Yesterday, on September 4th, the Startup Crash Test #2 was held in a former grain mill. Now, this mysterious building is known as Art-Fabrika.
The event was organized by the co-founders of the IT Crowd Kharkiv project, Kate Karaptan and Lena Ruchko. Moderators and mentors were as follows: Vitaliy Fish – an independent consultant, a freelance adviser of the Prime Minister of Israel on the formation of start-ups in Israel
Eugene Shpika – CEO of TopTechPhoto, developing the service Pics.io, a mentor at Karazin Startups, and, for last 10 years – an operation manager in McKesson corporation.
“Unfortunately, startups from the Kharkiv youth are well-known outside the city, but they are completely unknown in Kharkiv itself. At SCT activities in Kharkiv, we have a mission – to form a spread-out, yet unified, start-up community in the city. We are successfully moving in this direction,” said Kate Karaptan. She explained that the SCT is also the chance for the participants to get advice on business models, and feedback on future users: “Therefore, we consider the success of SCT-presenters in the future pitches and adjustments made to their projects. Microsoft recently started supporting the SCT. For example, a startup Swibo received Microsoft’s program BizSpark for free.”
The participants came to surprise the audience and the strict mentors, presenting three projects. The first group presented Rentafont (service for selling fonts), the second – Swibo (web application for the joint organization of sport events), and the last one – Protectimus (service for secure authentication and data protection in different accounts).
The audience of the SCT is growing rapidly. According to the organizers, the past event had 150 people registered, while this one had over 250 people. Any person from the audience had the chance to take the role of mentor, asking the participants of Crash Test some tricky questions. Some guys found partners and associates and had an opportunity to talk with the owners and managers of successful IT-businesses.
You can also learn more about the Startup Crash Test and the IT Crowd Kharkiv projects in our interview with Lena Ruchko.
