Developing 24hour-startup 2010
Posted on | January 18, 2010 | No Comments
Been a few weeks since the last post, but it is pretty hard to write when you’re constantly stuffed to the gills with turkey, ham, beef, cheese etc.
Aaaanyway – there have been some awesomely exciting developments happening with 24hour-startup 2010, as we’ve already got a couple of meetings lined up with potential sponsors. That’s promising, because there’s no way we could get it off the ground without them! (There’s still time to get involved if you’re interested – just email Rob).
A few of these lovely people have asked for an indication of how much it would cost to sponsor the event. So, this post starts to outline the work that we think is required to make 24hour-start 2010 an amazing social-entrepreneurial-competitive-PR exercise for some lucky brand(s)/organisation(s)!
Concept development.
We need to put some thought into exactly how 24hour-startup 2010 will work – in collaboration with our sponsor(s), so that it helps them achieve what they want for their organisation. Our current thinking is as follows, and all subsequent tasks drop out of this, and are of course subject to change as the concept develops:
- 24hour-startup will be run through a custom-built website, which will allow anyone to quickly and easily register a team, and blog about what their team are doing throughout and after the 24 hours.
- Teams will be competing for a prize, provided by the sponsor. This needs to be something brilliant that any group of self respecting entrepreneurs would love to win. Could be as simple as investment.
- There will also be a brief, announced at the start of the 24 hours, which teams must respond to. We can’t leave it as open as the one we worked to; i.e. start any business you can think of because then people will be able to be a bit sneaky and come prepared with lots of ideas! So, the brief is likely to specify and industry sector, or business problem that needs solving.
- One team will be announced as winners by a panel of judges. This panel will be made up of some members of the original 24hour-startup team, some representatives of our sponsors, and perhaps a famous entrepreneur or two. Judging criteria need to be decided; but we think it should be about much more than the eventual sale price of the team’s business on eBay.
- We also need to decide how we go about promoting the competition, both through public relations, and social media activity on Twitter and through this blog.
Obviously there’s a good few more details to iron out, so we’ll need to allocate some resource to working with the sponsor(s) to nail down the competition format, brief etc etc.
Project planning and management
Someone’s going to need to schedule all of the various streams of work that are required, so that everything runs smoothly. We need to do this in conjunction with our sponsor(s) too. The first big job will be actually deciding which 24 hours the competition will run for (not only a calendar date, but also a GMT start time that works well for teams across the globe!).
Designing and building the website
There are loads of bits of awesome functionality we could build. As mentioned, we a need simple registration process and profile page for teams. Most of the other functionality will be giving the teams tools to promote their project and generate as much buzz about it as possible (we like that this is in their interest and that of our sponsor(s)).
For example, we can make it simple for them to plug in Twitter and video feeds, and link to the eBay auction for their fledgling startup – exactly as we did last year.
In addition, the homepage of the site will be used by our team to pick out interesting developments from the teams around the globe, and generate buzz about these. Basically, we’ll need to build a simple interface, so we can act as curators (more on that later).
Clearly the cost of building the site is very variable, and dependent on a specification which we’ll agree with the sponsor(s) – but we will be looking to provide an indication of the ballpark figures for what we have planned so far.
Administering the site
As people enter their teams, we’ll need someone on hand to deal with any issues that are thrown up, and of course a very intense period of admin during the 24 hour window(!) and to a certain extent afterwards too. They’ll also need to be on hand to answer and tech support type queries from entrants throughout this time.
Press liaison
We’ll need to write a press contact schedule, and press releases, and allocate resource for contacting journalists in the run up to the competition, putting teams in touch with local journalists and updating global press throughout the 24hrs. Then there’ll be time required to ensure the media follow-up with articles once the winner is announced.
We got some excellent coverage in the Sunday Telegraph last time around, and this time it’ll be much bigger, better and with lots of time to get journos interested before the big kick-off.
Social media management
This is a biggie. 24 hour startup has the potential to engage thousands and thousands of readers across the main blog and all the team blogs – something we think will be of huge value to the sponsor(s). Plus, we nearly became a trending topic on Twitter last time round (showed up on some UK trends), so we’ll be gunning for that this time.
To do this, we’ll need social media managers to curate the competition. By this, we mean they will spend time talking (probably via Twitter) to the people who are doing the promotional work for each team, and reading their tweets and posts. Then, we’ll be writing summaries for the main blog, linking though to all the team pages (so, each team will have the chance – if they do something interesting enough – of getting major exposure from the homepage).
At the same time, we’ll be Tweeting from @24hourstartup about everything that’s going on, providing an incredibly exciting live feed of everything that’s happening around the world (this is gonna be fun!).
So, there’ll need to be resource allocated to doing this. (One thing to note is that this would probably need to scale up with the no. of teams who enter!)
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We’re currently pulling together ballpark costs for all this work now. Clearly, our eventual sponsor(s) may have the resource to do some of this themselves, or have ideas for different things that will affect the costs. This is simply a stake in the ground.
Sound good? Please let us know in the comments, and get in touch with Rob if you’re interested in sponsoring.
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