Hacker Remix

My experience of participating to a startup weekend competition in Italy

52 points by danielpetrica 4 days ago | 39 comments

shalmanese 12 hours ago

I strongly believe pitch competitions are negatively correlated with success because they bias for ideas that are easy to validate which means there’s probably a non-obvious reason it hasn’t been done already.

In this case, OP is working on something in the travel space which is notoriously a startup tarpit because customer acquisition costs end up killing most ideas.

You can’t meaningfully affect frequency of usage via your actions and the vast majority of the audience travels infrequently enough that they forget your tool exists the next time they travel.

Also, if you’re serving outbound, you need to bizdev a meaningful amount of the globe to first gain utility. If you’re serving inbound, the customer acquisition generally only happens late in the user journey and is expensive/time consuming to access.

There are still successes in the travel space but the odds are stacked against you.

yobbo 8 hours ago

"Gym access, comfortable accommodations, sightseeing, custom meal plans"

This is a bog standard travel package. So many of these exist and they are not difficult to produce.

Selling them (really) successfully usually revolves around some pre-existing brand tied to celebrities, authors, books that connect with the destination or theme.

danielpetrica 7 hours ago

Yeah of course we did not reinvent the wheel, but from our personal experiences, user interviews and searches this is not present at the moment in the Italian market. > "Gym access, comfortable accommodations, sightseeing, custom meal plans" These are general descriptions as we are in the steps of finishing the program of the first trip offered.

I'll update the article once we defined the program better. We have a marketing expert to take care about the promotion and positioning, that is not my area of expertise. I'll forward the advice to him. thank you, if you have any other advice please feel free to comment. Any piece of feedback can be very useful in this step.

danielpetrica 11 hours ago

Thank you for the information. If you have any other advice please tell me I'm very grateful for any advice

We're aware that the small validation we were able to do during the weekeend so now we are trying to validate it really by organising a real trip in September.

We are trying to bootstrap it at the moment and count on our network of friends, Clients (the main founder is a personal trainer) and people that expressed interest initially. we count on organizing the first 2-3 trips to be understand if the idea makes sense to continue or not. we also aim to understand the difficulties with this 2 initial trips to perfect the formula for the trip and find difficulties.

We are not building a tool, but are trying to organize group trips to sell to clients.

We are aware of the high cost of user acquisition too so we have a marketing person in the team. And we aim to try building a community long term with old trip participants and interested people.

We also want to give a healthy/fitness spin to the trip so people will be able to attend the gym or do athletic activities (not my knowledge domain, I bring the outside view to the team by not being in the fitness niche).

greatgib 7 hours ago

If you want my personal opinion, it is too a niche for being a successful "startup" business.

Like imagine if I add to your pitch "trips for people that like ... And to have a bottle of ketchup on lunch tables and that like hotels name starting with b or k".

Probably ok for a small modest local travel agency but not more.

I would see more success as a "sport and leisure group trips travel" agency but I guess that there are few other competitors in the field.

danielpetrica 7 hours ago

Probably I explained myself badly due to English not being my first language. >sport and leisure group trips travel This is basically what we want to build. Organize trips that let you do sport, visit new places and if needed continue your specific implementation (for example finding your supplements and incredients in the apartment already). all of this while being with 8 or 7 strangers and 1 or 2 coordinators for the group

yobbo 8 hours ago

> are trying to organize group trips to sell to clients.

You might as well be saying "we are trying to make movies to sell tickets".

Organising group tours as such is easy, but the value is in the creative input that engages and inspires possible clients. Destination, people - both guides and participants, activities, materials are all part of this. It can't be "tested" just as two movies with the same synopsis can be completely different.

danielpetrica 8 hours ago

You can totally see my english is not the best.

> Organising group tours as such is easy, but the value is in the creative input that engages and inspires possible clients. Destination, people - both guides and participants, activities, materials are all part of this. It can't be "tested" just as two movies with the same synopsis can be completely different.

Thank you for this input. I agree with you that the experience is the most important part. We are preparing the first trip and will try to keep this in mind too. We want people to go back home at the end with great memories and having met new friends. We know we can't guarantee this to all but we'll try to insert activities and occasions to create community (probably not the best term to describe it). The biggest success for us will be if people go back home with 7/8 new friends.

deadbabe 7 hours ago

Success isn’t really the point. These competitions are a fun way to meet other people with entrepreneurial interest. You can work together in a team to build something quick together and if you like them you can keep in touch and maybe do something more serious later on. Most ideas at these weekends will be undercooked, and will need a few non-obvious pivots to be viable businesses.

tgpc 9 hours ago

an economist sees a 20 dollar note on the floor. Doesn't pick it up. If it was there, someone would have picked it up already.

bryanrasmussen 8 hours ago

scientist has heard this so many times in the past he decides to test its validity. He drops 20 dollars in front of economist. Economist takes the 20.

Scientist: Damn it, now I'm out 20 dollars!

cynusx 5 hours ago

I love your enthusiasm so let me share some hard-won learnings with you.

In my view, entrepreneurs spend way too little time on the problem space and rather jump into the solution space very quickly (way too quickly).

The world is full of problems people accept to live with that they just don't consider important enough to solve.

That's the essence of Paul Graham's 'build what people want, not what people need' which is the founder of YC.

People will tell you whatever they think you want to hear. When interviewing them you need to understand how they solved the problem before and the actions they took to solve it. Actions speak much louder than words and you can understand how they think about solving the problem which picks up valuable contextual information as well as potential alternative solutions (competing solutions) they evaluated.

Once you understand the full context and why they do what they do, you can identify the core problem and related "jobs-to-be-done" which really helps in setting product and marketing strategy as well as positioning towards others.

You can do all this with spending very little money to be honest, you may have to put money as an incentive to get enough people to talk to.

And then last, if I were you I would find AI use-cases in mid-size companies (20-200 employees). About 80% of early-stage investor money is flowing into AI right now.

danielpetrica 5 hours ago

Thank you — that’s genuinely useful advice. You clearly have experience in this space, and I really appreciate the thoughtful insights. I’ll definitely share them with my team.

> People will tell you whatever they think you want to hear. When interviewing them you need to understand how they solved the problem before and the actions they took to solve it. Actions speak much louder than words and you can understand how they think about solving the problem which picks up valuable contextual information as well as potential alternative solutions (competing solutions) they evaluated.

We tried to apply some of that in the limited time we had — for instance, we avoided presenting the idea directly and focused on questions that revealed whether people had faced similar problems before.

> And then last, if I were you I would find AI use-cases in mid-size companies (20-200 employees). About 80% of early-stage investor money is flowing into AI right now. We're not actively seeking investment at the moment, but your point about AI in mid-size companies is very relevant — it's something we’ll keep in mind as we evolve.

danielpetrica 6 hours ago

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danielpetrica 5 hours ago

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danielpetrica 4 days ago

A few weeks ago, I participated in a startup competition in Italy. Over a single weekend, my team had to develop a startup idea, validate it, and pitch it against other teams. In this article, I’ll share our experience and the key lessons that led us to victory

Tepix 10 hours ago

There‘s a typo in your photo caption: wining instead of winning

danielpetrica 9 hours ago

Thank you very much for pointing that out for me, I corrected it, cache permitting it should be live in the next 5 minutes

slimebot80 13 hours ago

is there a link to the competition results page?

danielpetrica 9 hours ago

My friends sent me this link with a article from one of the organizers It's in italian so you may need a translation service. you can find the pitch for the top 3 ideas there: https://ltomantova.it/2025/03/31/successo-seconda-edizione-s...

danielpetrica 11 hours ago

Hi, not that I'm aware of it. It was only the second time they holded this event in a smaller town in Italy (Mantova) so it's a bit less organized on that side.