Maputo Slush’D is the beginning of the Slush’D extravaganza in 2022. With only a handful of core team members, and the community around them, the organizing party, Ideário Hub brought Slush’D to Maputo with a bang!

The event hosted around 50 ecosystem builders with the goal of creating successful startups in Mozambique. With builders such as João Gaspar from Fintech MZ and founders such as Titos Munhequete and Celso Ferreira on stage, the program was valuable to all who joined the event.

The earlier Trondheim Slush’D events set a good tone for what can be achieved, and Maputo Slush’D continued on this note. The participants enjoyed having the Mozambican ecosystem come together, and the discussions on how to build their ecosystem going forward.

Becoming Part of the Slush’D community

All Slush’D organizers become a part of a unique community of active ecosystem builders in the form of Slush’D. The organizer of Maputo Slush’D, Alfredo Cuanda describes his initial vision of the event in the following way:

“When the application process started, I knew this would be the event concept to help us build a bridge between the Mozambican and global startup communities. Mozambique is home to many events that only cater to the local community but lack an international spice.”

The idea of Slush’D is to cater to the local startup ecosystem, and give them a possibility to network and meet with other startups within their community since, in the post-pandemic era, these possibilities have been fairly limited. To the organizer, Slush’D represents an opportunity to build an event for the local community:

“I wanted the community to reach a common idea of what we want to achieve in Maputo. I hope that with Slush’D, the community would see itself as a startup, constantly developing and moving forward. Organizing the event fulfilled my expectations since attendees contributed to the mission of building a better startup ecosystem in Mozambique.”

Although a strike almost led to the event being postponed the team did an amazing job in making the event happen. According to the organizers, the Slush support and having a Handbook and brand to always refer to make the organization process easier. They also noted that being able to work with such a lively brand was extremely valuable and allowed them to spark the interest of others.

The Highs and Lows

Although the Slush brand is a powerful one and allows one to get an easier connection to networks, to the organizer of Maputo Slush’D, one of the more challenging parts of the process still revolved around this aspect:

“Although making the brand our own was relatively simple we still had to create our own narrative around the event. We had to translate the concept so that it was unique to Maputo. However, I think we did a pretty good job at this as the people who joined were extremely excited to be part of this initiative.”

Slush’D offers the organizer access to networks with its reach. In addition to a powerful brand, all organizers are allowed to connect with each other to form meaningful relationships. For Alfredo, it was extremely helpful to have the Slush’D community around him when it came to organizing the event.

Learnings

There are many things that stay in an organizer’s mind after their Slush’D is a wrap. In Maputo, there were a few things that could have been done differently, but overall, the organizer feels that in the time frame given, the event was a successful one.

“The only thing we missed was more time to organize the event. The Mozambican ecosystem moves at a very fast pace, and thus, I would have made the event more focused and smaller from the beginning. Therefore, it was our win that we scaled the event down from around 100 to 50.”

According to Alfredo, every Slush’D organizer must trust the local community and use the help from the community to build the event. All in all, Slush’D impacts every single startup ecosystem in its own way. In Maputo, this showed as lighting a spark in supporting the local startup ecosystem more systematically. This way, the community can make sure that in the future, Maputo will produce startups that can scale internationally.

Slush’D Is Constantly Scaling

The Slush’D year has started with a bang. From the event in Maputo, the next destination for team Slush’D is Dar es Salaam in Tanzania with a completely different theme and bottleneck to solve.

In the meanwhile, we’ll be locking in the Slush’D organizers for the first half of 2023. Since each Slush’D event answers to different needs, every Slush’D event is very different from one another. If you think you have what it takes to host the next Slush’D for your local startup community, make sure to apply here by Aug 7.

Do you want to know more about organizing a Slush’D event in your hometown? Head over here to find more information about Slush’D!

In case any questions pop up, send them over to [email protected].