Developers, Startup Founders, Students and Startup Enthusiasts gathered at the Blue Island Hotels, on Saturday September 16th for #StartupSouth3 Pre-Conference – the Enugu edition

The event started with a speech by Uche Anichie – Convener of #StartupSouth – who explained that #StartupSouth is a project with a goal to connect, expose and attract investment to Startups operating within the South-South and South-East states and urged participants to come together and collaborate for sustenance. He also encouraged stakeholders to do all within their power to take advantage of the opportunities #StartupSouth3 (holding in Aba on November 9, 2017) will present. He explained that it was the need to have a very strong and quality Startup representation during the Pitch segment of #StartupSouth3 that informed the decision to have Pre-Conferences in five cities before the main event on November 9.

Furthermore, he stated that efforts have been made to attract investors to the conference and enumerated what they are looking for as teams with exceptional ideas in a big or emerging market, strong domain knowledge/experience and Doers. He urged them not be content with just having ideas but to put in work – exhausting their available options – in moving the ideas forward. Noting that it’s only then that investors will be interested.

The panel discussion featured founders and developers from within and outside the state including Victor Anuebunwa (Developer and Co-Founder, Radaa.com), Chigozie Ezeugwu (CEO, Co-Founder at Radaa.com), Edoga Chukwudi(CEO, Digital Dreams), Pascal Okeke (CEO, BigCode and Convener, StartupAnambra), Tochi (Tboy) Gabriel (Lead Organiser, GDG Enugu) and Martins Ifeanyi (Enugu Based Financial Analyst). The Panelists identified the strong need for community and established the need for senior technical people to mentor younger founders and techies. They also listed ways Startups can benefit from #StartupSouth3 (The Made in Aba edition) to include – solving for logistics, power and access. To demonstrate their resolve to build a community, a Whatsapp group was created immediately to ease communication and over one hundred and fifty people are already in the group.

The Pre-Conference also featured a pitch from the Weeklong Hackathon by GDG Enugu (sponsored by Digital Dreams) and Demo from Roar Nigeria Startups. The winner of the Hackathon was team xcropay – an escrow payment service for ecommerce. The Roar Nigeria Startups that demoed their products are TrillzApp – a location/event discovery app, Paymiso – a cryptocurrency escrow payment services for ecommerce and peer-to-peer exchanges and Alphotazi Farms – a modular cassava processing system.

The Pre-Conference continues in Uyo (September 19th), Owerri (September 22nd), Asaba (September 28th) and Port Harcourt (October 6th).

If you are around any of these cities, you can register here (https://goo.gl/R33tfB).