On October 23 and 24, we hosted our first 5th edition of AIBoomi Startup Weekend in Kochi!
Our Keralam chapter had been a little inactive for a while, and we’d been warming up the engine by running a few Demo Rooms here. But at the back of my mind, I’d always wanted to bring our Startup Weekend to Keralam.
Keralam has a pretty strong tech community, and I wanted to see how something like this would work out here.
So when Sehar suggested, “Let’s do Startup Weekend in Kochi!” I was immediately up for it.
Why Kochi?
One thing I’ve noticed from my experiences with early-stage startups is that there are a lot of people building things, but many of them are doing it in isolation.
Kochi has quite a few early-stage startups, students experimenting with ideas, and developers building products. But I feel there aren’t enough spaces where they can meet other founders, get honest feedback, or learn from people who have already figured out things like finding customers, researching competitors, or taking a product to market.
There’s also something else I’ve noticed.
People are very keen to build. But sometimes, they’re so keen that they skip the part where they have to figure out whether what they’re building can actually create the intended impact.
I’ve come across people spending months building products that already exist, sometimes in markets where established players are already doing a pretty good job. A little research could have helped them understand the competition, find a different approach, or even reconsider the idea altogether.
And now, with AI and all the tools available, building has become much easier. You can go from an idea to a working MVP in very little time.
But getting customers to use it, or better, pay for it? That’s still hard.
I feel we’ve built a pretty good culture around making things, but we need to spend just as much time understanding why we’re making them and who we’re making them for.
Startup Weekend felt like a good place to start.
Bringing the ecosystem together
When we started thinking about the event, Kerala Startup Mission was the first place that came to mind.
KSUM has done a lot of work in building Kerala’s startup ecosystem, and I thought it would be a good opportunity for students and young builders to get exposure to the people and networks around it.
Another organisation I really wanted to collaborate with was TinkerHub.
I’ve always admired what they’ve done for the builder culture in Kerala. From their maker spaces and buildathons to the way they communicate with younger audiences, they’ve made learning and building much more accessible.
They’ve managed to create a culture where people can just show up, find people to learn from, experiment, and get started.
And they’ve been doing this consistently.
When we reached out, the team was incredibly receptive. Mehar, Kurian, and Nandana helped us with everything from reaching the right audience to content, reels, and connecting with mentors.
KSUM came on board as our venue partner and also helped us connect with mentors. With both communities supporting us, we were ready to bring Startup Weekend to Kochi.
20 hours, a room full of builders
Registrations started at 3 PM on October 23, and people slowly began flowing in.
By the time we kicked off, the room was almost full.
What I hadn’t expected was the mix of people who showed up. We had school students, college students, working professionals, and founders who were already pursuing their startup ideas.
There was even a father-son duo participating!
Some people knew each other from previous hackathons, while others were complete strangers. It was nice to see people from different backgrounds coming together to work on their ideas.
I remember seeing someone walking around during the initial hours, and I was wondering why they weren’t building.
When I asked, they casually told me that the actual building starts overnight.
And they weren’t entirely wrong.
As the night went on, people started getting into their work. Some were sitting quietly, completely focused on their screens. Some were helping other teams figure things out. A few were power-napping too!
By the crack of dawn, there were still people sitting there, building away.
One thing we made clear at the beginning was that Startup Weekend wasn’t just a competition. We wanted people to learn from each other and build a community of their own. It was nice to see that happening when participants stepped in to help each other whenever someone got stuck.
Beyond just building an MVP
While going through some of the initial submissions, I remember asking myself a few questions.
Why are they building this? Have they researched whether something similar already exists? Who would actually use this?
These weren’t questions about whether the participants were capable of building their ideas. It was more about whether they’d spent enough time thinking about the problem itself.
And this was something I wanted the mentors to challenge during the event.
Throughout the 20 hours, mentors went around speaking to teams about their ideas, the technical approach, and the business side of what they were building.
I noticed that some participants actually started reconsidering their ideas after these conversations.
Some realised that what they were building might not be something customers would pay for. Others realised that the same problem could probably be solved in a much simpler way. A few even wanted to pivot.
I found that quite interesting.
Because I think it’s easy to get attached to an idea, especially when you’ve already started building it. Having someone question your assumptions can make you look at the same problem very differently.
The final demos brought out some of these gaps too.
The jury asked questions around technical feasibility, scalability, competition, and the market.
I remember a few participants being asked about their ICP, or ideal customer profile, and some responses were along the lines of, “Everyone is our customer.”
And that’s something I feel a lot of early builders struggle with.
When you think your product can help everyone, it’s easy to overlook who actually needs it first.
Even questions around competition made some teams think about things they hadn’t considered before.
These are things you learn when you start talking to customers, selling a product, or working with people who’ve already done it.
And I feel young builders need more opportunities to have these conversations.
What I took away
By the end of the event, we had a submission rate of around 95%, which was something we were really happy about.
But what surprised me the most was that people actually turned up.
I know we’d been working towards getting registrations and bringing people into the room, but seeing students, professionals, and founders spend their Friday and Saturday building something was encouraging.
It reinforced something I’d believed for a while.
Keralam has people who genuinely want to build. There’s a strong technical community here, and organisations like TinkerHub have done a lot to make building accessible to more people.
But I also think there’s room for us to do more on the startup side of things.
Building an MVP is one part of the journey. Understanding the market, finding customers, figuring out distribution, and eventually making revenue are all things that need just as much attention.
And I don’t think every builder needs to become a founder. But for those who want to take that path, there should be more opportunities to learn what it actually takes.
For me, Startup Weekend was a small signal that there’s an appetite for this in Keralam.
I’d want to build AIBoomi Startup Weekend to help build on that and become a launchpad for more people to take their ideas beyond the MVP stage, find their first customers, and start building businesses.
The people who made it happen
There’s a long list of people who helped make our first Startup Weekend in Keralam happen.
First, a huge thank you to my AIBoomi team, Sehar, Keerthi, Avinash, Georgie, Varun, Ashiya, PC, and Sulochana for being available throughout, helping me think through things, and stepping in whenever I needed support.
To KSUM, thank you for hosting us and supporting the event. A special thanks to Tom and Nasif for helping coordinate everything on the administrative side, and for making things easier for us on the ground.
To the TinkerHub team, especially Mehar, Kurian, and Nandana, thank you for being so receptive to the idea and helping us get it out to the right people.
Anisha, thank you for helping me connect with vendors and coordinating so many things with me.
Keshav, for helping us curate the right crowd and showing up on the ground despite your busy schedule.
Matthew, for stepping up wherever needed, from mentoring students to emceeing and coordinating things during the event.
SR, for coming all the way from Goa to help us out.
And Sumeeti and Savio, for going beyond mentoring and helping out wherever needed.
A big thank you to mentors Adarsh Divakaran, Jyothis KS, Matthew John, Michael Mathews, Nasif NM, Rustum Usman, Savio Victor, and Sumeeti Lalwani for spending time with the teams, questioning their ideas, and sharing their experiences.
To our jury members: Aadith Ramesh, Abhijith Neil Abraham, Mariyam Vidhu Vijayan, Nikhil Dharman, Srijith Santhosh, Vineeth Rajagopal, thank you for taking the time to see the demos and give the participants feedback on what they’d built.
A big thank you to OpenAI, Neysa, and SerpAPI for coming on board as partners and supporting the 5th edition of AIBoomi Startup Weekend in Kochi. Really appreciate you being part of this!
And of course, to everyone who showed up, stayed through the night, and built something, thank you for making this happen.
Here’s to more builders, more ideas being challenged, and more startups coming out of Keralam.
നിങ്ങളുടെ ഉള്ളിലെ തീ കാത്തുസൂക്ഷിക്കൂ… ആരും നിങ്ങളുടെ വെളിച്ചം കെടുത്തരുത് !
[English Translation: “Protect the fire inside you… Let no one extinguish your light!]
