The second of our series of entrepreneurs’-eye views of this week’s Entrepreneurs Festival, now in its 4th day, comes from Lizzie Hodgson, Founder of CivicBoom. Read on for Lizzie’s thoughts on start-ups, networking and the benefits of coming together to share knowledge and ideas…

Tech City: helping us harness our startup super powers

Here’s something you already know. Being a startup is hard. Indeed, it’s quite possible you’ve been told on numerous occasions that “if it we’re easy everyone would do it” (thanks mum).

But just because it’s sometimes hard, painful and gut-wrenchingly frightening, it doesn’t mean it has to be impossible. We just have to make sure we make the right decisions… Especially when we (most likely) make the wrong ones first. Which is why events like the Entrepreneurs Festival are so utterly critical to people like us.

This week is not only our opportunity to be educated on the hows, whys and wheres of startups – but also to share our tales of woe and to ask questions about how we cope with various situations.

It’s like we’re in a living, breathing startup barometer: Entrepreneurs Festival is our opportunity to measure progress and disasters against each other. The good stuff is great to share, but it’s clear going by the conversations we at Civicboom (@civicboom) have been having with other startups, we also need share the troubles and in turn create openings to help support each other.

And that surely reflects the ethos of Tech City Investment Organisation: create an ecosystem of startups where we feed into each other and thrive off our collective knowledge, experience and insight.

But there’s more. By way of (very) light preparation in writing this piece, I had a quick flick through my notebook. It is peppered with impressive names of people from business, government and technology; every one of them eager to be part of this emerging, but exciting, startup movement that WE are building.

I am thrilled to be returning to Canterbury, my tired brain packed full of advice, leads, ideas and inspiration. My startup battery will have been recharged – even if the bank balance isn’t.

I now understand that we’re all standing on the shoulders of giants. It’s a privilege to be here… so let’s combine our startup super powers, pay it forward and make our mums proud.

About Civicboom:

Civicboom.com (beta) is an audience engagement platform with an open API. They make it easier for content-hungry organisations to ask for and get back rich media content direct from their audience via mobile and web. They’re currently based in Canterbury, Kent, and have an award-winning developer team (Best Developers at Guardian [H]Activate 2011). You can read more about them here.