BootHK is a community for co-working, makers, and startups in Hong Kong.
We've been tossing around doing some basic renovation work to organize the space more efficiently. After weeks of deliberations and quoting work, we decided to just start tearing things down this weekend and jumpstart the process.
Thanks Jimmy Wong, Louie Fong, and a few others for coming by Saturday to help.
Come out and network with young entrepreneurs from around Hong Kong and learn more about the 2012 Make a Difference Award. Also available is a pitch practice with feedback.
Registration deadline is May 15th, so sign up today if you are interested.
Starts at 7pm, beers and retrospectives provided by Thoughtsauce.
Over a dozen people learned how to solder and basic circuit board assembly. This meetup is happening regularly on Tuesdays at 8, with a wide range of projects being worked on by a solid group of people learning about all things hardware and software.
See more at http://www.hackjam.hk
Just a quick update for the BootUP! this weekend. We are going to hold in in the BootHK HQ in Wan Chai. Those that have been accepted for the event should have received an email confirming your spot. If you registered but did not receive a confirmation, please send an email to jon.buford at boot.hk.
A year ago, I was working from home and StartupsHK was just a group of startup founders that met up every other week at Habitu. Step forward to now, StartupsHK is a community of startups that numbers in the hundreds of members and I'm working from BootHK on my projects. We are coming up on the third month anniversary of BootHK's first site being open, and there have been many amazing things that happened in that time and while setting things up.
Funding
To get BootHK open, we needed around $200,000 (USD $25,000) in total so that we could set it up and have about 3-6 months operating float. The reality is that we did it with around $120,000 (USD $15,000), which covered getting things set up, but did not allow for any float. At this point, I'm happy to say that it looks like we are running at a break even revenues and it is anticipated that we will be able to grow that so that we can start repaying some of the up-front investment that was put in.
Lessons learned:
This last weekend (Nov 19-21) was the first startup weekend incubation event in Hong Kong ever, and things went really, really well. The event was a bit of an ongoing learning experiment and test of the new BootHK facilities, being the first major event we've hosted here in the month of operation.
We had a total of 19 participants building startups over the weekend, along with many great local entrepreneurs who dropped by to help mentor and give feedback over the 48 hours (well, 50 hours, to be exact).
We started off with a dive into group idea brainstorming, led by Casey Lau. This resulted in around 30-40 concepts that were then individually voted on by each participant selecting their top 3. For the ones that got at least 3 votes, we took those people that voted on them and put them on a weekend startup. This ended up with three groups of three and 2 groups of four.
After forming the teams, we asked them to put together a name for their project, a tagline explanation, and to commit to what they plan to accomplish during the weekend. After this, we basically set them loose and had them start planning out what they are going to do and get started.
Lesson 1: Next time, have a hand full of mentors available that can meet with each startup as a team and have a more in-depth discussion at the point that they have some initial plan to help them sort out what the next steps should be over the next day. Each team will have a different level of expertise, and having some guidance on how to utilize that the most effectively will help everyone have better results.
Tonight there are five amazing teams of entrepreneurs working on five great ideas here in the BootHK HQ. Each team has a good balance of development and business, and they are all gearing towards having some prototype and business plan ready in the next 48 hours.
We started out the night with a group brainstorm, winding up with around 30 up on one of the five massive whiteboards in the HQ.
It was a full house tonight, with close to twenty participants, some drop-ins, Casey Lau and Jon Buford heading up the night's festivities.
