Sam Clegg - Santander Start-Up Weekend Participant
“The highlight for me personally, was overcoming lots of barriers and presenting something within two days that had not been an idea at all before we started the weekend”
Sam Clegg a recent Northumbria graduate partook in the Santander start-up weekend in March 2016; he came to the weekend having already set-up his business Festible with his business partner Danielle Young who also attended.
Festible is “A social online platform, where people can meet other people based on their music tastes and the festivals that they want to go too. Simply it is a way of expanding your social group to meet your music needs”.
Sam chose to attend the start-up weekend because “we had heard about the lean start-up methodologies and knew we wanted to learn more so we could apply it to our business, a lot of people of people are raving about this methodology”.
Sam learnt during the weekend that “a chance to learn from the start-up foundation which was amazing which really was amazing these guys they are not old, they are young and they have been there and done that and they kind of spoke a lot of sense. So we were quite excited, it was one of the most worthwhile things we have done for our business”.
They put what they learnt during into practise by “As soon as the weekend finished we were like we’ve come further in a couple of days than we’ve come in months, before hand and like we’ve got to stop being how we have been with this and actually put ourselves online”.
Asked if he would recommend the weekend to others; “Absolutely 100%, it’s not easy, it was hard work throughout the weekend, and it’s a lot of hours. So I think anyone who has any idea at all needs to get in there, people who don’t have an idea yet have to get in there because there is a false hood that you need to have the perfect idea to start your own business in the terms of a lean start up. What the weekend taught me was that you can’t have the perfect idea without talking to your customers and finding out what they want not what you think they want”.
Asked if Sam would be in the same stage with his business if he had not been part of the start-up weekend he answered “Genuinely we wouldn’t have been. We would maybe be at a similar stage in terms of what we have developed but not in terms of our ideology. Start-up weekend changed the vision for the future.”
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