More than 30 local entrepreneurs participated in Geekdom's 54-hour TechStars Startup Weekend San Antonio, which kicked off last Friday. Below is a look a the top three winners.
- The overall winner was Foodie, an app pitched by Ezekiel Torres and Nafrid Siddiqui, that organizes restaurant reviews from friends and celebrities as well as gives recommendations for specific dishes.
- The second-place winner, Prompt, was an app that helps small business owners create videos for marketing and retention with templates and prompts to improve quality.
- In third place was Community Helper, a customer relationship management technology platform that helps nonprofits manage, recruit and organize volunteers.
Geekdom, a San Antonio coworking space, partners with TechStars, a seed accelerator, to host about three startup weekends a year. In 2022, it will host eight. The next one — from Jan. 21-23 — will have a "social innovation" theme, Leslie Chasnoff, programs director for Geekdom, said. Typically, the company also does a startup weekend geared toward celebrating women entrepreneurs in March, and in the past has had themes of smart cities and civic technology.
"We have designers, we have software developers, we have entrepreneurs that are still in the startup stage now within our community to help out as they come out for the weekends," Chasnoff said.
In a typical TechStars Startup Weekend, participants meet Friday night and have 60 seconds to pitch an idea for a company. The group votes on favorites and ideas are selected for groups to work on for the rest of the weekend. Participants are expected to talk to mentors several times throughout Saturday and pull together a basic roadmap for the business and, by Sunday, each group makes a five-minute pitch to a panel of judges.
"It's essentially a crash course in how to take an idea of something and turn it into a true startup, (with) a roadmap and building blocks," Chasnoff said.
Startup weekends hosted at Geekdom have launched several San Antonio businesses, including financial tech startup FloatMe, which won the 2017 TechStars Startup Weekend San Antonio, as well as MelloBe, a local company selling posture-enhancing furniture accessories, and Blooming with Birdie, a child-friendly video series inspired by Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood and the Montessori learning method.
