This information is MUST-READ for Garage48 registered participants!
Garage48 Johannesburg will start on Friday, 2nd of December at 4:00pm check on venue page. Please come ahead of time, as the registration process might take some time.
PAYMENT OF THE PARTICIPATION FEE
The participation fee covering all food, snacks and drinks and the whole awesome weekend. The payment will be expected from you after the registration to confirm your participation.
If you have any questions about the payment, feel free to contact us.
Students get discount with "Student".
WHAT TO BRING WITH YOU?
- Positive attitude, open mind and lots of energy :)
- Everything you need for a rapid product development.
- Please take your:
- laptop
- all chargers,
- 3-5m power extension cord (as power might be on distance),
- mobile phone
- Optional:
- pen and paper
- photo camera to take and share photos
- credit cards if domain registration is necessary
- business cards to share
SUBMITTING AND VOTING FOR IDEAS
- To have your product, business or service idea implemented during the Garage48 weekend you have to submit it to our Facebook Group. There will be 30 ideas selected to be presented / pitched on Friday evening.
- If you have not yet submitted your idea, then do it NOW to Facebook group "G48 Johannesburg".
- The deadline for submitting ideas is Thursday 12am before the event.
- Please also review, comment other ideas and "Like" your favourite idea(s) in the Facebook group!
- The mentors and organizers will then choose TOP30 ideas based on idea description and popularity (number of Likes, comments) in Facebook group.
- Ideas are presented based on "elevator-pitch" method within 90 seconds. Organizers and audience can ask 1-3 short questions. All pitched ideas will be later listed on separate posters to form the teams.
PITCHING IDEAS
- If your idea gets to TOP30 list, please prepare a good pitch. Consider following key points:
- Briefly describe your background (10 sec)
- Your idea and "the problem" what you are solving.
- Who are the targeted users, how big is the market (30 sec)
- The solution: technical + business model (30 sec)
- Which skills do you need and what is realistic to build in 48 hours during the weekend (20 sec)
- Look at the guideline and example "how to prepare a good pitch" (slideshare)
- NB! Practice your pitch to your friends or family before you present! 90 seconds goes really fast!
- You can prepare 1 (one) PDF slide! to support your pitch. If you wish to show a slide, then please send it for us for Thursday noon (22. September) by e-mail info@garage48.org and we have it ready in our computer on-site. Please put your project name as subject line.
FORMING TEAMS
- After pitching is finished, we will put all ideas on the wall with separate posters (with keypoints written while you pitched). Every participant will choose their favourite idea. Usually 10-15 best ideas will get enough interested team members to get the "green light" for implementation.
- Average team has about 5-7 people and the team should be "balanced" - covering all required roles like: a project manager, developer(s), designer and marketer in order to get the product/service ready in 48 hours! Minimum size for a team is 4 people and max is 8 people.
- If some ideas get too few people or not a balanced team (probably unable to build the service), the idea will be dumped. Those people will choose another idea / team to work with.
WORKING IN TEAMS
- After forming the teams, organizers will give a room/space for every team for the weekend.
- You should start by dividing the roles, set the product vision, customer journey and start working right away.
- It is very important that you have a project manager for the team - one of his tasks is to keep the focus of the team, one eye on the clock and the other on the team progress. 48 hours is really a short time.
- Food and drinks. We provide breakfast, lunch and dinner on Saturday and Sunday. So you can focus on work and building your product. See agenda for details.
- Mentors. We have arranged mentors to work with the teams throughout the weekend. Some of them are more technical, some more business savvy, so be open and ask for their advice and contacts in case you need.
- Please wear your name badge during the whole event, this will help to encourage networking and gets you inside through security guards. Otherwise be open, get to know new people, share your ideas and give ideas/feedback to other teams. And of course, have fun!
- Checkpoints will take place at least 2 times on Saturday and Sunday. During checkpoint a project manager on
SUNDAY DEMO NIGHT
- Sunday afternoon 2:00 pm is the deadline. Either you have your service ready or not, time will tell.
- Every team will practice their demo together with mentors and jury members for 10 minutes to make the final adjustments and make a better presentation.
- We do not allow any Powerpoint presentations for web services - we want a live demo! Show your product!
- The final demo event starts at 5:00pm
- Presentations will be held in random order. Every team gets 3 minutes for product demonstration (+3 minutes for questions from jury, mentors and audience).
- We admit, that the development process is the ultimate importance. But we still have a jury, to evaluate the results and choose the top projects.
- When jury goes "off" to choose the winners, we have few speakers from our sponsors telling you how they could work and help with your teams after the Garage48 event.
- If you have further questions, please see the Agenda and FAQ page. If you don't find an answer there, then please write us at info@garage48.org
SPONSORS
We thank all our sponsors and partners to make Garage48 Johannesburg a cool startup community event!
Garage48 Johannesburg is sponsored by Vodacom and Google and Blackberry.
