Archive for November, 2008

Lessons learned at Atlanta Startup Weekend 2

Posted November 10, 2008 * Comments(5)

This post is intended for people who will attend a Startup Weekend event for the first time.

Why attend a Startup Weekend?

  • It’s a better networking event compared to daily events. You’ll cooperate together to achieve a common goal, you’ll suffer together, you’ll have fun together. Overall, you’ll spend more time together, and form stronger connections.
  • If you have acquaintances that you think highly of, but never worked with before, Startup Weekend is the perfect opportunity. You can think of it as a laid-back 54 hour interview for identifying possible startup partners.
  • You’ll meet like-minded people. You’ll have fun. You might even start a company!
What do I need to do before the event?
  • Build an audience for your idea before the event. Think about how you’ll monetize it, and have a concrete product defined (what features you’ll implement during the weekend, how it will work etc.)
  • Set up the infrastructure before the event (buy a domain and hosting, set up code repository and project management site etc.) If you’ll build a web app, have a skeleton app that includes common functionality (authentication at least)
  • Practice your pitch, think about how you’ll convince people in 1 minute
Okay, I get it. What else do I need to know?
If your idea doesn’t work out, then the most important decision you’ll make during Startup Weekend is to choose the right team to work with, because you will be spending most of your time with those people.

So, how do I choose which team to work with?

  • Don’t choose an idea, choose a team: Even the brightest idea will not get far if there isn’t a good team behind it. Make a good compromise between an interesting idea and a good team. Make sure you team has enough back-end & front-end developers, as well as graphic designers if you’re building a web application. 
  • Think twice before joining a large team: (More than 10-15 people) These teams are like large companies, they are not agile. It’s harder to coordinate, reach consensus and make decisions. You’ll also be working on a very small part of the whole, which might not be as exciting.
  • Make sure that others are committed: All participants should share the same vision about the product. If you see people throwing in ideas that will take the product to a different direction, it’s a bad sign. Try to anticipate if people will still want to work on this idea the next day.
  • Hold up to your ideals: There will boring ideas with huge business potential. Unless your only goal is to earn money, don’t be fooled by them. Life is too short to work on boring ideas!

Atlanta Startup Weekend 2

Posted November 10, 2008 * Comments(0)

I spent this weekend participating in Atlanta Startup Weekend 2. If you’re not familiar with Startup Weekend idea, this is a good introduction.

Friday at 7 PM: Ninety random people with different backgrounds (software development, design, marketing, business etc.) gathered in a room to work on ideas that would lead to start-up companies.

Although some people were there to start businesses, my goal was to meet like-minded people, experience this unconventional event and have fun by working on a cool idea.

In the beginning, everybody pitched their ideas for 1 minute, and participants voted to narrow down ideas to 15. Those who made the cut were given 3 minutes for Q&A, and teams started forming.

A few teams disassembled at the end of the first night. Either members didn’t have the necessary skills to realize the project, or they weren’t committed enough to the idea. Friday was spent on discussing details of the ideas, and how they would be implemented. Teams went back home only to come back early the next morning.

Saturday 9 AM: Teams spent the whole day working on their projects. During lunch, there was a talk on intellectual property. Most of the teams had their websites up on Saturday, some were event partially functioning. Some teams stayed till late, while others went back home around midnight.

Fast forward to Sunday 6 PM: 7 teams were ready to present at the end of the weekend. Each team was given 10 minutes to demo and answer questions. I was impressed by twitpay.me (use twitter to make micro-payments, great design) and jumbis.com (one product per day, you get discounts if you agree to post about your purchase on social networking sites like twitter, facebook etc.)

Other projects from ASW2 were fuutprint (digital cards) closebuy.me (local inventory search), givingti.me (give one hour, receive one hour), seedstagerecords (invest in online musicians) and reepli (pr response tool). While some of the teams are selling their weekend projects on Ebay for $2,000, others agreed to continue working on their projects after this weekend. Overall, it was exciting, it was a fun. 

I’ll blog about lessons learned from this event in the next post. Stay tuned!