Dull thoughts in a sharp world.

I participated in StartupWeekend this past weekend, which is a three day event.

Here’s the basics:

Day 1: Pitch ideas/form a team

Day 2:  Wireframes, product road map

Day 2.5: Coding!  2.5 because it happens late at night.

Day 3: More coding!

Day 3 at 7 PM: Launch

With the goal in mind to launch a product (from inception of idea to working beta) in 50 hours, the work environment can get pretty intense. But that isn’t the point of StartupWeekend.  Both Tyler Willis and Andrew Hyde prefaced that the first goal of StartupWeekend is about building a community, not a product.  I didn’t realize this till Day 3 at 7 pm.  Here my recollection of the events.

Day 1: Jesus, you think you can finish that in 8 hours?

I arrived to the Microsoft offices around 7 pm, hungry and a bit weary from all the drinking events from Web 2.0.  However, the energy of the crowd was incredible.  The chatter was high, brainstorming had already begun, familiar faces were in the crowd, and the usual suspects were up to their old tricks (You know I’m talking about you Larry).

5 venture capital firms (including Dave McClure) gave their quick 1,2,3 of what they thought a great pitch entailed, and open mic night began.  Random entrepreneurs stood up and gave a 30 second pitch of an idea.

After the pitches, it was much like a typical unconference, with self-organizing groups forming around an idea or problem.  I wondered around for a while, talking to pretty much every group.  Nothing at this point resonated with me.  As a generalist/designer, I had some strange requirements:

1)  I inherently understood the problem.

2)  We had a clear solution/differentiator.  (You only have 50 hours, vetting time limited).

3)  It was launchable by Sunday at 7 pm.

Putting my hindsight glasses on, I should have added:

1)  Really fun, easy going team

2)  Small group

A smart fellow (yes, I used the word fellow) name of Matt walked up and pitched me on the idea of a URL shortening analytics company.  Though I had no experience outside of using Bit.ly for Twitter, I sensed he was passionate about the problem and we chatted.  I floated around for another hour or so, met with some other great people, and ended up reconnect with Matt’s group.  We decided to set the analytics for Bit.ly idea as starting point.

After getting home around 1:30 am, I drunkenly did some due diligence on other url shorteners with analytics.  Of course simply Googling URL analytics returned cli.gs, the exact idea.  I sent out a couple of emails, one with the following text:

Day 2:  What the hell are you talking about?

Arrived around 9:30 am, immediate went into a conference room and vetted the multiple links idea for the next 3 hours.  At 1 pm, we had the below board with all of our input and ideas mapped out.

All the team members had great insight, and for that matter, backgrounds that were relevant to the project.  Each personal contributed equally to the idea.  That may have been some of the problem… we were getting into feature creep.  Typical of most startups, but I didn’t realize that it happens to all.  Luckily, we were fairly proficient at prioritizing the list, we divided tasks, and got to coding/designing.

Lesson 1: Don’t get into feature creep.  (Esp. if you only have 28 hours)

After a couple iteration of wireframes, our team got together and ended up with this mockup.

We still needed decide on a name.  Options were, poo.ph, ree.ph, dwar.ph, and hubb.it.  I wanted one of the first three, and I was adamant.  At first, I thought poo.ph was God’s gift to URL’s.  Then, changed my mind to dwar.ph. In the end, we choose hubb.it, Which was a great decision, and I really like that name.  I should have trusted their judgement on the name.

Lesson 2:  You have to trust your partners.

Day 3: Holy shit!  We only have 3 hours left?

Day 3 came fast, with a wide variety of items to still be completed on our list.

We basically just worked from the time we got there till 7 pm, either coding, designing, or creating the powerpoint.  A couple of disagreements here and there, but overall was a great day.   Our three presenters completed rocked it and I think the problem we were trying to solve resonated with the crowd.  Dave McClure even twittered about it (Okay, fine, he twittered about all the presentations).

The struggles of a startup are compounded into hours as oppose to months, so disputes will always arise.  We argued about the design, features, and even the slides in the presentation.  In the end, none of that mattered.  We felt a part of a team that was able to accomplish so much in so little time.  We felt a part of the startupweekend culture that created such high energy and smart people collaborating around a single goal.  We felt a part of a larger community of startup entrepreneurs, experiencing the same difficulties, pains, and passions.

I should have listened to the sermons of Tyler and Andrew.  And they were spot-on.  In the end, it was all about the relationships and community that was built. (Oh, and Hubb.me is for sale for $1 million)

Thanks to my team for being such a great group to work with!