Puerto Rico’s startup scene is starting to take off and it was time. Last week, the second Startup Weekend Puerto Rico took place at Seriously Creative, were a group of over 30 enthusiastic entrepreneurs worked for 54 hours on their projects. I was able to attend as a mentor and I was blown away by the amount of ideas, the energy and the positive attitudes that endured during the whole event. For a complete wrap up and details about the teams please read Hector Ramos’ blog post. Instead of a complete review of the event I will write down the details that I though were the most important or interesting:

1. On Friday night the attendees had to present their ideas and the groups had to be formed around the most popular concepts. Around 23 ideas were presented but only 8 teams were formed. That meant that 15 attendees were not able to work on their ideas. The amazing this is that all but one of attendees (that I know of) stayed during the whole event, working on ideas that weren’t presented by them.
2. The diversity among attendees was great. I could see people in their 20′s and some over 60′. Also they had different backgrounds, expertise and education levels.
3. I was amazed at the energy and the amount of work that was shown by attendees. Each day the teams worked from that early hours to the end of the day and even had to be asked to leave. On Saturday, for example, attendees worked from 9am to way past midnight.
4. Adapting from the get go. The majority of teams started with an idea and changed some aspects of it during the course of the days after chatting, doing some research, and seeing what worked while developing it. I believe that one of the original ideas was to build a mobile game and it changed to a monetizing platform for mobile games.
5. Benefits are more important than features. During an interaction with one of the groups we were able to change the focus of the conversation from the features of an app to the benefits business owners would receive from using it. That interaction lead to other insights related to customer demographics, market size and identifying the real target customer.
6. You can create an amazing product but you have to be able to sell it.  This was apparent during some of the presentations were the teams struggled to clearly explain what their products were. In that line, demos rule. One group created a demo of their app and then recorded a video/screencast of a potential customer using it and demonstrating one of its killer features.
7. The venue for these events is really important and I don’t think you can do any better than Seriously Creative. I knew the place was amazing but I was still blown away. The owner, Dana Montenegro is a great motivator and sets the creative mode from the get go, but the key is the staff and service. At all time there were at least 4 employees making sure everyone was confortable, had drinks, cleaning up, re-stocking the food, etc. We had unlimited supplies of sodas, potato chips, cookies, ice cream with toppings, candy bars and ‘regular’ food was also served. Amazing.

Congratulations and thanks to everyone involved in the event, specially to the organizers Ramphis Castro, Giovanny Collazo, Marcos Polanco and José Padilla.