Team Columbia College Chicago Goes to Bloomington Startup Weekend (powered by Google)

Three second-year Master of Arts Management students — Brittani Alston, Melissa Jimenez, Shreya Singh — attended Bloomington’s Startup Weekend at Indiana University’s Cyber Infrastructure Building on November 11-13, 2016.

Bloomington Startup Weekend is a 54-hour event where designers, entrepreneurs and developers unite to bring innovative ideas to fruition. During the weekend, participants collaborate to create, develop, and present new business ventures. The event kicks off with a pitch series where participants with ideas will give a brief 60-second pitch to everyone in attendance. The audience will then select by vote the top several ideas to advance. Teams will then form around the chosen ideas, and “work/play/insanity” begins. Over the following two days, teams develop a business model, work toward a minimum viable product, perform market research, and prepare to present their progress in a winner-take-all final pitch competition.

Team CCC shares their experience at the event:

Team MooVooDoo!

“We had to rally behind one of the five chosen pitches… so, naturally, we chose the most artsy option possible: a filmmaker platform called MooVooDoo. Pitched by Ukrainian participant Serhiy Vernei, a professional Web Developer, MooVooDoo is an online collaborative platform for amateur and para-professionals interested in film-making,” says Melissa. 

“On Saturday, team MooVooDoo Kicked off the day with website content, web design and business development simultaneously… After hours of brainstorming, planning, research, and discussion, by the end of the day, we had already fleshed out the entire business’s structure, its operations, marketing strategy, law considerations, revenue structures, and scalability features,” says Brittani. 

“On Sunday, with all the legwork done, Team MooVooDoo pulled the magical presentation together. We worked on financial projections, completed the website prototype, crafted presentation slides, and perfected the delivery,” says Shreya.

After final deliberation, the results came in and Team MooVooDoo was awarded second place. They received over $600 of resources per person and the opportunity to pitch to the CEO of Shark Tank, an event hosted by Indiana University.

Team CCC believes that Bloomington’s startup weekend was an invaluable experience and one that should be experienced by all business and entrepreneurship students. That is why Brittani, Melissa, Shreya, and fellow second-year MAM student Brandon Saunders, will be bringing the Startup Weekend experience to Chicago in Spring 2017.

Official Branding for Startup Weekend Chicago

Columbia College Chicago, in partnership with the Business & Entrepreneurship Department, will be hosting the first Startup Weekend on March 31 – April 2, 2017. The event will be held in the Conaway Center- 1104 S Wabash Avenue, Chicago, Il, 60606. This event is themed “Creative Enterprises Edition” and as such, we welcome pitches for ideas–tech-related, service-oriented, product-based, and everything in between–related to the arts, media, fashion or entertainment industry. Student tickets are $49 USD and General Public tickets $99 USD each. The price of admission also includes breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks and beverages for all three days of the event!

Tickets for the event will go on sale January 2nd, 2017. Follow us at Startup Weekend for Creative Enterprises on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, using the hashtag #SWChiCreative

We hope to see you at Startup Weekend!! We can’t wait to hear your amazing creative ideas.