Launch 48 Cardiff - event summary

Back in October 2013, I took part in an event called Launch48 with my good friends Matthew Jones, Nathan Ahmad and Luke Berry.

The aim of the event was simple: Work with strangers that you’ve never met before for 48 hours straight to build a startup that’s going to make millions (umm yeah).

As stressful as the event may sound, it was actually pretty fun. Although the actual time working on stuff was probably about 20 hours when we included going home and eating within the time that we had – this made it even more of a manic weekend.

The idea that I worked on was called WannaBeASpaceman? and was pitched by Amie.

To sum up WannaBeASpaceman in a short sentence:

WannaBeASpaceman is a library of short videos for children who need help to answer the question: "What do you want to be when you grow up?"

After many beers, waters and slices of pizza we came up with a working prototype, a business plan, as well as a pitch of what WannaBeASpaceman was going to be (all in under 48 hours!)

You can see our final result here which is kindly hosted by Heroku.

Unfortunately WannaBeASpaceMan didn’t take off (no pun intended) beyond the Launch48 event to make us all millionaires, but it was still a great weekend.

Wanna be a Spaceman was born out of an original blog post ‘No-one ever told me I could be a spaceman’ - after a lifetime of poor career guidance she vowed to create a curated library of professionally produced videos which would give a realistic insight into a variety of industries. The opportunity to turn an idea into reality didn’t present itself until an event in October 2013. Launch 48 (www.launch48.com/cardiffweekend) brought together an eclectic mix of folk from various industries including web development, marketing, business and education. Over a period of 48 hours, hardly any sleep and a lot of coffee, a team of nine people filmed a load of great people talking about their jobs, built an extensive backend database which allowed people to search the site, designed a beautiful website and got a social media presence. The result was a social enterprise called ‘Wanna be a Spaceman’ - the principle behind the site is not to try and solve every problem that exists in the world of careers advice, but rather to do one thing well. Beautiful, simple & inspiring videos which will help to inspire, direct and give choice to anyone who needs some careers guidance. Search. Watch. Be inspired. Our core values A commitment to inspire and give choice to those who need career guidance. A determination to ensure user privacy by not collecting any identifiable data. A pledge to undertake business practices in an ethical manner and never, ever to be evil.

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