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This is part 3 (of 3) of my write-up about my experience at Startup Weekend Kathmandu. Part 1 is here and part 2 is here.

This part focuses on my thoughts and feelings after the event.

Monday morning came with a headache… I hadn’t slept much since I was up all night tweeting and Facebooking about our victory the previous night. Although the event wasn’t very well-known or well regarded in Nepal (no media coverage) I felt it was a big accomplishment and was feeling good. So good that I spent another few hours on the computer after getting home and only took a shower around 11pm.

This morning was special not only because we had won, but also because it was Tibetan Lhosar (i.e. Tibetan New Year) and I was scheduled for a lot of temple visits with the family (groan). Head pounding, I quickly ran for the paper and was disappointed to see zero coverage of the event (I’m still not too happy about this – it’s too hard explaining the event to my elderly grandparents, but seeing my photo in the paper would have made their day).

Anyway the day went on as usual and the thoughts of the previous win slipped away from my mind. Life went back to normal, I went to college, ate momos with friends and clicked photos.

It was only later, probably about a week that the team met together again. We gathered and had to talk amongst each other: how committed were we to Parikshya?? We had spoken about this during SWKTM, whether we wanted to go through with the project even if we lost, and it was a unanimous decision. Again here it was a unanimous decision, and we made plans to meet up again.

Parikshya no more (the name, not the team!!)

As of now (a bit more than 2 weeks after SWKTM), all 7 of us are working on the project. There were a few hiccups mainly being our differing schedules and commitments. Our most major hurdle was our project name:

Actually after our victory when we broke for dinner on Sunday, I decided to open op the URL www.parikshya.com and register it when we got an unpleasant surprise – someone else had registered it (it was not in use on Saturday) and had conveniently left their number for us. I called the person and he said that he wanted to “get in touch” and that they wanted to work together.

After the event in our post-event meeting we talked about this and decided we would make our own product instead of working with those that had taken our name (yes the person admitted that he liked the name we were using and had registered it only after seeing our project). No comments about this, we had not registered it and it was our fault; it was our fault to be so naive to think that no one would go ahead and register it before us, especially since we had won – the world of business is ruthless and that was one of the first lessons I learned from SWKTM.

We are starting from scratch, redefining our market and the program code itself and hope to launch this product in the near future.

You can keep up with us via twitter or Facebook for future updates

SWKTM

Like I said before, SWKTM was a great experience and I learned a lot of stuff during the 54+ hours. I met a lot of cool people, got to meet industry leaders and decision makers and also, a free tshirt!! 😀

I can’t wait for the next Startup Weekend!!

:| :D :/

😐 😀 😕

You can comment below or contact me if you have any questions about Parikshya (name to be changed) or the event itself.