Why
I'm swamped. Work is hoppin. So, why take a whole weekend to attend Startup Weekend Columbus? I usually split my weekend between fun and work. What could possibly convince me to spend a whole weekend working on a project that may go nowhere?
The experience.The experience of creating something from scratch with a random group of folks. Oh, but not any random group of folks! This random group of folks is made up of entrepreneurs and entrepreneur wannabes.All with a variety of skills and backgrounds. How could I pass up that opportunity???
What
Startup Weekend is about throwing a bunch of entrepeneurs and entrepreneur minded folks into a room and seeing what happens. Beginning Friday evening, any attendees who have an idea give a 60 second pitch. Everyone votes. Top vote getters become projects of Startup Weekend. Attendees choose a project to work on, groups split off, and the work begins! (Did you calculate how long the pitching and voting takes? Right, work begins about 9:00 pm on Friday evening.)
My Pitch
I was not planning on pitching an idea. But I had one, so I did. And it got enough votes to become a project! It took about an hour for us to come up with a plan. And it took just a couple more hours for one developer to decide the technical difficulties were too great for the project to be viable. So what did we do? We merged ourselves into another project. That's the Startup Weekend way. Flexibility.
My original pitch - We'd all like to have our preferred username in any social network we join. Thus a need for an app that automatically signed you up for new social networks with your preferred username. My group decided to start with the idea of signing up folks who are not currently using the top social networks by asking for a set of common data and then submitting the signup form for the users. We hit a wall when we determined Twitter and Facbook allowed for data to be pulled but not pushed. End of project.
Your Milton
We then joined a group working on an application for micro businesses to manage sales, projects and finances. It would be super simple (ie, not feature rich) and all 3 parts would be integrated. It was easy for me to see the value of this application. I'm the target audience. We named the project Milton. Why? You sure you really want to know? The answer is in the video. But I must warn you. Throwing a bunch of folks in room and expecting them to develop into a coherent team with defined roles and productive communication is, well, not so realistic. Add into the fact that entrepreneurs tend to be take charge kind of folks. What do you get? A room full of leaders full of opinions they want to express. So, the below video is somewhat painful to watch but at the same time gives a good idea of how progress can be made regardless of the circumstances.
The result? A fabulously well put together idea. Complete with a business plan and screen shots of the to-be-created application. Below are the two pitches from Eric Ralph and Brian Link that led to the original creation of the project and the final presentation by Eric Ralph and Michael Paull.
Thanks to Michael Paull and Jim Canterucci for the above videos.
