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!
