Comuna - A Hackathon Business Idea
After attending Hack the North (Canada’s largest hackathon) in September 2016, I fell in love with the hacker lifestyle and the fact that a team of people could take an idea from inception to usable prototype in only a weekend. One hackathon I attended, enLight’s HACKference, challenged our team to create a viable start-up business that changed the “way we work” in 24 hours.
The Process
We began with a lot of brainstorming around different sorts of work and productivity tools that existed, our goal was to avoid making just another calendar or reminders app. At one point during our brainstorming process, I brought up the work of aspiring professionals and students. I was particularly interested in those customers who want access to high-end (and often expensive) equipment but do not have the capital to purchase it themselves. From here I proposed the idea of an app that would facilitate the renting of high-end consumer products to help those who wanted to work with those tools obtain access to them. From this, Comuna was born.
Com•mon |ˈkämən|
Belonging equally to or shared equally by two or more
Comuna is actually Romanian for common or communal. When we were looking for a name for our product we felt this word had both a sound that we loved and a message that properly represented the product.
After 24 hours of development, Comuna developed into a peer to peer renting service that connected those with desirable products to those that wanted access to them. The business was designed to make money via a small transaction fee and the selling of tiered insurance on products being rented. A renter could choose to buy different levels of insurance to reduce the amount they would pay in the event the item they were renting became damaged.
To prepare for the pitch, I partnered with a fellow teammate to build a rough prototype for what this app might look like. To build this prototype, we decided to try and learn how to use the recently released Adobe application, Experience Design. When we were done we had some mockups and a rough user flow for how a rental might occur.
The Pitch
By the time our prototype and business plan were complete we had about an hour left of the competition to build and rehearse our presentation. This pitch presentation had to include things like the product overview, business plan, target market and market entrance strategy. While it was a hectic hour of pitch writing, we were able to finish with 30 seconds to spare and successfully deliver our pitch to the judges.
If you would like to see our pitch presentation you can check that out here!
I’d like to give a huge shoutout and thank you to my team Lauren, Henry, Christina and Bili for being such a fantastic team to work with. I would also like to thank Alexander Peh from Pay Pal for awarding us the team sportsmanship award during the closing ceremony.
