I have always been creative and entrepreneurial.
Sometimes that shows up in the videos or websites I create for clients and sometimes it’s using video and web design along with my creativity and entrepreneurial mindset. I have been interested in the startup community for several years. I listen to many podcasts about the topic, reads books and consumes blogs about startups.
Thankfully there is an international network of startup minded people.
Startup Weekend is a global network of passionate leaders and entrepreneurs on a mission to inspire, educate, and empower individuals, teams and communities. Come share ideas, form teams, and launch startups.
I joined Startup Weekend in Columbus, Ohio for their annual event for entrepreneurs. The event lasts one (long) weekend, lasting 54 hours, where you join a team on Friday night, work on developing and validating the business idea on Saturday and create the tools needed to pitch the startup on Sunday night. There were 120 people in attendance and over 50 people gave their 50 pitch on Friday night many of whom had great ideas to help improve people’s lives, simplify processes and solve common problems. I had several ideas that I could have pitched but I wanted to join a great team rather than lead one.
There were several really great startup ideas, but I joined a group that that served a common problem to videographers. Every professional videographer (and photographer) should be backing up their footage and photos. However, most of them only have a local backup, and hard drives can crash without warning. Some of them even upload their files to “the cloud”, but this can takes weeks to fully upload. This gap of weeks while the files are uploading to the cloud leaves a large gap of liability for the professional.
That’s why we created Procure, the backup solution for video professionals (and photographers too). It’s easy offsite backup for videographers. Remember how Netflix used to send you a DVD and every time you send the DVD back, you get another one in the mail? That’s what Procure does. We send you a hard drive to copy your files to. Once the hard drive is full just send it back and we’ll send you another one. Procure will backup your files safely offline. So if your hard drive crashes or your files haven’t backed up, you still have your backup stored safely with Procure. Some upcoming features are the ability to see your files in the dashboard of your account so you can safely download them as needed.
On Sunday night we were able to present our startup to the judges (very successful entrepreneurs) and won 3rd place out of all the groups! This was an honor and very exciting. Our group worked very hard throughout the weekend.
Overall it was a GREAT experience and I would highly recommend the experience to anyone that is interested in the startup process. I had an incredible team of a developer, designer, project manager and researcher. I was able to consult with the group and give them real world examples of why this service is needed. I was also able to poll almost 2000 videographers and get some valuable insights and validation on our idea which helped us pivot in the right directions.
For more info on our startup visit www.GetProcure.co and for more info on Startup Weekend visit, http://startupweekend.org/
