Now that the next Startup Weekend Hong Kong is coming up, I can’t help but do a recap of the last one. The obvious reasons are that it was a great learning experience, crazy fun and the best crash course in startup-isms there is. Anyone coming out of SWHK can attest to this. However, not everyone can walk away with hands-on knowledge on what it takes to have a perfectly balanced team. It’s nothing short of sitting in a Formula 1 car knowing that the machine was meant to be driven to win.

The best part of SWHK #7 was my kick-ass team. I know that sounds like a very cheezeball, sentimental and un-business-like thing to say, but I’ve got the facts the prove it. The facts come in the form of SWHK #7’s Crowd favorite and Execution/Design awards. ;)

Unlike many of the teams doing the hustle at Cocoon that weekend, the business canvas model was a secondary tool to building our startup. We jumped into what we felt actually mattered to people - the journey. Guided by the bright minds of Apogee, Dan and Jo, we found the best way to validate our idea. We let people tell us their stories and experiences with “sifus.” Our prompts were completely open ended and they could tell us anything they wanted - this is where our team hit gold: 98% of the people we talked to had a horror story about dealing (finding, hiring, scheduling and paying) with a sifu. The remaining 2% had parents who were gracious enough to handle the matter.

We collected these stories and analyzed them. We built our product around the patterns we found across the experiences, not the other way around. That’s what created product value for “C Fu” and made it resonate with the general public; we listened to people’s horror stories then provided a solution.

The comedy value from the stories we heard during customer validation were the icing on the cake! We had giggles to last for weeks and that showed through in our pitch which you can see here:

Now this short recap is basically 54 hours condensed into a two-minute read. But I need to stress that because of my brilliant team, all 54 hours of SWHK really were as seamless as it sounds here.

Not one of us played second fiddle in any sense and we all pulled our own weight towards the same goal. Individually, we each knew what we were good at and played to our strengths - which providentially checked all the boxes for a winning (yes, twice) team! But big ups to TofuPay and GranChat, the other big winners at SWHK #7.

Team C Fu didn’t think we could fix every single problem in HK. We only discovered a situation that was generally a painful experience for many people in Hong Kong, ex-pats and locals alike. We set out to solve it, without any intentions on making big revenue, just by making something that could work. Thanks to everyone for all the encouragement to keep working on C Fu. Next steps? Building an ecosystem that works…

Check us out and get on our list at: C-Fu.co