There's something to be said about bringing an entire community together that's focused
on one thing, in this case entrepreneurship and start-up businesses.
I mean, we're in Toronto, but I understand that New York was having a start-up weekend,
Boston, the cities throughout Europe and Asia were all having simultaneous start-up weekends.
You think you can understand what it's like to own the responsibility for creating a business,
but you can't until you actually put yourself in the entrepreneur's shoes.
Start-up weekends basically take your idea and turn it into action.
Everyone can pitch an idea, the ideas get voted on and the top 20 ideas get to form a team,
and then at the end of the weekend you pitch to a panel of judges who have either a venture
background, start-up background, who assess the merits of your business and your team,
and you walk away with this from the weekend.
And have a very worst-having, great experience, and very best-having and operating business going in 36 hours.
A couple of things that I think we should throw out on the table now is, first of all,
it's like the principles of this weekend.
Like, do we want to like come up with the most kick-ass app and kick-ass business?
Do we want to just have a great experience working together?
Do we just want to have a lot of fun?
If we have a viable business model at the end of the weekend, that's a gravy in my mind,
but I'd just love to execute something, see it happen, see it come to life.
The Ice Cream Truck Finder app was a very simple app.
It was designed to do exactly what it says, help you find ice cream trucks.
It was premised on the idea that I didn't really want to walk to the nearest ice cream store,
and I'm like, I wonder if there's an ice cream truck nearby?
And then I realized that there was no way for me to find that out, and that's where the idea came from.
Hey guys, my name is Roman, and I fucking love ice cream trucks.
And what I love more than ice cream is ice cream truck ice cream.
And would you believe that the one thing I can't find when I want ice cream truck ice cream is an ice cream truck?
So I want to start a service called Ice Cream Truck Finder, which is a really simple idea.
It's just a mapping service where you can find all the ice cream trucks near you.
So I'm looking for just about anybody who is willing to take this idea seriously and avail it.
Thank you.
When I first left my job, I thought it was going to be a smooth, easy ride all the way to the top.
It's a whirlwind, that's for sure. Entrepreneurship is surely a whirlwind.
Like no other, it comes with the highest highs and lowest lows.
That being said, when you hit those moments in time, when things aren't going right,
and it seems like it's going to happen, there's no high or high that I've ever filmed.
It's amazing what startups can do now. Things have changed.
Two or three guys with like a few hundred or a thousand dollars can go out there and build a product
that can then turn out a billion dollar company.
I'm a bit older than your traditional, you know, than your traditional entrepreneur.
So when I grew up, it definitely wasn't like that at all.
Like it's no way, like you would, you know, it was not normal to think like,
oh, you can build a startup with very little money, very little people,
and build something really big on them.
And also, like looking around, there's like so many success stories.
You're like, crap, I want to be like these guys. These guys are killing it.
Why aren't I doing that?
But you know, I'm the kind of guy that, you know, it's all in nothing.
I've kind of said it many times, it's either make it really well, very rich.
Not just money, but like make and make it, or I'm just going to be like, you know,
it's going to be broke, my whole life.
My name today is called Resume Graphics, and Resume Graphics is a website for job seekers
who want to have a kink-ass resume and, you know, get that dream job.
So what does it do? You plug in your main team account and it automatically creates
an awesome looking original resume, like the one I have here on my t-shirt.
And I'm looking for designers and web developers.
Again, it's Resume Graphics, and this is the website that will get you your next dream job.
Thank you.
And in doing a startup, for the first time, I didn't know Jack.
And then I did make all the traditional mistakes that a first-time entrepreneur makes.
I wasted my time and failed in that sense.
Those experiences have helped me kind of shape me to where I am right now.
I think everyone has ideas. I think everyone to some degree, more or less, is an innovator.
But an entrepreneur is a person who takes that idea and acts upon it and tries to execute upon it.
So, as I said, we're thinking about, we want to build an application.
So this is a web-based thing that would tell people where ice cream trucks are.
So they can get their ice cream easier.
Do you have a smart phone? Do you use a phone?
I still have a cell phone.
You've got a cell phone. What kind of phone do you have?
I don't know.
Is it like an iPhone?
It's a simple phone.
Okay, so...
Very simple phone.
Very simple phone.
All right.
Would you consider getting like a fancy phone like this if it was going to improve sales?
This one is very hard to do. I won't fight with people.
You're not okay?
I don't say my age, but I'm not single.
Okay, okay. So you think these phones are too complicated?
I have to go to university to learn how to use this phone.
Okay, okay.
But I don't know.
Do you use the internet?
No.
No, not at all.
No.
Okay.
The customer validation didn't prove to be as strong as we had hoped and that the assumption that we could easily use GPS track ice cream trucks proved completely invalid.
The COVID ice cream idea is gone. It's gone.
This is all the stuff that we didn't do.
So it's just sticking up to all we lost, right?
Yes.
And some estimation time.
That's it.
We were left with the challenge of trying to figure out how do you put ice cream trucks on a map if you don't have GPS to track them.
And one of the ideas that was put forward is that you could spot them. So anytime someone spots an ice cream truck, they could say, you know, open up the app and say, I just spotted an ice cream truck.
As we were having the conversation of whether people would actually choose to spot ice cream trucks or not, someone said, well, if we're going to do a spotting app, are there other things that people would be more interested in spotting than ice cream trucks?
Ice cream truck finder actually shifted from an ice cream truck spotter to kind of like a four square for stuff.
You know, in sports, when you have one foot planted and you start rotating, that's a pivot and that's exactly what you do in the entrepreneurial approach as well.
Basically, we only have like Saturday to build it because Friday night it was just wasted because you start at nine and you just form the team.
Like midnight by the time you get together. And Saturday, we worked a whole Saturday. And Sunday, like by the afternoon, you had to be ready.
So the morning, you kind of needed to be ready. So we basically did most of our work in one day.
Goes a little something like this.
Exactly. So you click on this and it would go to the tweet details page which I'm at Dungeon where you click tweet, it would go to the tweet details point, right? Or there would be like maybe a photograph icon.
It actually works.
Check me out.
You guys just, that's awesome. It actually works.
So when we put the landing page out, like we, after I don't know an hour or two, we saw that the signups were growing like a lot.
So we pushed it to a bunch of blogs last night. So we're on, I think, seven or eight blogs and we're approaching a thousand email addresses and 10,000 views on that launch page.
So I was like, holy crap, like people really like this stuff. Like I wonder why, you know, I was, I was really shocked. And it was just a landing page with one or one line was just, you know, it was as light as it's visualized your resume.
I just had the promise there. It's very mysterious. I think that kind of worked too. But I worked on products that, you know, you even, you know, you couldn't pay someone to use it or you couldn't pay someone to tweet about it.
And we had this product where people were tweeting, you know, about joining this, this website that really was just a landing page. It definitely helps morale and like when you're building something and it's working, it definitely helps morale.
And when it came time to prepare for the pitch, you know, I was certainly very, you know, I was certainly very nervous because it got traction, you know, the product works.
Everything was in our favor. And I'm not a natural presenter. I kind of hate presenting. And it was just up to me. Like, if I screw it up, basically, and I would let the team down.
Hey guys. My name is Ronan, and I fucking hate ice cream.
I don't hate ice cream.
I really love ice cream, but what this weekend taught me
was that it's a lot harder to build a mobile company that
helps you geolocate ice cream trucks nearby.
This is what Delirious became.
It's really all about providing a birdwatching tool
for the Gen Y generation to find cool stuff and share it
with their friends.
So here are our mock-ups of what the app would look like.
We have a landing page, and I encourage you to go out
and sign up to deliriousapp.com.
So if you want to find things like ice cream trucks, you can.
You guys, on deck, we have visualizing.
I don't think it's going to happen to you.
That's the problem.
The drive that I have to succeed, right,
to build something different, that's just something,
I don't know, it's like something innate.
Like, I kind of want to do something different.
I can't explain it.
I just want to, you know, I guess everybody
wants to be different, right?
Maybe that's the way, like, everybody wants to be different.
Everybody wants to do something different.
And I want to do something different.
It's always been something inside me, like bugging me.
I always think that I've always thought
that I could do a lot better than working on a nine to five
desk job and doing the same old thing every day.
And that's what drives me.
So it visualized me.
And the problem we're trying to solve
is that we're in the age of data overload.
And resumes are really boring and they're really long.
No one even looks at them anymore.
So the problem we're trying to solve is that, right?
What do people do?
Job seekers want to differentiate themselves.
They pay resume coaches $500 to optimize
their resumes.
They pay designers to come up with custom resumes, right?
So that's a pretty better alternative.
So what's our solution?
Our solution is visualize me.
Visualize your resume in one click.
Visualize me is basically a website
that will take in your LinkedIn profile
and automatically create an incredible looking
infographic from it.
You log in using your LinkedIn credentials
and it pulls your LinkedIn data and then
using our super magic sauce.
We create a beautiful looking infographic.
So we want to replace a resume.
We think the resume is a dying format.
So in the future, don't be surprised
if you have to go to visualize me to look at someone's profile.
Thank you.
I just wanted to express my gratitude because it's been
awesome working with all of you.
And it's been awesome just going through this process.
And we've made friends and hopefully a team.
And everything will be great going forward.
Everybody here did a great job.
I'm happy to call you friends and business partners
and all that kind of stuff.
I hope you guys feel the same way.
So I think a entrepreneur is half and a full hearty idiot.
And the other half is someone who's kind of risk-taking,
kind of crazy as well.
So now the last one, which does get a significant set
of prizes, we've got our winners, which are VisualizeMe.
If you look at the statistics, most startups fail.
Most entrepreneurs fail.
There are chances of success.
Both income-wise, career-wise, it's much better
if you just go get a job.
And your stress level is lower.
You probably have a normal life and have a family
and have a big house with a yard and all that.
Whereas an entrepreneur, you don't have all that stuff.
So I think an entrepreneur certainly has to have,
certainly in some senses, as part of that.
And the other part is just they just
want to change the world.
They're kind of crazy.
And they don't care what people say.
I call my wife.
I tell her I won.
So, yeah, you know, I've been home for like three days.
So.
You
