My experience of participating to a startup weekend competition in Italy

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Startup Weekend and Its Learnings

First, what exactly is a Startup Weekend competition? It’s an intense, fast-paced event that teaches you how to build a startup from scratch. The focus is on idea generation, validation, and pitch preparation —the core pillars of any successful startup. These skills are taught through a mix of talks, workshops, group activities, and networking opportunities.

The Problem

The first lesson we learned was that every great startup idea must solve a real problem.
We were taught how to:

• Clearly define a problem
• Analyze its impact
• Validate its existence

A well-defined problem should stem from real-world observations—not just assumptions.

Problem Validation

Identifying a problem isn’t enough—you must validate it. This means:

• Conducting surveys (online or in-person)
• Interviewing potential users (without biasing them with your solution)
• Asking questions that focus solely on the problem
• Checking if users have tried other solutions (which indicates motivation)

This process helps confirm whether the problem is worth solving and if users would be willing to adopt your solution.

The Solution

Once the problem is validated, it’s time to design a solution. Using insights from user interviews, we refined our approach by asking:

• How does our solution benefit the user?
• How does it stand out from competitors?

Market Research

A great solution means nothing without a **market**. We learned to:

• Estimate the total addressable market (e.g., the entire continent)
• Narrow it down to our immediate market (e.g., national or regional)
• Identify our early adopters (e.g., tech-savvy travelers)

This helps focus efforts on the most promising customer segments.

The Pitch—Where Ideas Succeed or Fail

Since this was a competition, we had to convince judges that our idea was the best. But even outside Startup Weekend, pitching is crucial when seeking investors or customers.

Key pitch tips we followed:

• Keep slides clean (minimal text, one idea per slide) they should not distract users
• Use data to back claims
• Choose the best speaker on the team (someone engaging and persuasive)
• Emotion matters — make the audience want to support you

Fitravel: Our Winning Idea

Our entry, Fitravel, won first place. Here’s how we did it.

The Problem We Tackled

Active people struggle to maintain their fitness routines and diets while traveling in groups.

Validation

We created an online survey and interviewed nearly 100 people (filtering out non-exercisers). We also intervied people in person at the event and on the streets of Mantova.

Here are our key findings:

• Most fitness enthusiasts wanted to keep training and eating well while traveling.
• Many had traveled in groups before or were interested in trying it.

This confirmed a real demand for our solution.

Our Solution

Fitravel offers group travel packages that include:

• Gym access
• Sightseeing activities
• Comfortable accommodations
• Custom meal plans for dietary needs

Execution

Even before pitching, we took action:

• Built a landing page (with our first trip planned for September)
• Collected early sign-ups
• Prepared a 5-minute pitch covering our research, solution, and team

The judges unanimously declared Fitravel the best idea, and we won!

Next Steps

Winning was just the beginning—we’re now turning Fitravel into a real business. Our first trip launches in September, and I’ll share more updates as we grow.

As a tech founder in a non-tech company, I’ll also write about the challenges and lessons of building a startup from scratch. Stay tuned!

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