STARTUP INSTITUTE TEAM AT STARTUP WEEKEND NYC

by Kashyap Bhatt, Web Development Track

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This last weekend fortunately I ended up going to Startup Weekend, only the second Hackathon (first one was at #StartupInst) I have been to. At first, I was skeptical about it and wasn’t sure what to expect or why I was doing it at all! My fears were reduced a lot after I knew I would have the company of Damone and Annette from Startup Institute.

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So, how was my weekend? It was awesome and really very tiring, very exciting, socially enriching and most importantly worth it. We built a startup business model and MVP for CuppleHub - The way couples connect. New friends Corey, Elaine and I built the web mock up for our site with the enormous help with other non-technical members Annette, Damone, Brien, Ahmed, Bhas, Virginia, and Joshua. While we were busy building the mock up, other members of the team did validation by getting out the building and hitting the streets, asking relevant questions, iterating based on the feedback, creating strategies and much more. Everyone helped us critically in building our web product by finding relevant images to put, providing feedback and giving us freedom to do our web stuff freely. I still don’t believe how well our team worked.We were like a well-oiled engine despite 7 out of the 10 people were meeting each other for the first time.

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We worked hard to build the demo for our product. Damone and Annette came up with this great idea and we all liked it. The team formed naturally and combined all our interests and talents. The concept is that couples should be able to find other couples to connect with easily. Before signing up for the site, we ask each user a few questions about what their interests, topics include food, drinks, activities, etc. Then we suggest other couples that we think they would have fun with. After that couples are suggested outings to go on based on their couple profile. If a couple doesn’t like our suggestions they can also search for couples with their choice of filters. (I am not the most visual person to explain the product but I have tried anyways to explain about product here)

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With that said here is what our Mockup looked like. It is hosted at CuppleHub (Note: Please know that this is a mockup for validating our concept. Currently you can enter in your email to see a demo version and get updates but you cannot create a full profile as of yet.) If you are interested in this idea or want to learn more about it then drop your email at http://cupplehub.launchrock.com/.