Beer and Business go together better pretty well, and here’s what one developer learned from other tech and small business owners from Tampa Bay Startup Week.
This past week was Startup Week here in beautiful Tampa Bay. At Powered Labs, we made it a point to attend as many functions and talks as we could manage to fit in without ignoring our day to day work all together.
As a business though, we help other, often young, companies build the foundations and platforms they need in order to accelerate their sales, marketing and infrastructure. We are continually looking for new and interesting ways to collaborate and utilize new methods and technologies in order to make that happen. We were more than just excited to start talking to other business owners in the community and learn about their struggles, problems and solutions that are all part of the startup life.
This week started for me with an event called the Beer Tech Jam. The people behind the small business incubator called the WaVe in Tampa went around to several breweries and spoke to the individuals running them. They asked what problems they were experiencing that they felt might be overcome through better use of technology. They took down all of the issues and problems and agreed to bring them in front of the Tampa Bay Tech community.
The Beer Tech Jam consisted of about 30 individuals from all areas of the Tampa technology community. Most of us do enjoy beer but had very little knowledge of the actual process and some of the challenges facing large breweries.
We started by sharing all of the issues and problems as a group and tried to boil them down to a few major hurdles they all face. We then broke into several groups to discuss the issues in more detail and to come up with potential solutions for them. These solutions are going to be presented back to the brewers during Tampa Bay Beer Week a month later.
Tampa Bay Startup Week was a great way for us to get out in the community and get an opportunity to think outside the box and find solutions on the spot for other problems we hadn’t considered. All participants were highly encouraged to pursue these ideas further and potentially create a viable business, showing the great potential that Tampa Bay has to offer as our startup community grows into sustainable businesses.
