#hackcon

When you consider that sometimes the only thing that you can reach to a potential investor is by your pitch deck. When you can’t even tell the people about what you do face to face, the quality of your pitch deck matters more. A few months ago we shared an article titled “7 startup pitch decks from time when they were not huge” which shows earlier pitch decks from startups such as LinkedIn, YouTube, Airbnb and more.

Absolutely no ambitions to write about the ‘Best’ or the most impressive pitch decks. Just want to be more practical, and focus on the skeleton of the pitch deck. So many pitches and presentations available on youtube; a lot of mentorship and training done; and why there are still so many fails?

Story

Your pitch is a chance to tell your story, how you see it and want people to know about it. Your pitch is not just a powerpoint presentation, but a page of your ‘story’. Make it as much more unforgettable; even when it comes to investment pitch. What is special about you for the users? Your growth until now; and after this moment is the thrilling part of your pitch. Why they should choose you? So, to write your story I would suggest starting with a script first.

Before you start, check the best practices in your sector. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Check how the same startups like you are managed to create the difference.

Slide 1. Cover.

Just use your imagination and use visuals and colors wisely. 🙂

Slide 2. Mission Statement

Just 1 sentence to describe your product. And please check out your competitors before you start; what is their mission statement; what keywords do they use; how do the position themselves. You will, definitely, have more clear ideas about own statement. There are some guidelines about designing a mission statement; so, please don’t ignore standard formulas like;

(Name of the Company) is developing (defined offering) to help (defined audience) (solve a problem) with (secret sauce).

Slide 3. Challenge/Problem

Usually, we call it a problem; however, some mentors suggest to avoid negative words in your presentations. So, suggestion- ‘Challenge’:) Sounds more challenging, isn’t it? What problem is out there in the world? How many people need this problem to be solved?

Slide 4. Solution

What do you propose? How does it work? What opportunities do you provide for people to be faster, happier, safer, more cost-effective or efficient? Don’t forget about your value proposition; which is definitely the main driven power.

Slide 5. Features

This is the slide where you can give more details about your solution; give screenshots or dashboard to explain your product in details; supporting the previous slide about effectiveness, etc. No more than 3 features; though you have more than this. Focus on the most life-changing solutions that none of your competitors have.

Slide. 6. Market

3 main numbers about the market you operate in. How does it look like a big picture? What is the size and potential you intend to fit? And for the investor, it is extremely important to show how much you know about YOUR market.

Slide 7. Competitors

Who else is in the market and what is your difference? The best way is to give a chart focusing on 4 major advantages. And please don’t waste too much time on competitors; you have them- yes; you know them- yes; show the slide and emphasize on your own product and advantages, not theirs; though they can be cheaper, do better, or have more users, etc.

Slide 8. Business Model

The slide that should be precisely clear. How do you get paid? What is the price? Is it B2B or B2C? Do you have Standard/Premium packages? What’s the price?

What is the opportunity for growth and how can you scale beyond your current scope; industries, technology, etc?

Slide 9. Product Milestones

Now it’s time to visualize your story. When did you start? Apple Store/Play Store release? First 100K users? Dates and major numbers/or logos. Don’t overload it! Don’t forget, this is the success story slide. As an addition, you can support this slide with client testimonials or cases.

Slide 10. Metrics/Traction

We love hard data! Show your metrics to share your success so far. Again and again; no more than 3–4 numbers for the audience to remember; like # users you have, churn, clients, pipeline, conversion rates, etc. Major Brands? Why not.

Slide 11. Team

It is all about the team, don’t forget! Make it more personal. Though I would recommend showing just photos/names/areas to make as clean as possible; you should definitely tell about your backgrounds, brands you’ve worked before. And, of course, how you, as a team, are going to change the world. As an alternative why not to use a happy team photo instead.

Slide 12. Investment

This slide is to tell about your expectations. By the way, investment is not just a money. Mention, if you need a network, sales channels, or anything else. Time to share how much money have you raised so far? How much are you looking for now? What big next steps will you use your investment for?

Slide 13. Thank you 🙂

Last Sunday, on 18th Nov, we got together for our 4th HackCon at Kolektif House Maslak. A warm “Welcome Home” speech was made by Kaan Akın, explaining what we’ve accomplished before, our aim for the future and what we expect from our new batch of Pioneers. While telling you more about what we did at HackCon, I’ll also explain our community processes and some info for our new Pioneers who couldn’t attend HackCon.

As Pioneers, we love talking on Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning, Digital Transformation, and IoT/Smart Machines. We will try to provide more resources and feed our new Pioneers with great information on those topics.

Then I took the stage for our second session, which was about events and activities we are planning at Hackquarters Pioneers for this new term. You can also find more info about this topic in our previous blog.

Last year, we received more than 2500 applications for our events and Pioneers program, and we accepted 120 new Pioneers into our family. We organized more than 40 meetups at 15 universities and 8 different cities. For this year we received more than 3000 applications for our events and Pioneers program. We have handpicked 105 new Pioneers into our family from 32 universities, 5 high schools and from 20 different cities all across Turkey. We are so proud to be growing rapidly.

Pizza for everyone!

After sharing our future plans with our beloved Pioneers, we had a networking session. We would love to thank StartupHR team for helping us to create such a fun environment for our attendees and Pizza Locale for providing delicious pizzas for everyone.

Next session was given by Kaan Akın about “Growing Tech in a Developing World”. We’ve got inspired by knowing more about the stories of leading tech companies and important facts about well-known startups.

Omegas took over the stage after Kaan’s presentation. Berke Uygun from Doktorderki, Emrah Yiğit from Pepapp, Elif Aleyna Duman from Hangi Üniversite Hangi Bölüm, Emirhan Erdoğan from Appyist and TurkishKit, Sezer Ulutaş from Appcent, Mehmet Taş from Blockpays, Berkay Şamiloğlu from Tion and Nizamettin Sami Harputlu from StartupHR were the panelists of our session, which was moderated by Kaan Akın. We would like to thank all our friends for being with us for the day and sharing their unique experiences.

The last presentation was from our education partner; TurkishKit. Emirhan Erdoğan talked about what TurkishKit is doing recently, how their community works and how we’ll be working together in our new term at Pioneers. They’ve already helped us on organizing our upcoming Hacker Meetups and our partnership with Bahçeşehir University. We would like to thank them for their participation at HackCon and their wonderful contribution to Pioneers.

What is next for Hackquarters Pioneers?

HackCon4 was our first step into the new term of Hackquarters Pioneers. In Hackquarters Pioneers, we have different groups called Alpha, Beta and Omega. If you know about a product’s creating cycle, you may be heard these words before. Alpha members are fresh newbies, who are in the beginning of all process, and trying to gain more knowledge to become “beta”. Beta members are the ones who had internships in startups or volunteered in organizing our events, so they’ve gained experience. Aleyna, Göktuğ, Sena, Metin and Emre are Betas of Pioneers 2019. Omegas are the last ring of the chain, the ones finally turned an idea into a startup. They help Alphas and Betas to complete the same process successfully. To be clear, the reason behind dividing our community is not creating a hierarchical community, it is actually creating a cycle which everyone could learn from the other.

Hackquarters Pioneers will be meeting every month as physical and online both. Physical meetings are for mostly hanging outs, knowing each other better. Online meetings are for catching up the Pioneers learning process well and knowing people from other cities as well without a necessity to have them in İstanbul.

We’re planning to add new online courses to Teachable which is our education platform for teaching entrepreneurship. We suggested to new Pioneers also watch, learn and take some notes. Then, they should give us feedbacks if there is any missing points or if they want to add new topics with the others. So we’ll manage to create new online courses and select 15 lucky Pioneers from whom gives us feedbacks, to attend courses as offline.

Through online channels we’ll be creating online meet ups, using Youtube more efficiently and promote our offline events to be reached from any other cities. Slack and WhatsApp groups have been made, our Slack channel has reached 250+ people from entrepreneurs, Pioneers and investors. Pioneers will be benefiting from networking, education and other needs for their entrepreneurship path. I strongly suggest every Pioneer to keep eyes out on every mailings and follow Hackquarters’ social media accounts carefully.

You’ll see Pioneers are raising on LinkedIn and Angel.co since they already started adding themselves into that platforms. Because we are trying to take them more into the ecosystem and they’ll learn how to use efficiently these two platforms, when they have to find true customers for their startups.

Conventional business models, vertical organizational structures and traditional leadership styles are all demolished by the disruptive changes in technology and social norms. You need to stay current in order to cope with today’s challenges. 21st century learning must take place in contexts that promote interaction and a sense of community that enable a true learning. With its interactive setting, 41 North Business School provides a learning environment to inspire you to attain the knowledge and skills with a top-technology learning hub that the 21st century demands from us all.

Located in the heart of the Business District in Istanbul, 41 North Business School remains the first and only stand-alone Business School in Turkey, addressing the needs of the business world with the expertise of our partners; companies, opinion leaders, technology advisors, world’s leading business schools.

Together with our top business school and institution partners, we create and impart new knowledge to advance business and society, we create entrepreneurial leaders who think globally and act responsibly.

We envisioned Istanbul – a cultural heritage, a bridge between East and West, a true inspiration with its dynamism and entrepreneur energy- to become a learning hub for all those coming from not just Turkey but also from all over the world.

“Women in Leadership” Program: Starting on 13th December 2018

We have developed the “Women in Leadership” program to encourage women managers to expand their sphere of influence by maintaining their feminine reality and to become women leaders in their own original style.

The academy based leadership program is highly personalized for each woman manager and based on intensive practice.

The program consists of 4 modules, two days per module, over four months, having “self-awareness” in the center, focusing on critical skills such as communication, networking, creating impact, problem-solving. The facilitators of each module will be using 21st century’s learning techniques such as action learning sets, community learning, gamification, supported by one on one coaching and group coaching sessions between the modules.

Following the program, you will be invited to meetings where graduates of the program, program instructors and business leaders will share information and discuss important developments in their areas and inspire each other. Thanks to the “Women in leadership” program, you will become a very valuable part of a women leaders network and be supported throughout your business lives.

Join us, unleash your potential and kick the glass ceiling!

Digital Excellence Post-Graduate Certificate Program: Starting on 7th January 2019

Digital disruption affects businesses across all sectors. Corporate decision-makers have the choice whether they only take the role as followers to preserve their existing business lines in the digital age, or whether they want to become innovators, shaping industry trends and conquering new digital markets.

41 North Business School in cooperation with ESMT (European School for Management and Technology) Berlin offers the Digital Excellence Post-Graduate Certificate focusing in the areas of strategy & innovation & technology. The academically designed program supports enhancing participants’ professional development and reshapes their leadership skill set in digitalization.

The six modules of the joint 41 North Business School and ESMT Berlin Digital Excellence Program prepare and equip corporate leaders to disrupt their businesses, develop new strategies, introduce organizational changes and pro-actively seize the opportunities digitalization brings to their markets.

1st module: Innovation and a Corporate Model, Building Digital Strategy: Gives executives a framework to generate new business models, identify key resources, partners, and organizational prerequisites. Provides the necessary tools to develop a digital strategy.

2nd module: Ideation Workshop: Being Agile and Entrepreneurial Gives a structure to thoroughly understand customers’ needs, ideate, develop prototypes, and generate solutions.

Participants familiarize themselves with the tools to advance new ideas inside and outside of their companies, and how to turn those ideas into successful businesses.

3rd Module: Data-Driven Organizations Participants learn how to apply basic data analytics to test their assumptions and to derive decisions from quantitative insights.

4th Module: Understanding Leadership and Being a Leader in a Digital World Participants learn about how to lead in a digital environment by building an adequate organizational structure and by using new ways of communication.

5th Module: Understanding, Analyzing, and Applying New Technologies in Existing and New Business Models Encourages participants to embrace Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence and IOT for process optimization and new business ideas.

6th Module: Bringing Technology to Market and Delivering on Digital Inspires participants how to commercialize new ideas and how to successfully implement digital transformation projects.

Our followers on social media are always the ones that get the news related to Hackquarters first. As you are aware, Hackquarters founder, Kaan, was attending an event last week that we announced on our social media channels. The event that hosted the food startups was organized by EIT Food, which is a consortium of 50 partners with the ambition to create a future-proof & effective food sector through a connected food system. EIT Food is supported by EIT, which stands for European Institute of Innovation and Technology. The event was hosted by Impact Hub Istanbul.

Here are the competing Turkish food startups for EIT Food;

Batır

Batır is a company focusing on creating healthy, all-natural, nutritious snacks, which is easy to carry and packaged for daily consumption. Batır is using mostly local ingredients in their products.

Can Hydroponics

Can Hydroponics grow micro-greens using local and natural seeds without any additives, hormones, GMOs or fertilizers. Rather than using plastic pots, they are using waxed fabrics and water. Some of their products have up to 200 times more nutritional values than their traditional counterparts.

HAD

HAD (or Human Architectural Development) is a startup focusing on rooftop agriculture. They help communities produce soil from kitchen waste. They also help those communities with agricultural ecosystem by helping breed bees, worms or chicken. With those actions, they are hoping to contribute lower carbon emissions in cities.

Hyggefisk

Hyggefisk aims to provide nature-friendly, healthy, sustainable and low-budget alternatives to luxurious animal-origin food, by using vegetable alternatives. They are already working with some hotels and restaurants with their vegetable-based caviars.

MUMO Wrap

MUMO Wrap is a health alternative to traditional fridge bags, plastic or aliminum foil. It’s made of fabric coated with wax, pine resin and coconut oil. Their product is reusable, healtier than its alternatives and keeps food fresh for longer.

Naturansa

Naturansa‘s name is based on latin words Natura (natural) and Ansa (cycle). Based on their name, team is working on sustainable, modern and ecological food and food systems with scientific and technological research. They are working with black soldier flies (BSF, Hermetia illucens) and they are feeding flies with food waste. Feeding with natural products, BSF also provides “the cycle” with edible larvae and natural fertilizer.

Nu Snacks

Nu Snacks products are hoping to help people with health snacks without any gluten or sugar. They have raw bar, granola and nutbutter products currently on market.

Shaman’s Secret

Shaman’s Secret has been founded by Beril, who grow up within a family, interested in nature and natural products. She decided to turn their home-made kombucha into a product. Their products vary such as kombucha starter’s kit and dried kombucha cultivation kit.

HAUS

HAUS produces healthy, dried food with a special technique called “freeze dry”. Their technique sucks out 98% of humidity from food such as cheese, olives, okra, and thus keeps in nutritional values of their products. Their food not only keeps its shape and nutritional values, but also has long years of shelf life. (Editor’s note: I tried it. They are awesome)

Tarlamvar

Hackquartes Pioneers is a young, growing and enthusiastic community which supports university and high school students to reach guidance, advice and experiences they need about entrepreneurship. Starting this term, we have 100 new Pioneers to bring into the startup ecosystem from over 1000 applications. Our Pioneers are spread among 20 cities, 32 universities and 5 high schools! We’ll meet with our new recruits for HackCon4 on November 18th, at Kolektif House Maslak.

HackCon4 is going to start with Kaan Akın’s speech and my presentation about Hackquarters Pioneers’ future. Namık Kural will take the stage to share his story as an investor. With delicious food from Pizza Locale, great drinks from Lipton and help of Startup HR, we will have some free, networking time with our Pioneers and other attendants. As an extra info: StartupHR is also founded by two Pioneers.

After networking and lunch break, our beloved Omegas will take the stage: Berke Uygun & Emrah Yiğit from Doktorderki, Sonat Kaymaz from Scorp, Berkay Şamiloğlu from Tion, Serkan Dinçer from Coimex, Mehmet Taş from Blockpays and Sezer Ulutaş from Appcent. They’ll share their unique experiences and they are also going to evaluate 2 minutes long Pioneer pitches.

For this new term, as we will be starting our new partnerships with Ecodation and TurkishKit.

Ecodation is a smart education platform with a great team of mentors from various expertise such as app development, business and more. They will be telling more about themselves and their future plans at HackCon4. For our new term, Ecodation will be helping our Pioneers with their self-development and they will also be looking for new brand ambassadors among our Pioneers.

TurkishKit is a community which provides quality educations for the curious Pioneers who want to learn more about software and design. They are mainly focused on technical and practical education. They will be telling more about the development ecosystem and how Hackquarters and TurkishKit will collaborate in our upcoming Hacker Meetups. (You can see our upcoming events on Hackquarters Eventbrite page).

As Hackquarters Pioneers we aim to focus on learning smart, applicable and practical things instead of just talking about theoretical information. So with our partners, Omegas and mentors around us, we’ll be organizing crazy things as many different cities as we can. HackCon is always a huge excitement for us and now it is a starting point of the new era of Pioneers.

ackquarters Pioneers is an entrepreneurship community supporting high school and university students, who want to try themselves in teams of the next generation startups or found a startup of their own. With this purpose, Hackquarters organizes quarterly HackCon events. From the day the event series started to spread entrepreneurship all over our region, we organized 40+ meetups at 14 Universities reaching 2000+ students.

Moving forward with social entrepreneurship events and Hacker meetups we are aiming to catch every potential young entrepreneur in order to turn their ideas into successful startups.

So, let’s talk about our community; Hackquarters Convention, shortly HackCon. Our 1st and 2nd HackCons gathered in Kolektif House, in October’17 and February’18. Last Saturday, on 21st of July, we get together for 3rd HackCon at Akmerkez, Istanbul.

We had breakfast together and talked briefly about what we were doing from the beginning and what is next. During the gathering, we realized that our community has expanded more than we expected. We’ve organized really cool events, inspiring high school and university students since September 2017. While talking about it all, we saw the big picture; our potential. (I’ll also write about it in the next article.)

Next, Namık Kural, one of the first angel investors in Turkey, took a stage. We discussed the way entrepreneurship ecosystem developed for the past years and how it progresses with advanced technology. Namık Kural has a lot of experience in his field and his speech helped us to see entrepreneurship from a different point of view. It was very educative.

In Hackquarters Pioneers, we have different groups like Alpha, Beta and Omega. If you know about product’s creating circle, you may be heard these words before. Alpha members are fresh newbies, who are in the beginning of all process, and trying to gain more knowledge to become “beta”. Beta members are the ones who had internships in startups or volunteered in organizing our events, so they’ve gained experience. Omegas are the last ring of the chain, the ones finally turned an idea into a startup. They help Alphas and Betas to complete the same process successfully.

After Namık Kural’s speech, our Omegas took over the event. Ata Cengiz from Tarlamvar, Nilsu Sertatıl and Baran Öncel from Glamy, Gözde Büyükacaroğlu from Vivoo, Emir Emanetoğlu from Smopin, Serkan Bağçe from Startupmarket, Volkan Kırtok from Neytiv and Mert Kıray from Octovan were with us at HackCon 3. They shared their experience and explained how they passed the obstacles on their way to success in their startups. Our less experienced Pioneers were pretty active, asking a lot of questions to our Omegas.

At the end of the event, we divided our attendees into 5 groups, mentored by the Omegas. We laid on the grass of terrace and worked on business canvas models for tech and innovation focused companies which enriched entrepreneurship ecosystem; as it is very important to apply theoretical knowledge into practical use. We’ll also integrate this kind of small workshops into our upcoming events.

We were honored to be with people who really want to have an impact on the young generation and share knowledge like we do within Hackquarters Pioneers. Also, watching our Pioneers improve more and more every time we meet, makes us extremely happy.

We are grateful to the people who help us to make HackCon3 even greater. Thank you, Namık Kural for being with us and sharing your experience.

And thank you, Omegas for mentorship and support during HackCon3.

Finally, many thanks to Akmerkez for support and venue sponsorship. We really enjoyed being at Akmerkez.

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