Nokia is throwing a impromptu meetup at Boot from 8pm-10pm on Feb 16th. If you are looking for someplace to talk tech with folks and would be interested to see what the latest phone is from Finland, come on out.

From the sponsor: Nokia is the global headline sponsor of Social Media Week and we're active around the world at the various cities to meet with people on the ground. With this event, we want to bring together like-minded people who are interested in tech and the latest gadgets. And for those who are interested, we'll be happy to demo the new Nokia Lumia 800 and get your thoughts on it. Pizza and beer for everyone, and two people will win a Nokia Lumia to take home.

Space is limited to around 40, so please RSVP here with your Twitter name, or just your name.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

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. 

For anyone that is around Sunday late afternoon or evening, or the coming Tuesday, we will be doing more work and can always use more hands. Especially Tuesday. 

See the full gallery on Posterous

Thanks Jimmy Wong, Louie Fong, and a few others for coming by Saturday to help. 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

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.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Starts at 7pm, beers and retrospectives provided by Thoughtsauce.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

See the full gallery on Posterous

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

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

via startupshk.posterous.com

BootUP 2 was a major success! I think everyone is looking forward to seeing what comes out of the startups that were kicked off this weekend.

With two companies kicking along from the first one, it will be interesting to see how many of the six continue. Currently it looks like at least Hometasty.com and Grabbit.hk will be going at it, and some of the others are in discussion.

 

BOOTUP 2 DEMO DAY - SLIDESHOW

 

BOOTUP 2: THE STARTUP WEEKEND TEAMS

 

BOOTUP 2: DAY ONE OF THE STARTUP WEEKEND IS IN FULL SWING AKA AND THEN THERE WERE FIVE!

BOOTUP 2: DAY ZERO OF THE STARTUP WEEKEND

 

 

 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

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.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

The BootUP! is a weekend incubation event run by BootHK and StartupsHK to help give an opportunity for those that are thinking about starting their own startup a chance to see what it is like for 48 hours. It is a great way to meet people in the community as well as can be a great way to try it on before taking the plunge.

The current plan is to start at 7:30 on Friday night, Feb 25. We will start out with an ideation and team forming session to kick things off, and then plunge right into people working on their ideas until 11pm. Saturday and Sunday, we will start at 9am, with mentors and other people from within the startup community coming through to help keep things trucking along.

Sunday night at 5 we will have 5 minute presentations from each team to demo what they have done, and to share their experiences as well as plans for the future.

If you are interested in participating, please register here: http://hkcowork.pandaform.com/pub/bootup2app/new

Any questions, please send email to jon.buford@book.hk

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

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:

1. Until you have cash in hand, don't count funding that has been promised.
2. It will take longer to finalize funding than you plan on.
3. Sometimes support will come from unexpected places.

Community

BootHK started as Hackerspace Hong Kong, but it morphed over time to focus on the coworking aspect. The reason for this was just pure and simple business. We built up a model that looked at both a primarily informal use and a primarily working use, and saw that with Hong Kong real estate costs, the informal use would just not be viable financially without several hundred members. Initially, we had between 50-100 people that had various levels of input into what they were interested in, and what we saw was that there was a critical mass of people that would use the space for working in some form or another and that they were interested in paying enough to make it possible to be self-sustaining with only perhaps 30 active members, a much more manageable number as well as just realistic.

The other side, the people, that has also been a changing situation from conception until now. When we made the decision to create the coworking space, we immediately lost quite a few people that had an interest in the Hackerspace usage. It is always difficult to make that kind of decision, but it looks like it was the right one. Another related topic is the kinds of communities we have here. Initially I wanted to set up BootHK so that it is run and managed by an association of people. It ended up being more driven by myself than I had originally wanted, but I think this also worked out, and a different kind of community is steadily building within the space that is not so much about the operation of the space, but is more about a self-supportive community that has a home here. 

Moving forward, it looks like the right fit will be to set up a not for profit company that is responsible for running the BootHK spaces. Technically, this could be a non-profit entity, but I think we've got almost enough seed to bootstrap it into existence. 

Lessons learned:

1. Just start where the demand is, you can always expand it later when you build a strong foundation.
2. Take help where it is given, but keep things moving.
3. Iterate and give people what they need.

Real Estate

Lessons learned:

1. Location is really key, if we were 5 minutes further from major transportation we would have a much lower usage rate.
2. Finding a sympathetic land lord really makes everything easier. 

Usage Patterns

If we continue to grow, and can afford to open an additional space, having about a 50% ratio of fixed desk space to hot desk seating seems to be pretty much what the demand is. Especially if we were able to open a larger space, I think we would include several office pods for small companies to use and also look at some private single person work seats for when someone needs to spend the morning talking on the phone or whatever. Right now we have a general rule for people to use the conference room for calls, but I think as we grow, it will become more likely that the conference room is occupied.

Lessons learned:

1. We have gotten more interest in usage from established companies wanting a satellite desk or just flexible workspace and they like the feel better than more traditional options.
2. When bringing in new people, have a very low friction trial process: it will either be a good match for them or not.

Bonus lesson learned:

The flip side of this is that we also have random amazing people coming through.

Many thanks to everyone that has been involved in making BootHK possible and to the members for coming in to make it a place that people want to come to.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

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. 

Day 2: Saturday

We had Kenneth Kwok from Hong Kong Web Analytics come and give a quick discussion on web analytics for those teams that were interested (or around) on Saturday at noon. We had initially planned to have a few other topics of discussion, but these got pushed off to let the teams focus on building.

Lesson 2: Plan on a startup lifecycle 101 discussion on Saturday first thing or Friday evening, perhaps even before the ideation, to help shape the work that the teams will be doing the rest of the weekend. 

At this point the teams were just cruising along in their own ways, to one extent or another. One team (Diksee) shacked up in a nearby coffee house for the day and really just cranked out their concept. Another team was here and was doing the same. Three of the teams spent a lot of time discussing what they were doing in one form or another, but not necessarily in the most productive way.

See the full gallery on Posterous

The first of these teams were working on something that was targeted towards teens and young adults. When talking with them about their idea, they had this long list of features, but it just wasn't sounding like they had a real connection with their customer. I recommended that they get out of the building and do Customer Development, when they finally did get out and talk to customers at the end of the day, it had a huge impact on their project. 

Lesson 3: Hong Kong is a very compact place. If you are doing anything that relates to someone that is here, take advantage of getting out of the building and having a quick discussion with them.

The second of these teams was doing something related to buying and selling wholesale products. They spent the better part of Saturday going back and forth trying to nail down the approach to the problem and how to prove that it was viable, however, none of the team really had much in-depth experience within that area.

Lesson 4: For concepts that relate to areas that would require specific domain knowledge which none of the team members have, it is probably best to not pursue it for an event like this. 

The last team was very gung ho on Friday night, and even one of the members ended up working on prototyping their concept overnight. When they came in on Saturday morning, three of the four members ended up doing more research into competitive products, and decided that the market was too crowded, so they should change to another concept. The guy that stayed up all night working on the prototype wasn't one of them. Later that afternoon, after diving deep into the new concept and working on it for a few hours, they started showing the results and found out that they were all working on slightly different things. 

Lesson 5: Make sure each team has a clear understanding and common vision they are working on. 

The last two teams, each had four members, and they both had the hardest time defining what they were going to work on. It seems like the larger the group, the more important it is to have a strong leader with a vision to drive them.

Lesson 6: When we run this again, we will put a limit on the startup teams of 2-3 people. The groups of four had a hard time finding consensus where the groups of three were able to zip along.

Day 3: Sunday

The last day started with people filtering in over a few hours. A few showed up before 10, but most drifted in after that. There was a wide range of the amount of focus each team had. One team, the one from the day before doing the wholesale buying and selling, still had not nailed down their exact direction.

Lesson 7: Plan out short meetings with startup mentors for each team every 4-6 hours or so. Catch problems earlier to help make sure each team stays very focused throughout the weekend.

Lesson 8: Do have more structure to the times that people are expected to be on site and have that mapped out ahead of time. Pre-plan any presentation discussions and have the time for each nailed down so that if people are interested, they can plan around that.

Presentations and Demos

Here are pictures from all the presentations. The content and approach for each one varied pretty widely. The one team of four that had problems switching concepts ended up working on individual projects for the rest of the time, so ended up presenting three separate presentations. 

Lesson 9: Be more clear up front about what the presentation time allowed and help to focus the presentations more. Enforce a time limit to keep things moving along and also to make sure that what is presented is focused and clear. 

See the full gallery on Posterous

So, the first BootUP! was a success. Everyone that participated learned a lot, and most of the people will be continuing to work on their startups. 

Lesson 10: Top three comments of what participants learned:

1. You really don't need to be secretive with your idea, it really is all about execution. You learn a lot more by sharing your idea and getting feedback from other people with different perspectives.
2. Getting out of the building and talking to the customer works. The original idea ended up not being something the customer would want, but the customers had clear ideas of what needs they have.
3. Delay No More - You can't wait for the right time, there is never a right time. Especially for those people in nice comfy jobs, you just have to take the leap and do it.

Many thanks to the StartupsHK crew, especially Casey Lau for being the MC that I can never be.

Also many thanks to the local entrepreneurs that stopped by during the weekend and for the final demos, I think this shows how strong of a community we already have here, and that there is a lot of potential for growing that. 

Other write-ups of this event:

Casey Lau - StartupsHK: BootUp: The first Hong Kong Startup Weekend, a Round-up and photos

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

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.

After everyone selected their favorite ideas, we went around the room, taking their top three votes and then started with the concepts that had at least three votes to form each team. This wound up with distributing the resources quite well, and with teams of 3-4 each. Following that, we broke for 30 minutes to let the teams discuss their concept, come up with a name and a tag line. 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

More Info

We had a discussion at the last Startup Monday meetup, and one of the big topics was the arrangement of the ownership of the work done during BootUP!. Someone suggested that we look at iWeekend for some help to how to handle this, and we found a great FAQ they have for the upcoming Beijing iWeekend. (Actually, we may look into doing future events as an iWeekend.) The gist is, if you have a very awesome idea that you want to have clear control of, don't do it for this event. We would prefer that people focus on doing something interesting and go through the process while getting to know other people and keep that killer idea to start later once you have a better idea of who you want to partner with. 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

We now have a schedule of meetups and events for BootHK online at:

http://boot.hk/pages/calendar

If anyone is interested in helping to run this and continue to add more events from around the community, please let us know. 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Here is a quick overview of what to expect:

Friday, 7pm:

1. Intro/Meet and Greet
2. Startup Lifecycle and Weekend Plans
3. Brainstorming and Teaming up (groups up to 3 people)
4. Initial Planning

Saturday, 9am:

1. Coffee
2. Business Models vs. Business Plans
3. Prototype, Develop, and Plan (Teams working on their startups)

Sunday, 9am: 

1. Coffee
2. Continue to Prototype, Develop, and Plan

7pm: 

1. Team Demos
2. Break for Judging
3. Announcement of Winners

We are working on getting some sponsors for the weekend, so we can have prizes available for the top teams. Also, we will attempt to have a wide range of judges available for the final demos, including investors and successful entrepreneurs.

The space will be limited to 20 participants, please email jon.buford@boot.hk with BootUP in the subject and a short description of why you want to be part of BootUP! and what skills and interests you might have. We will try to select a balanced group with a range of skill sets. 

If you are a student, designer, developer, or just enthusiastic about starting your own company, this is something to not miss. 

Similar events around the world have resulted in real, viable businesses or have connected up founders that went on to make a successful business together.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Come out and hear how this year's Rails Rumble went for the local team and talk about the other sites that were put together in 48 hours. 

Also on the slate would be to talk about what other things to do, both for RoR and just tech and developers in general at BootHK, such as code jams or other user group meetups, etc. 

Meetup is at 7:30pm at BootHK. BYOB and snacks. 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

BootHK is supporting MaBelle with a great contest they have put together for Facebook Game Developers to show off their best skills. With prizes of up to $100,000 for the winning entry along with potential development work, this is a pretty sweet deal, and could give a startup a bit of seed money to kick off that big project they wanted to work on. 

There will be a meeting here at BootHK in Wan Chai tonight (20th October) at 8pm to go over the details and to meet the sponsors. Come out if you are interested in the contest. 

You can find out more about the contest at the official site:

MaBelle Facebook Game Development Contest

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

The first new round of Startup Monday meetups was last week at the new BootHK. We had a great turnout, with some new faces and several of our resident startups in attendance. This will be an ongoing meetup for anyone actively in a startup or about to found a startup, every Monday at 7:30 at the BootHK HQ. 

There has been a steady stream of people coming and going here. We've got our resident group of three (soon to be four) entrepreneurs William Li, Daniel Fung, and Andrei Lissovski. William Liang and Jimmy Wong have been by frequently. I'm there whenever I can, and Sarah Tong comes over mostly on the weekend. 

Tuesday, we are slated to have the wired broadband installed, which will give us the bandwidth to have more people working here. 

The big announcement will be a meetup this Wednesday at 8pm. More info will be posted later, but it is a Facebook Game development contest with a total of HKD $500,000 in prize money going to to the top 11 developers for MaBelle, the diamond jewelry company here in HK. 

Also in the works are more events and meetups. Chime in if you have any ideas for something you want to host here, or that we need to have.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

BootHK is officially open for business, and to celebrate, there will be an open house this weekend both Saturday and Sunday from 10 to 6 (or later as things go). So, come by, hang out, work on a project, and see what it's all about.

The address is 19f, 231-233 Queen's Road East, Wan Chai.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Things are really starting to come together for our headquarters. Today, we had a solid turnout, with a mix of old and new faces to help get all the basic cleanup done.

Next, we will be in on Sunday to do some more installation of stuff and to start planning what's next. We still need to do the AC install and the carpet cleaning, and can schedule the opening as soon as that is set.

Watch the Google Group (http://groups.google.com/group/hkcowork) for details for Sunday.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

This week and weekend were full of all sorts of events and happenings. It was great to see a big turnout at Barcamp, and to have so many come to hear and talk about BootHK.

See the full gallery on Posterous

We did a lot of preliminary work this week to get the space ready to open, mainly getting the entrance partition out of the way. Thanks to Andrew, Andrei, and Jimmy for lending a hand.

Next, we need to take the trash down to the local refuse collection point, about two blocks away, and then we need to clean up the rest of the shelves and have the floor cleaned.

The AC is being quoted, but aiming to have it by the end of the month.

Let's plan on another cleanup this week to get the rest done. Watch the Google Group for the details.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »