Less is more
It is easy to get swept up in the feeling that you can change the world in 54 hours. While you certainly can do a lot of good toward starting a real company and building real community in a weekend, your ability to elicit wholesale change is limited. That said, start with small goals. Pitch ideas that can easily be accomplished in the Weekend which do not require constant attention of the founders afterwords. Unless the team agrees that it will be a starting point for a much longer venture, keep it simple. Remember, if your company comes out of the weekend in a working state that founders can show to friends, gauge market interest, and slowly build with limited time and resources, the greater the chance for eventual World-Changing status.
Go to school
This is your chance to use that part of your skill-set that normally is underutilized. Maybe you are a developer that never gets to see what it is like to be in the marketing department. Or your a designer that always takes direction from marketing and feels under appreciated. The Weekend requires that you stretch from your normal role to bridge the gaps between disciplines that may seem foreign to you. Flex those muscles and learn where your strengths lie outside your core competencies.
Be a stranger
When you bring a group of friends with an idea that is chosen, you are likely to work closely with that group on the idea you already had in mind. While the weekend can serve as a focused time to hammer out that project with your friends, working with an established group of friends defeats the purpose of Startup Weekend. Seek to work outside of your comfort zone, on a project that normally would scare you, with a group entirely of new faces. That is the only way you will grow and get the most out of your experience.
One of the important things to realize is that every company is started at Startup Weekend is formed in a vacuum. You start Friday night and have the company developed by Sunday night. That’s great. It works. We have a company. But the piece that is missing is market research. Your group may think you have a great idea, but until you consider how people outside the room will view, understand and use your product, it is really just a first step. Although it is an over used term, Startup Weekend is really ready, fire, aim or launch, relaunch.
My point is that if you want to continue the company and see it become successful, you cannot leave out the marketing component. So, if your group is going to continue with the company, go home Sunday night and just unwind. Then Monday, talk to your family and friends about the experience and the company. Even without asking prodding questions, you will get all kinds of feedback. Have your team each record their friends and families feedback into a wiki. Then as a group, decide what your next step will be. It is too easy when you are in a 54 hour frenzy to overlook an obvious problem or opportunity. Let the company sit in the back of your brain for a few days, get feedback, and then look at it after you’ve recovered for the weekend. My guess is that you may wind up with something different than you had on Sunday night, and it may be more sustainable.
George Junginger and Doug Williams met at RTP Startup Weekend in July and continued their journey to Columbus a week later. If you followed the press that came from RTP, you may remember Doug from this choice bit of CNBC footage where he codes and sings at the same time. Doug blogs at igudo.com and George can be found @georgeju. They continue to work together and expect to participate in many more Startup Weekends in the future.
The following is Part I of another excellent guest post from Doug Williams and George Junginger
After seeing two Weekends in action, we have some insight to share on how to be prepare yourself for a successful Startup Weekend.
Argue with work, not words
It is very easy for so many passionate people to argue and debate endlessly. In fact, it is almost a requisite for any successful founder to be able to successfully argue both sides of a problem to objectively arrive at the best possible solution. But time is so important that it is better to adopt a Ready, Fire, Aim mentality iterating with tangible results. Results here is a loose term referring to a working prototype, sketched interface, written copy — anything that serves as a starting point to concretely move forward. Otherwise, you may be left holding a bag full of your pulled-out hair rather than a startup at the end of the weekend.
Open is better than closed
One of the inarguable goals of the weekend is to build community that lasts long after everyone has returned to their normal lives. To facilitate such growth people have to meet, they need to talk, and most importantly they need to build relationships. This can only happen if people and the facility adopt a commitment to be open. Open space. Open conversations. No one will learn or meet if everything is private, secluded, and discrete. This fosters an environment where each team is as excited about every other team’s projects along with their own. There is a lot to be gained by walking around and being intrigued by someone else’s work.
Leave with full pockets
The company you help create may never generate a single cent of profit. If you’re like all of our co-founders at dealcastr, you may fold almost immediately when confronted with the commitment required to make a startup work. So if I tell you that the weekend won’t lead to a successful exit, and that your dreams of riches are completely unfounded, why do I reference to full pockets? Your pockets should be overflowing with your own business cards on Friday night, and packed with everyone else’s on Sunday night. There is no reason you can’t leave with something equally as valuable as a buyout: a network in your pocket.
Action
Startup Weekend favors the type of person who can be in a leaderless group yet find something to do. There is more work than can be done. Design, development, and marketing may seem obvious. But what about the intangibles such as blogging, planning for after the weekend, starting a wiki to keep communication flowing, managing Twitter accounts, et cetera? You must be a self-starter, confident in your abilities. You must know what you can contribute and make that work for the good of the group.
Media
Everyone loves their name in lights and their picture plastered across the Internet. Even those who don’t enjoy their work (as opposed to themselves) receiving attention and recognition. So the more blogging, Tweeting, video recording, and photography — MEdia [sic] — that is produced during the Weekend the better. Not only does this give people a little extra something to go home with, but it helps foster community and a feeling of permanency to the Weekend’s events. MEdia is one of the major builders of community.
Stay tuned for Part II coming a bit later this week!
Yeah, we had a kumbaya moment. It was brief.
You know that time when you’re on this idea high – fueled by sugar, caffeine, good company? You start almost working synergistically, pushing each other further than the individuals could do themselves. The entire world seems conquerable. And the rest of the drive through West Virginia was how to solve the problems of the world. We both agreed that money brings power, and that power is the ability to affect someone else’s life. I was always taught that one of the great opportunities that money gives you is the ability to create work for people. To be able to provide someone with the dignity of work and to care for their family is something you still cannot buy at Amazon. But it also has the ability to make societal changes. We thought about being President, a Senator, or any elected office and finally decided the pay was too low and it wasn’t nearly as fun as running a business. Very little self-reliance and autonomy in those professions.
Ohio is calling. And to the rest of the world 2am is closing time.
All the way up to Ohio, the folks in Columbus would tweet the RTP Startup Guys to find where we were, when we were going to be in, if we needed help, etc. Now, I need to be brutally honest here – because Summize would bust us on this anyway. It had been a long journey. We had taken a wrong turn out of North Carolina. We knew that we wouldn’t be getting into our hotel until very late. So, we thought we would buy a six pack to take to the room when we finally got to the hotel. Not in Ohio. First we tried one convenience store that locks their beer up at 11pm. They told us to try the next county – Washington, I think. No liquor sales after 1am. So yes, we were disappointed that one of the ideas they didn’t implement at SWC was a change of the liquor laws.
Groundhog Day? No. The ending is better.
We hit Startup Weekend Columbus on Saturday morning and were warmly welcomed by the organizers. And so, we did everything all over again until we got in a car Sunday night to drive back to North Carolina (Doug had a performance review at 10am that morning that he could not miss — sleep or no sleep). Of course, the drive was easy because there were more business ideas, more refinement of current plans based on our experience in Columbus. Was anyone in Columbus working on projects that we were? Absolutely not. But it’s being in the environment, the presence of other ideas, the optimistic enthusiasm of possibilities, that allows you to see things more clearly, to refine, retool, move forward.
Was the journey as important as the destination? My body will tell you, “No, next time take a plane you idiot.” My brain and soul will disagree.
We can now claim, “We found our Business Partners at Startup Weekend.” The questions then stands, “Which weekend are we going to meet each of you? When will you find your next business partner?”
The following is Part I of the first guest post written by George Junginger and Doug Williams about their RTP and Columbus Startup Weekend experience.
Two Weekends - Two Startups - Too Much? Fun.
George Junginger and Doug Williams met at RTP Startup Weekend in July and continued their journey to Columbus a week later. If you followed the press that came from RTP, you may remember Doug from this choice bit of CNBC footage where he codes and sings at the same time. Doug blogs at igudo.com and George can be found @georgeju. They continue to work together and expect to participate in many more Startup Weekends in the future.
This post, the first in an upcoming series, is about the journey from SWRTP (credit) to SWColumbus. There will be a follow up posts comparing the cities, discussing what we learned and more.
After spending (what Startup Weekend claims is a mere, but we know better than that), 54 hours working on a company, we decided to try and do it all over again in Columbus, Ohio, the following weekend. Is Startup Weekend about community? Is it true that the journey is as important as the destination?
Why would you do this?
So, you spend all this time with a group of people – some lacking a few hours sleep, some who have donated brain cells to the great brewing tradition of the Midwest, and some just hitting a wall. Where this would cause a problem in any bar, workplace or church in America, it had absolutely no effect here. And you learned something amazing – that there are people here you could create a company with outside of SW. The stress, the excitement, the manic-depressive nature of starting a business – if you could hang with these folks through this tightly wound weekend, you could probably handle the ups and downs of a business that wasn’t started over three days. It’s kind of like a first date that goes on way too long. You are either going to never want to see that person again, or find out that you have so much in common, you want to go on another date.
Doug and George both chose dealcastr (deadpool) and spent hours working on the project. That day, Saturday, started at 9am. It would end at 4am for George and never end for Doug. At 11pm, Doug and George walked up the street to a bar for about an hour. That’s when they figured out that whether or not dealcastr made it, they could work together and create a couple of companies. After our speed dating session in RTP, the programmer with a marketer’s soul and marketer with understanding of technology needed more. We needed to know if the weekend was a lightning strike or if this was a long term relationship. So, what better way to test our confidence coming out of RTP than to head to another Startup Weekend?
The organizers of Columbus heard and were very excited that we were coming to their fair city. They started referring to us as the “RTP Startup Guys” which made us feel welcome. We tweeted across four states until we got there. They only failed us once, at 1AM, which was more Ohio’s fault than SWC’s (more on that later).
Again, one must ask why.
Why did we want to spend 10 hours in a car? We wanted time to talk ideas. We were jazzed from RTP and excited to get the same charge from Columbus. The time in the car was the bonus that offered us time to flesh out potential ventures we could share. If you don’t come from SW with a profitable venture, at the very least you should have a network. After an intense weekend, we had more intense time in a car, hotel room, another Weekend, not to mention the 10 hour return drive home. With little sleep, hard work, and no time apart - we didn’t kill each other! That’s how you spell Business Partner.
We left North Carolina about 3pm on a Friday. It had been a long day and our main goal was that we would have 8-10 hours to hash out all kinds of business ideas, plans, and what-ifs. We were both looking forward to it but had a challenge to overcome. You know that 3pm slump that hits in most offices? Well, looking at the drive at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, it hit big time. Our solution? Cook Out.
Now our friends outside of the South have probably never heard of this two lane drive-thru restaurant. They have something on their menu for only two months every summer that will have your head spinning faster than a Starbucks espresso. Yes, our ideas for the next few hours were fueled by this high glycemic treat – a watermelon milkshake. It’s exactly what it sounds like, chunks of watermelon, soft serve ice cream whirred in a milk shake blender. They keep whole chunks in the bottom which don’t get blended. And after one of those, it was non-stop idea time, until the sugar crash.
Talk is cheap. And free. Let’s make it pay off.
Any entrepreneur loves talking about their ideas, and we are no exception. This drive was a chance to play both evangelist and devil’s advocate – for your own ideas and someone else’s. And when you are doing that with a person whose insight and opinion you trust, you don’t mind them asking the hard questions, knocking down your assumptions and solutions. That is true partnership, true community.
After we had torn apart and rebuilt four companies, we were in West Virginia. Now anyone who reads People magazine or watches the news, knows that they absolutely must make a stop in West Virginia. Reason? Every Powerball lottery winner seems to come from there. The people in Columbus might be brilliant, but $1 into $140 million? – that’s better than cattle futures. Now West Virginia is a beautiful state to drive through and Starbucks has even discovered that it is part of the United States. Perfect timing as we were crashing from the watermelon milkshakes. Was it a sugar induced hallucination that showed gas was only $3.77 a gallon? George tried a Venti cappuccino, Doug grabbed a Red Bull, and yep, gas was still only $3.77.
Given that it is Monday, it seemed like a good idea to start the week off with another post fromMike Gray’s Code and Management blog about being loved at Startup Weekend. His last guest post revolved around some thoughts for developers and this one is tailored more towards the Startup Weekend audience at any event.
10 Ways To Be Loved At Startup Weekend:
Bring a video projector - want to do pair programming, want to share some thoughts, want to review your slide deck, you need a projector
Bring a power strip - whenever you are working away from the office or home, you can never find enough power outlets, buy a Monster 4 Outlet Mini Power Strip for all of your travels
Bring an ethernet hub and ethernet cables - the WiFi in public facilities is bound to fail, be dog slow, or be completely unavailable, but with this you can setup your own network to share files with team members anyway
Bring a Mac laptop - not to be religious about operating systems, but it just seems to make Internet Connection Sharing dead simple
Bring a broadband wireless access modem - a Verizon Wireless EV-DO USB modem combined with Mac laptops and ethernet hub allowed our group to keep working while others were stuck without an Internet connection
Be the person on the team willing to run to Starbucks to keep your team caffeinated
Know the area, know the closest cafe, know when they close up shop for the night
Be @TheBeerWench, bring the beer, know your beer, only bring the good stuff
Rent an RV for the weekend, pull it up outside Startup Weekend location, let your team members use it for meeting space, but more importantly for down time, naps, and any out of towners that need a place to crash
Have fun, enjoy yourself, be happy - remember this isn’t your day job, you are here to have fun, push yourself, make connections; this weekend will be a lot of work, but it shouldn’t feel like work!
Thanks again to Mike for his thoughts and soon enough we’ll have a great post from our RTP Startup Weekend travel guys about their RTP and Columbus combined travel experience!
The next in our series of guest posts comes from Ted Pin of the Intermz team that managed to get exactly what they needed, and more, from the recent Ann Arbor Startup Weekend. He has a series of posts that cover what it is like bringing an idea to Startup Weekend and below is the fourth installment in the series.
I mentioned Startup Weekend in a couple of posts in this series, but I never really got into the details of how it actually worked for us. I promised an honest, nitty-gritty blog about starting up, so here are the details about how events like Startup Weekend can really change the course of your dream. (And if it sounds like I’m pitching for Startup Weekend in spots, I am. It was just that awesome.)
What is Startup Weekend (from a founder’s viewpoint)?
Their website defines it as “an intense 54 hour event bringing together brilliant tech minds (developers, designers, marketers, ect.) together to create a company (or as many as the community wants) from concept to launch!” Well, from a founder’s standpoint, it ended up being a lot more than that.
Startup Weekend actually began as a kind of “traveling Y-Combinator.” If you’re not familiar with Y-Combinator, they run annual gatherings of startup companies that Y-Combinator fund at a seed level and helps them get going. Y-Combinator then takes a small share of those companies. One of the biggest drawbacks for founders is that Y-Combinator is stationed in CA and not all founders/startup-teams can get out there for a couple of months at a time. In contrast, Startup Weekend holds events in all parts of the country (as determined by vote) and no longer take a financial interest in your company. They gather a group of incredibly generous local volunteers like Laura Fisher who organize and manage the event, which basically gives you a space, an Internet connection, and a bunch of willing people to throw stuff at (and believe me, they will throw stuff back at you, too).
For Intermz.com, it was definitely intense, and it is definitely helping us go from concept to launch. But I want to share with a lot of the other more subtle (and less subtle) benefits that a founder can gain from events like this.
Self-selected crowd This might seem really obvious, but if you are a founder looking to recruit people to get behind your vision, you can waste a lot of time sending emails and trying to convince folks to actually join your team and do work for your idea.
Imagine being able to give your pitch to a room full of people who have already said, just by being there, “I’m here to work. Just convince me your idea is worth working on.” Then it’s simply up to you to give them a good reason. Intermz ended up attracting one of the largest groups at Startup Weekend which had a diversity that is became the major factor in our progress.
Energy, inspiration and momentum
This is the soft stuff that I don’t think gets talked about enough. Don’t discount the soft stuff. Startups are based almost entirely on passion and energy. Why? Because you’re probably not going to have any money in the beginning and the work is going to be really hard–and your statistical chances for success barely register. The only thing that keeps people (including the founder) working on an idea is love for it and how much belief there is in it.
As I see it, entrepreneurship events help ignite and sustain that belief in one most-important way: When you see that other people believe your idea, it makes you, the founder, believe in yourself. That belief translates into apparent commitment, which signals to the team that the people are in place to make it really happen. Before Startup Weekend, I began to have doubts about my idea, which made me doubt myself. But the response Intermz received at the event gave me, and us all, reason to row in the same boat.
Network
So you’re in a room full of other like-minded, enthusiastic people. If you wanted to talk to, get advice from, and get help from like-minded, enthusiastic people, why would you not go to an entrepreneurship event? Always keep in mind that these events are full of self-selected people who are like you. Help them and they will help you.
Opened up
I would wager that how you think you can achieve success before you attend an event like Startup Weekend, and how you think you can achieve success afterward are going be shockingly different. Not only that, I would also wager that after such an event, the plan will be clearer, the goals better defined, and your confidence will go up. (This all assumes of course that you had an idea that attracted enough help.)
You may not enjoy the process of getting your mind opened, but if you’re not uncomfortable, then you’re probably not learning. Engaged people are going to ask the tough questions that help you focus and understand.
Entrepreneurship events make this kind of eye-opening a very good thing because: 1) You’re getting feedback from people who presumably want the idea to succeed (or they wouldn’t be there), and 2) they aren’t you.
Who entrepreneurship events are not for
These events are not for people worried about non-disclosure agreements (NDA) and the like. There is an implicit code at these things that if you come up with an idea, no one will try to rip it–otherwise these events wouldn’t work. If you go to one and expect people will sign your NDA, don’t count on getting people to join your cause.
The reality
To make your web-startup, or any startup for that matter, succeed, you’re going to need people with ideas, passion, and the willingness to work. Without them, you can only go so far. I challenge you to find a better way to recruit more of those people in one place than by attending an entrepreneurship event like Startup Weekend. Go find one and give them a good reason to join you!
Good luck, and go get ‘em.
Thank you to Ted for the great post and we’ll have more on the way later this week!
Everyone, welcome Ray Angel, the new ‘guy behind Startup Weekend.’
I met Ray at the Bloomington Startup Weekend, where he impressed me and quite a few colleges with his energy and love of startup culture. He will now take the lead on Startup Weekend.
You can read his blog here, his twitter here and see his oh so trendy hipster mugshot on the right.
Expect a slew of weekend announcements in the next few weeks.
I will take a step back and advise when needed. It has been an amazing ride, but Startup Weekend was never my true passion, it was an idea that I never expected to blow up and take me to the places it did. I have now met over 2200 early stage startup junkies over the last 16 startup weekends.
The new format is a hit. The same passionate and in depth conversations are happening. Everyone is developing a new startup concept (with the goal of having the idea, model and prototype by the end of the weekend), or are walking around and tasting what a bunch of different startups are like.
Because of this, progress is being made on current startups as well as creating new startups.
Cofounders are meeting. The community is getting stronger. This is the main goal of the weekend, glad to see it working so well.
We have quite a few students tagging along with startup veterans (I wish I could have done this while I was in school!).
Reed Foehl came and played a 3 song acoustic set, and was a huge hit. This is one of the amazing musicians that SMTVmusic.com has provided to the weekend.
Laura and Tara are doing an amazing job with MediaCasters.tv, doing a very interesting experiment of using utterz, ustream, seesmic, blogtv, and twitter to give up to the minute updates and live video coverage of the event. I think they are doing an amazing job, you? Thank you to pulver.tv for sponsoring this aspect of the weekend!
Six people have flown or driven quite a distance to be here (one driving from Indiana)
We were front page news for the two local daily papers. Fun to see a social media geek get something on an old media front page.
The Weekend’s first lifecaster came in and started up some amazing conversation, which built up because there was interaction happening at home (contradicting my dislike of live video). It was very cool seeing the interaction of the at home community.
It looks like there will be 8 substantial projects coming out of the weekend. I will write up a few of them tomorrow, when they launch (oh, no, did I just jinx it?).
About two months ago I was contacted by Harry Brown, requesting that Memphis be added to the list of Startup Weekend location possibilities. Memphis’s community motivated, and launched themselves to the top of the list. Memphis, (a place known for it’s BBQ and tradition, and not necessarily their tech startup talent) has really impressed me in how their community got together.We talked about location, and Harry introduced me to Eric Mathews of Mercury Labs. I have heard great things about what Eric, and others are doing to accelerate the tech development in the area.
The Memphis Startup Weekend will be May 30- June 1 2008.
This might seem really obvious, but if you are a founder looking to recruit people to get behind your vision, you can waste a lot of time sending emails and trying to convince folks to actually join your team and do work for your idea.
Laura
About two months ago I was contacted by Harry Brown, requesting that Memphis be added to the 
