UnitedStyles road to the finals of TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing

I am writing this post from a plane between Beijing and Shanghai, after spending 2 busy days at TechCrunch Disrupt in Beijing. In terms of speakers and content it was one of the best conferences I ever attended, in my opinion much better than the regular TC Disrupt conferences in San Francisco and New York (there you see the same speakers every year, with several of them merely there because they are famous instead of having tech insights). What made the conference even better was that UnitedStyles was chosen as one of the companies that could participate in the start-up competition, the Startup Battlefield.

We had signed up in early September, spending a lot of time on the application process (incl. making a short video) trying to make it into Disrupt. And as usual when you really want something and put a lot of effort in it, it worked for us as well. 12 days before the start of Disrupt we were informed that we were among the 17 companies that were chosen to present on stage (in total 500 companies had applied, so not a bad result). From that moment on all hell broke lose in the UnitedStyles offices: because TechCrunch only informed all participants so late we assumed we would not be in, and the features we were supposed to launch on stage were not ready yet.

From that moment on the team worked almost every single day until deep in the night, with CTO and co-founder Joop Dorresteijn often not hitting his bed before the sun came up in the morning. It was hard work and it wasn’t always fun with a major deadline, but it really made UnitedStyles into an even better team. This was real team work, all working together to reach the same goal: launching at TechCrunch Disrupt and making a good impression on the judges and audience.

Xander and I also had to work on the presentation, which turned out to be harder than we thought. We only had 6 minutes and had to discuss all elements of our company, vision, business & marketing plan. Plus a live demo on stage – a live demo of something that was not even ready in alpha yet. Stressful days and nights followed, and I felt bad for the team sometimes, especially when the office was still full at midnight on a Saturday night. I seriously think that this kind of work ethos can only be found in China.

We were very fortunate that we had just hired a social media specialist, Lindsay. She had started the day before we heard about our TechCrunch participation and so she could immediately see what makes a start-up different from a multinational or a government organization (Lindsay had among others been an intern to Joe Biden before). While preparing for the presentation we realized it might be better to have a woman on stage to do the live demo, so she could design her own dress in front of the audience. So within 2 weeks of starting to work with us Lindsay ended up on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt!

On Sunday morning the core team (Xander, Joop, Lindsay and myself) was supposed to fly into Beijing, but due to have smog there the airport closed down. Xander, Joop and Lindsay were stuck in their plane at the gate, but Grace and I were taking a later plane and heard about it before we checked in. Because we had to be in Beijing at 4 pm for the tech rehearsal we decided to try our luck with the train. That worked and we took the first available bullet train.

That was a great experience, and I actually like traveling by Chinese fast trains a lot better than by plane. You can get to the station 10 minutes before departure instead of 1-2 hours, there is no hassle with checking in suitcases and all kinds of security measures, and the train ride itself is very comfortable. We booked first class seats and those were perfect. They were similar to first class plane seats and could turn into beds. Another nice thing is the view, you get to see a lot of the Chinese countryside if you travel by train. Because the bullet train tracks are normally about 10 meters above the ground you have an excellent view of rural China.

Service was great, food and drinks were served constantly and you got refills without asking for it. I worked for most of the 4 hour 50 minute trip (by plane it takes a bit less than 2 hours, if no delay), and got a good 3G connection for about 2 hours out of these. There was also wifi on the train, but I could not connect to it. I was in contact with the team in Shanghai over Skype and SMS, and was happy to learn that they eventually managed to leave after a 6 hour delay. We got into Beijing about the same thing as they did, so that worked well.

We then went straight to the TechCrunch Disrupt venue at the China National Convention Center for the tech rehearsal. I had informed the organization by email that we would not be able to make it on time, but luckily we could reschedule to later that afternoon. It was nice to be on stage and talk to the organizers. Then we went to the hotel and worked on our final presentation until late in the night.

On Monday we had our presentation at 3:30 PM, but because the program ran late we only came on stage around 5:30 PM. Xander did the main part of the talk, and that went quite well. The same for Lindsay who did the demo and showed how to design a dress and put a special print on it.

Generally we got a lot of positive feedback from people, both at the conference and online (the conference was streamed live through Tudou and Livestream). Traffic to UnitedStyles.com spiked after the presentation and an article on TechCrunch about us. And we got our first orders after the relaunch as well!

At night we were invited to the VIP dinner at a traditional Beijing restaurant, where we heard that the 5 finalists would be announced later that night. And indeed, around 11 PM we received the message that we made it to the final! That meant we had to do another presentation on Tuesday, so we (again) had some more work to do… The presentation was the next day at 12 PM, and we were lucky to be the first one on stage to present. We changed our presentation a bit, but the main content we left the same. Also this presentation went okay, and then we watched the other finalists present. There were some very polished presentations, but I did not like all of the ideas too much.

Long story short, we did not win the Disrupt cup and a cheque of USD 50,000. That was a pity, but we had not really expected it anyway (but of course we had wanted it!) and we were happy we made it until the real final. At least we knew we were in the top 1% of all participating companies, and that’s a big achievement as well.

It was a special experience to be part of the TC Disrupt Startup Battlefield and I am very happy we could participate. If you’re a startup and have the chance you should try to get it. It gives you a lot of exposure in the media and with VCs, and it’s always good to have a strict deadline to launch your product or new features of your product. Thanks team TechCrunch Beijing for this amazing conference!