and echo chamber is real. It's not true that nobody is calling those situations startups. I am. So are the majority of people. And definitely so are the people who start those things. This is a helpful article for understanding the situation:
https://techcrunch.com/2010/03/06/replicators-innovators-and...
I'm quite sure that the dictionary definition is the one that most people will agree with. Silicon Valley did not create the word and so don't get jurisdiction over its definition. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/startup Words and language evolve over time according to usage. The word startup hasn't evolved to that point yet, despite what prominent tech investors and founders would say.
What does my comment have to do with the Silicon Valley?
I'm not even in the Silicon Valley, nor is is the observation of the popular usage of a term 'arrogant'. It just 'is'.
Nobody is calling a regular roofing company a startup. If said roofing company is doing something entirely different, and probably growing at an accelerated pace ... like developing a new kind of integrated tile and application process ... then maybe people would refer to this as a startup.
A law office can be a start-up. "I want to start up a law office." Words (in English) require context to have much meaning. Startup could certainly mean "investor fueled boom or bust hypergrowth ambition rocket" at a YC demo day. Or it can simply mean a company one started.
I'd argue that a trait shared by many startups is talking about themselves in the best light possible to get people focused on their future potential, and to me that leaves room for considering a bunch of mega success wannabes cranking out code on Twitch as startups in a startup competition. Shipping, failing fast, getting feedback, pitching... They all sound like startups to me, so that's what I'll call them. May the best startup win!
In general, a startup is a business that doesn't yet have a stable customer base or business model. What you're describing is a "tech startup", and the modifier often gets dropped in the tech press, for obvious reasons. The investment press also drops the modifier, because few other startups are interesting to them.
I agree and I think technology and scale also play a role. The law-tech company Atrium for example probably gets called a startup, and I think it is because it has high ambitions (nation-wide) and is tech-enabled.
I am sure that without ambition (i.e. just serving a single city) or without tech (i.e. just building one conventional law firm in every city) it would not be called a startup.
I dont see how nomadlist is a startup. I understand your want to redefine things, I myself am working on a small side-project indiestyle, but its not a startup.
It used to be called "a website". And you don't "launch" it just publish it. website != product && product != business. But props to these guys for focusing 24h on their side-projects and for the one I've browsed with very impressive results.
If you look at the above graph on startup financing cycle, it starts before there is any investment -- with cofounders and an idea.
The terminology and process beyond that point comes from MBAs and money men. A VC will probably invest in any company that will satisfy whatever objective they have for investing.
This is a 24 hour project sprint by a founder. If it gets the right eyeballs, the idea is well on its way to becoming a startup.
The hashtag #24hourstartup is good branding that conveys that.
>The hashtag #24hourstartup is good branding that conveys that.
You're one of the few who "gets it".
I don't think anyone who participated actually believes they made a startup. Startup just implies something greater than project and start-to-monetization.
It's absolutely a misnomer and even Pieter who largely popularized the "Startup in <time>" idea even admits it, it's all a marketing ploy for laypeople to get it instantly.
I’m Armin, part of the team behind the 24 Hour Startup Challenge!
Over this weekend, there are over 300 founders building products live on Twitch in 24 hours. As I post this, there are almost 90 people live streaming their work from all over the world! You can watch them on 24hrstartup.com.
The idea behind this live-streamed hackathon event comes from Pat Walls. He challenged himself to do a 24-hour startup twice this year and live-streamed his process. He is currently moderating and interviewing people from the maker community in our main stream.
Initially, we planned for about 50 participants but were overwhelmed with sign-ups. People are motivated to do this, and you can see that in their streams! We think it’s great to watch everyone make their crazy ideas reality, so we wanted to share :)
A few products being built right now:
* Heartbeat Canvas - Generate art from your heartbeat
* Privacy First Products - A curated list where you can discuss privacy first products
* EpilepsyBlocker - Disable GIFs that may cause epilepsy
Let us know what you think!
Armin (& Melanie & Pat)