Super proud to announce that my startup idea, ‘Spark Girlz’ has won the Women’s Startup Weekend Asia Pacific Finals in Bali. How exciting! But how did we get here?
As is well known, I love to learn and do electronics and 3d printing projects. I get a lot out of sharing what I’ve learned with others so they can experience the same joy I have when I do something challenging. I hope to inspire others to realise all the fantastic new prototyping potential we have at our disposal. Really, it’s amazing how much easier it is to create a new product now than it was 10 years ago. But I’m just one person, and I can only do so much.
About a month ago, I attended a Women’s Startup Weekend at Canvas Co-working for a bit of productive weekend fun. I hoped to meet other cool business ladies and hopefully have some of everyone else’s experience and knowledge rub off on me. But, as a personal rule, you can’t go to a startup weekend without bringing an idea to pitch. The idea was a business to inspire young girls through electronics. Thus, Spark Girlz was born.
I pitched the idea on the Friday night, formed an amazing team, and we got to work. We interviewed many knowledgeable people about the idea, and refined it down with some key learnings, which, interestingly, included:
“While we’ve got lots of students coming on board the robotics team with coding skills, many people have no electronics and hardware skills”
– Dr. Sue Keay, QUT Robotics Team
“Many parents think the Lego club is for boys, we have only a couple of girls in our group of over twenty kids”
– Volunteer from Bricks4Kids Initiative
While there are lots of great resources for girls to learn electronics, unconscious bias plays a huge role in what parents buy for their kids. If you aren’t a progressive parent and you’re looking for something a little girl might like, the engineering kits with masculine looking packaging aren’t going to cut it.
We also realised that Spark Girlz needed to be targeted at girls aged 8-12 years. This is the critical age when girls must gain an interest in science. From high school, if they are not initially inspired, they will often be no longer interested.
These were some of the key points we delivered in a final presentation on the weekend. We also put together a light up ‘safety scarf’ as part of the demo pitch, always risky to do a ‘product demo’ in a pitch, but it paid off. We were announced the winners of the Toowoomba competition, winning participation in the 12 week Onramp Business Bootcamp and a trip to Bali to attend the Asia Pacific Women’s Startup Weekend. Woo!
Going to Bali was a fantastic experience. The streets, food and culture was amazing to explore. One of my favourite parts was visiting the Ubud co-working space and speaking to travellers who were living the travelling/digital business lifestyle. Every three months, pack up and visit another city and join another co-working space, a great way to get the best of both worlds.
These ladies are living the dream.
We competed against teams from Japan, China, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and more. It was heartwarming to see such a large focus on social enterprise from the other teams, they really care about their communities and want to improve them.
We changed up the Spark Girlz presentation for the finals and distributed an MVP (minimum viable product) of a paper circuits greeting card to the judges during the pitch. We also brought lots of these to give away to all of the other cool teams to take home.
After the pitches, the judges had a tough job, and they decided to announce a winner and an honourable mention. And Spark Girlz came out on top! The feedback from the judges:
“We were so excited about your idea. You’ve demonstrated deep knowledge of the market size and the challenge, and how far you’ve come. The applications are huge, there’s a great chance for expansion.”
We won 6 weeks of mentoring through Techstars.
Big thanks to the rest of the Spark Girlz team who couldn’t make it out to Bali but were there in spirit, and huge thanks to Canvas Coworking for making it all happen. We’ve got a great startup community here in Toowoomba, and more people need to realise the great opportunities on offer to learn from other locals. And of course, Andrea, the best co-founder!
This story was featured here in the Startup Daily, the Chronicle and Channel 7 News.