“What if we just take the incubator model and flip it on its head?”
This is the central question that Colton Dillion asked himself when founding Startup Incinerator and exactly what he set out to address during Startup Incinerator’s very first competition last weekend at Northwestern University.
Startup Incinerator is fueled by pitting startup ideas against each other and then weeding out bad ideas each round of the competition. It truly is a sink-or-swim model (especially because most of the weekend’s approximately 40 companies had only come into existence a few days prior).[ibimage==19780==Medium==none==self==ibimage_align-center]
The competition consisted of four rounds judged by various experts from Northwestern’s Farley Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Kellogg School of Management and Segal Design Institute.
License Buddy, a site that tracks progress on requirements for licensed professionals, won the first prize (a package from 99designs, 10 hours of consultation with SquarePlanet and $10,000 in legal counsel from Edwards Wildman, LLP). Second prize went to CycleTracer, a provider of bike locks that use owners’ cell phones as keys.
But even if a company’s idea was eliminated early in the weekend, its team was not. Team members are scooped up into the teams of the winning ideas so that “we keep the talent and narrow down to ideas that actually have a chance,” Dillion said. At least eight of the teams that formed over last weekend, Dillion said, plan to stick together in the future.
Dillion said he likes to think of Startup Incinerator as a cross between Kickstarter (which brings ideas in through social media and vets them against each other) and a traditional startup accelerator (which provides training and resources).
His model actually happens to be Dillion’s thesis project in Northwestern’s Engineering, Design and Innovation program.
Beginning research on the idea with classmate Tyler Hagen in spring 2012, Dillion found that there might be a need for something like Startup Incinerator.
“Fifteen percent of people who go into incubators get second round funding,” Dillion said. “That’s pretty bad, in my opinion. So you’re losing a lot of the talent that you’re training. Kickstarter does a really good job of discovering and vetting ideas, but 60% of tech startups that get funded on Kickstarter aren’t able to deliver on time because they haven’t had the training.”
So, has Startup Incinerator struck the perfect balance?
Competitor Rajiv Murali, a founding member of CrowdKicked, an e-commerce website featuring crowd-funded products, was able to bring in three new members to his team throughout the weekend. But the most valuable aspect of Startup Incinerator, he said, was the judges’ advice.[ibimage==19781==Small==none==self==ibimage_align-right]
“We had really experienced judges to give feedback on your ideas to kick start your project,” Murali said. “Execution is often the biggest challenge and here you have execution advice. They are here to poke holes in your plan. Before, we didn’t know what our idea was worth and now we know that it’s possibly worth $200 million.”
Startup Incinerator received enough positive feedback that Dillion said it will be something he tries to continue and expand to a full 12-week program after he graduates in December.
“If it turns out I’m not full of shit, I would love to do this full time and try and scale this thing,” Dillion said.
Visit Startup Incinerator's website and follow them on Twitter at @strtupinc.
