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I strongly believe pitch competitions are negatively correlated with success because they bias for ideas that are easy to validate which means there’s probably a non-obvious reason it hasn’t been done already.

In this case, OP is working on something in the travel space which is notoriously a startup tarpit because customer acquisition costs end up killing most ideas.

You can’t meaningfully affect frequency of usage via your actions and the vast majority of the audience travels infrequently enough that they forget your tool exists the next time they travel.

Also, if you’re serving outbound, you need to bizdev a meaningful amount of the globe to first gain utility. If you’re serving inbound, the customer acquisition generally only happens late in the user journey and is expensive/time consuming to access.

There are still successes in the travel space but the odds are stacked against you.

I went to a startup weekend maybe 9-10 years ago. It was a lot of fun. I didn't pick the best idea to work on, just the funnest sounding. Ended up with a small team (3 of us total) and we we're one of the only ones to actually have a good demo. I try to do some kind of hackfest every year now.

There is just something magical about working on something fun and pulling an all nighter.

A few weeks ago, I participated in a startup competition in Italy. Over a single weekend, my team had to develop a startup idea, validate it, and pitch it against other teams. In this article, I’ll share our experience and the key lessons that led us to victory

is there a link to the competition results page?