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On Thursday 8 October we ran sidething's first ever event, Growth Night, at Juntos Offices in London. 61 side project and early-stage startup founders came down for an evening of putting the product down and working on how to actually sell it.
Thanks to Lovable, ElevenLabs and Commfy for backing the night, and to Juntos for having us.
200 sign-ups for 60 seats
The event got onto Luma's London list and its Tech list and over 200 people signed up, for a room that fits about 60 comfortably for a night like this. It was a vetted event: I went through every application against LinkedIn, and most of them were really good, so saying no was the worst bit of admin I've done all year.
We squeezed one extra in, so 61 came, mostly side project founders with day jobs. We checked everyone in at reception, handed them a name tag and welcomed them to sidething's first event. The name tags were awesome. Nobody had to do the "sorry, what was your name again" thing, so conversations started a step ahead.
Everyone can make a product now
I opened with something everyone in that room already knows: making a product isn't the hard part any more. You can make something surprisingly good in a weekend. Getting people to care is harder.
The companies moving fastest tend to have the same advantages: founders who understand distribution, people around them who can help, and an absurd ability to use AI to move faster. That's basically why sidething exists: it helps you work out what matters next, gives you people to work alongside, and puts AI agents to work on the boring bits.
Then I speedran through some growth plays. The one people liked most was HubSpot's Website Grader, a free tool that scores your website. HubSpot put it exactly where their buyers already were, so every score turned into a lead.
Lovable gave everyone 100 credits and a month of Pro, and ElevenLabs gave everyone a month of their Creator plan, so nobody was short of tools. The mission for the night: move one thing closer to revenue.
The room
At 19:00 everyone split up. Some went to the content zone to film, the rest took over the sofas and long tables, and within about ten minutes people working on similar ideas had found each other.
The room was full of people actually doing it. Sasha is 14 and already has KidsHustle live on the App Store, where parents post small local jobs and teens nearby do them, and he says it's past 1,100 downloads. Arham, Akbar and Rezwan were working on one app together, Scrolls, which gives you real books one swipe at a time. There was a triathlon training app and someone forecasting where beekeepers should put their hives using satellite data.
Meagan came looking for a developer to help with Saiph, a tool she's working on to help banks catch money laundering and fraud faster. She got her Lovable credits, sat down, and the person next to her was a Lovable developer, so they got going right there at the table. Shortest hiring process in London.
I had a chat with Yiran from Chinese Wine Club London, who wanted to sell more bottles. We ended up on the simplest plan of the night: go into the Chinese restaurants near you, take a mate with you, and ask if they'd stock it. Wafia volunteered to be the mate.
Too many users lol
Everyone got early access to sidething on the night. I'd shipped the release an hour before from the back of an Uber and tested it three times, and then most of the room opened it at once and we hit our compute limit. Too many users lol.
We solved it the old way: I scrambled the team together and we walked round the tables helping people one to one.
The pizza situation
Commfy were feeding everyone, and then we found out that just before our order went in, PizzaExpress had taken a 100-pizza order from someone else. The pizza took ages and only half of it turned up. Ramit from Commfy and the team did some very quick thinking, Domino's covered the rest, but it still turned up too late (sorry, y'all).
Demos
At 21:00 four teams got up and showed what they'd been working on. Massive thanks to our judges.
Ken Ekow founded Scale Story and helps seed to Series A founders turn their traction into a story investors and customers believe.
Harry Soar is head of marketing at Storekit and co-founded Round before that.
They both spent the evening walking the room and talking to founders before sitting through every demo.
Arun and Aschwin went first with Quantum Krump, a dance battle coordinator that takes the chaos of quantum computing and turns it into your next krump move. Best name of the night.
Nicky showed kizuna, which finds friends for your dog. It matches on temperament, so if your dog doesn't get on with big dogs it won't pair you with one, and you meet other dog owners nearby instead of hoping to bump into them on a walk.
The Scrolls team showed it off. It's doomscrolling for books: quotes and passages in a feed, with a leaderboard so you can show off about how much you've read.
Soraya put Plates&Mates on the screen, for booking restaurants and hosting dinners while you make new friends, which felt right on a night held together by pizza. She won best project made with ElevenLabs and three months of ElevenLabs Scale.
Everyone who came is now in the sidething WhatsApp group, so the night didn't quite end at 21:30. The messages kept going afterwards, which was probably the nicest part.
Next time
This was supposed to be our pilot. It ended up being quite a big pilot, and it went better than I hoped. Next time we'll have more structure, a bit more time, a mic so the back of the room can hear me, a proper demo of sidething so everyone knows exactly what it does, and probably a backup pizza place.
If you're running a side project or an early-stage startup in London, come to the next one.
ship your side project.
we turn your scattered to-do list into a roadmap, with the accountability to actually do it.