Building a startup in 24 Hours — the #24hrstartup Movement

Creating an opportunity for makers around the world to build something awesome — in 24 hours

Around a month ago, I launched a startup in 24 hours and live streamed the entire event on Twitch. Unexpectedly, I reached #1 on Product Hunt and #1 on Show HN the next day.

Upon noticing this traction, I realized that I had inspired a new group of makers to take my approach to launching, and develop a startup in 24 hours.

After collaborating with Armin, Melanie and a strong community of dedicated makers, we founded the 24 Hour Startup Challenge — with the intention of helping encourage others to just launch! 🚀

About the event

The 24 Hour Startup Challenge is simple. Makers can register to the challenge and are given one day to build as great a product as possible (of course with a few breaks in between).

All participants must start from scratch, and live stream the creation of their product from start to finish. In addition, after the event finishes, all startups should be made available to the public with the intention of inspiring other makers to launch their product.

The challenge offers the opportunity to build in the public and helps you develop a community around your product pre-launch. Thanks to our sponsors, we are offering a total of $3000 of prizes to 10 of the most productive and motivated makers in the challenge.

These prizes are being offered to help inspire makers to continue with their project after the stream, and allow them to continue building awesome products!

Why are we doing this?

When I built my startup in 24 hours, I had created a community of passionate makers right in front of me, who aspired to have the same approach to launching as me.

We hope to replicate this in the #24hrstartup challenge and develop a community of globally distributed makers who are passionate about making great products. We want to promote the image that everyone is an indie maker at heart, and that whether you are a coder, non-coder, designer, or salesperson, you can still participate. Our participants are covering a diverse range of industries, from techies, to traveling, to food and hospitality.

We also hope to help alleviate the fear of launching and change the way that people pursue product launches. By building out in public, you can get access to invaluable user feedback and insights from people who can improve your product. We want this benefit to be available to everyone, and convey the message that you can build and ship something awesome in 24 hours that other people can use.

Finally, we are passionate about the massive impact that indie makers can have. Indie makers are developing the future of entrepreneurship! We want to spread the word that if you start a tech business, your goal can just be financial independence, not becoming a unicorn.

We want to help promote this image, and in the process assist indie makers in their professional and personal growth!

We are growing, fast!

I started working on the idea with Armin and Melanie less than a week ago and decided to limit the event to 50 participants, with the aim of scaling upwards as traction for the event grew.

However, much to my surprise, over 50 makers signed up within a few hours and it became clear that we were pursuing something that would revolutionize the way people look at product launches.

We then decided to scale up our program to support 100 people due to high demand, but motivated makers continued to sign up and we ended up removing the limit.

Right now we have 500 people registered for the challenge and an insightful Telegram community of users who are collaborating on their products, best practices, and launch tips.

In order to make the program happen, we also decided to onboard a few sponsors who could provide support to participants as well as contribute towards the prize money available at the end. After a lot of hard work, we crafted meaningful sponsorships with some of the largest organizations in the maker community — Remote OK, Baremetrics, and MakerPad to name a few.

Join the #24hrstartup movement

If you are ready to join in on one of the largest lives-treamed startup events in history, you can register here, and find updates on my Twitter.

Be sure to fill out your profile with details regarding yourself and your project and submit it by end of day Friday in order to participate in the challenge.

The challenge begins on November 17th, 2018 at 12:01 am EST.

If you cannot participate but still want to get involved with the event, you can check out our list of participants and offer your assistance during the event! You could even help promote the streams of other makers, or just tune in and watch a variety of people build great products.

This monumental event will represent the best that the maker community has to offer, and should inspire non-makers to come out and build something cool! We hope that you have fun shipping alongside tons of other people, and build something cool in the process!

Thanks to James Gallagher for helping me write this :)