Beginners Guide To Startup Weekend – This Is Where It All Begins!
Intro
Startup Weekend Spring 2010, just wrapped up and let me tell you, it was an amazing experience and I’m glad that I participated, pitched and presented. I will give you a comprehensive summary so that you know what it’s all about and may even convince some of you to participate in an upcoming Startup Weekend in your area.
What Is Startup Weekend?
Startup Weekend is just a bunch of crazy anybody’s with an entrepreneurial spirit who spend an entire weekend getting in groups and building a working prototype (hopefully) of one of their ideas. It can be anything, but most products are web or mobile phone based software products. Startup Weekend is a roving event, which means that it travels from city to city around the world. So go straight to the source and see when a Startup Weekend event is coming to your town at StartupWeekend.com
The Pitches
Beginning on Friday at 6:00 PM we all gathered at the Startup Weekend location, which this year was at PayPal/eBay headquarters in San Jose. PayPal was kind enough to donate a large conference room, common area and some adjacent smaller areas, which were more than spacious enough for the over 100 participants, sponsors, gawkers and facilitators. After a few presentations from sponsors and guest speakers, participants lined up along the wall and pitches began.
I was third in line, but was promoted to be the first to pitch, which I’m always game for, when numbers two and three didn’t want to go first. I presented my idea for a mobile app that facilitated connections between similar parties in both a fun and playful (flirting) mode, and a more business oriented mode for finding leads at trade shows. I was very satisfied with my pitch and proof of concept as no less than two other groups pitched similar products, and we discussed the possibility of working together after all of the pitches were completed.
There were some great pitches and some great presenters, here’s the complete list of pitches:
1 Winqbaq – my mobile social matching app
2 karaoke mobile
3 English videogame
4 self help tech support
5 carpool search engine
6 stress mgmt bio devices
7 interface to keep CL local
8 Virtual Jukebox – RoqBot
9 Navidate – Dating profile from SMS
10 centralizing SMS Coupons
11 Customize Facebook appearance
12 Shopping new product browse
13 VJ retail feed of what you buy
14 Facebook find new friends *
15 Shopping cart share
16 Immigration one-stop shop
17 Mealmates
18 Group Coordination Marco Polo Tool
19 Micro-task freelance site
20 Craft on demand
21 Local Q & A
22 Connecting Industry Experts
23 Mayorwar.com for 4square *
24 Car maintenance mobile app *
25 ideal Home moving demographic app
26 Data visualization app for SMS
27 Email attachment visualization
28 mobile in-app apps platform
29 SMS by license plates
30 Universal request platform
31 Friends real-time sportscasting
32 CL posting templates
33 Interactive iPad platform 4 books
34 Grocery bar code scanner
35 Meeting people abroad *
36 Green earth phone
37 Puzzle your photos
38 POS mobile app (PayPal)
39 Socially Do Good Ap
40 Real-Time Event Review Website
41 SF Parking Zone Towing Map App
42 SMS need to meet app *
43 Vinterest.com dating validator
44 Shopping for kids experience improvement
45 Outlook for Tweets Organizer
46 Pay4Tweet Twitter WordPress organizer
47 bar code biz card SMS integrator
48 Coupon Groupon
49 helping guys dress
50 Shushme allows tweets to non-followers
*denotes ideas I thought had “legs” and considered working on
The Coupling Phase
The next phase involved an hour or so of connecting with other startup-ers to break up into groups. This involved each “pitcher” standing next to a small paper poster on the wall with their idea on it, as other participants walked around and decided who they were going to work with. In reality, this was just an example of chaos theory, similar to the floor of a stock market exchange, as everyone milled about networking and breaking into groups.
In demand were developers, in particular mobile developers. It was clear that some concessions were going to be necessary to adjust for this. When all the wheeling and dealing was done, our group consisted of two developers PHP/MySQL, a pseudo UI designer and myself, the marketing/UI/developer hybrid.
This phase wrapped up at midnight on Friday as we were “kindly” asked to leave the PayPal compound by security.
The Project: Social Concierge – “Connecting Common Interests And Interesting People At Events Via Mobile Social Media”
We all returned to PayPal on Saturday morning at 9:00 am and were served a slow bleed of waffles cooked by one of the sponsors on one waffle machine. It was a bit slow for the over 100 participants but was welcome nonetheless. This actually gave the event the feeling of a lean startup, so it actually worked quite well.
We worked until midnight on Saturday and returned to PayPal on Sunday morning at 9:00 am again. We were fed meals, which were quite basic but it worked quite well. The one exception was the delicious Indian meal served for dinner on Saturday night. Okay, enough of the details, lets get back to the actual project…
As we wanted to engage with all participants in the group, our project took on a unique and new approach from my initial concept, which was great, since now everyone took ownership of the new idea. We decided on a mobile web app since we did not have the mobile app developers, plus working on a PHP/MySQL driven website would simplify the development process.
Our idea: To develop a mobile optimized web app to simplify the process of meeting people with similar interests around events.
Our product requirements are that the product would be:
- Simple to use
- Portable
- Allow instant communication
- Leverage existing social networks (not require the input of additional user profile information unless desired)
Initially, we wanted this app to integrate user profile and update information from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, but decided that only LinkedIn would provide the most useful information given the context of business event networking. Plus, our research revealed that most people do not provide much information about their interests in the publicly available profile on Facebook. Furthermore, one of our developers spent an entire day battling the LinkedIn API, which meant that we didn’t have time to integrate Facebook or Twitter.
We decided on the working title of “Social Concierge,” since our app would be the interface between social media sites and the user and would leverage this information to recommend other event attendees whom the user should meet.
Another major feature would be a messaging system that would allow users to communicate with each other during the event, while maintaining the privacy of the users by not revealing any email, phone or other contact information.
Working Demo
So here is our “Social Concierge” web app in an iPhone simulator, where it looks the best. Or you can just view our “Social Concierge” LIVE working demo in a regular browser window.
Please feel free to play around with it as we continue to add new features. It works best if you and a friend with similar interests sign in so you can appreciate the interest matching algorithm. Go ahead and login via the LinkedIn gateway with your LinkedIn credentials, then check out your “Matches” to see who you should connect with at the event. When you click on their name, you can see their (LinkedIn) profile, then you can send them a direct message via the web apps messaging feature. As you can see, there are a lot of simple, yet robust features that you can envision expanding into practical and highly usable features on a mobile app platform. For a better understanding, a Use Case is in order.
Use Case – Social Concierge In Action
Bob is an Objective C programmer with expertise in developing games for the iPhone who registers for the “Mobile Phone Developers” event and receives an event registration confirmation email. In order to better prepare for the event, users are encouraged to click on the included “Social Concierge” link contained in the registration confirmation email, which will match their interests contained in their LinkedIn profile against the interests of other attendees at the event. Bob updates his LinkedIn profile with all of his professional and personal interests, which include Objective C, iPhone apps, game development, scuba, etc.
Jerry is an entrepreneur seeking a programmer to develop his iPhone app. Jerry also receives the confirmation email, and updates his LinkedIn profile with his interests, which include Objective C, iPhone apps, games, scuba, vegan, etc.
Just prior to the event, the event sends out an email with the first days schedule of events, as well as a reminder to check-in to Social Concierge. Both Bob and Jerry receive this email and check-in to Social Concierge. After clicking on “Matches” they discover that several people are recommended to them because of similar interests, however, what strikes Jerry most is the fact that Bob matches up with Jerry on so many business interest keywords, as well as the personal interest keyword, scuba. This provides not only a great business match, matching Jerry’s need for an Objective C iPhone game programmer, but also with a great icebreaker since they both share the common personal interest in scuba diving. Jerry sends Bob a private message through the Social Concierge web app messaging interface requesting that they should meet.
Bob and Jerry meet at the event, and then start developing iPhone games together and become “app-illionaires.” Bob ends up marrying Jerry’s sister and the rest is history.
As you can see, they owe all of their business and personal success to Social Concierge!
The Presentations
On Sunday evening, we were asked to stop working at 5 pm and the tables were removed and replace with chairs, returning the room to the initial setup that we had for the pitches on Friday.
We were the second group to present and opted for presenting a live demo of our app in a browser window without any kind of PowerPoint presentation. This was recommended by the Startup Weekend facilitator, and it turned out to work quite well for our group. Everything worked in our demo and we were one of FEW who actually had a working demo finished in time for the presentation. The majority of the groups had some impressive PowerPoint demonstrations, static screen shots and simulated demo’s.
Noteworthy Projects To Look Out For
The most entertaining project by far was “Mayor Wars,” which is a social gaming product built upon the Foursquare platform. To give you a taste of the humor of the group, check out this hilarious picture from their presentations which demonstrates the user’s ability to create their own weapons. The name explains it all, but make sure to check out MayorWars.com and watch the MayorWars presentation for a good laugh.
Eventabulous is a great iPhone app that allows people to instantly see whether an event is worthy for them to attend. By opening the app on your iPhone, you will see a Google Map with event markers and their corresponding thumbs up and thumbs down count.
The overall winner of the event, and winner of the slot at an upcoming pitchfest was Engleasy. Engleasy is a mobile phone app and website that teaches kids how to speak English. The demo included an iPhone displaying a picture of a dog, and asked the user (child) to say what they saw in the picture. It used Google’s voice recognition API on the iPhone to interpret the child’s verbal answer and then displayed whether the child was correct or incorrect, absolutely beautiful. The companion website had a version of Tetris where word blocks fell and the child had to move them so that they would collide with the correct image of the word in the other block. So the word “dog” would need to be moved so that when it hit the other blocks, it was touching the block with the picture of the dog. I agree that this was an impressive, marketable and awesome product. Check out Engleasy’s site, complete with market research.
Conclusion And Next Steps
I will never forget my Startup Weekend experience and have made connections that will last far into the future. I will continue working on the idea that was born out of Startup Weekend with people who were strangers and are now friends and business partners. As for you…
First off, visit StartupWeekend.com to see if a startup weekend is coming to your town or city. But don’t let that stop you if it isn’t, we had visitors to San Jose, CA from Toronto, Hong Kong, England and more.
Next, check out the Twitter #sfbay hashtag stream to see the latest messages, info and just plain good entertainment that happens around Startup Weekend.
And lastly, you don’t need an idea to attend, or even to just visit a Startup Weekend, so get out there and participate or just stop by to check out the fun. Keep an eye out for the next great business that began at Startup Weekend, because it can happen anywhere, any time, and from anyone, even from you and a bunch of strangers.
(Ref: FE4D6S2DN2XT)
