Back from #In50Hrs - We Did It !!!

As covered in my previous post, this weekend I participated in @In50Hrs. The event started off on Friday evening with the IdeaSmiths putting their best foot forward in pitching their ideas to other participants, mainly developers and designers, in order to have them join their team and hack around continuously over the weekend to come up with a convincing demo for Sunday evening.

I had an exciting and amazing learning time during the whole event, and I want to share it with others who are sitting on fence, trying to decide whether to relax over the weekend, or to spend sleepless night trying to bring fruition to an idea which is not theirs, teaming up with people whom they have just met.

I want to thank the wonderful effort put in by Vijay Anand and Shayon of In50Hrs. This event would not have been filled with so much learning without the mentors who volunteered their weekends to direct bunch of naive and totally confused young minds. All the mentors for this event were very approachable, and I want to specially thank Mr. Ravi Shankar, Atif Haider, Joylita and Deepak Shenoy for taking special interest in our group.

The jury for the Sunday evening demo included many entrepreneurs who have been on the other side of the table, giving demo to their prospective investors. It was very evident by the way they empathized with the participants and encouraged them for their effort. Their questions and suggestions really checked the idea thoroughly and I will try to assimilate their wisdom in later posts.

Last but not the least, I want to thank my team mates - designers Shashi & Gurpreet from National Institute of Design, and Joseph from Chennai. We had a wonderful time and learning experience, and this journey would not have been so much fun without the respect and appreciation we had for each other. It was such a pleasant surprise how team jelled and made an impressive demo just in time. As it was evident from our demo, there were no individual super stars and all of us played a crucial role which was sadly lacking in many of the other teams. To end it on a happy note, our Team "Source It" not only won appreciation from crowd, but jury too and ended up being one of the top 3 teams of the event.

Congratulations Team, we did it !!! and thanks to all the mentors and organizers for their hard work.