On my most recent startup weekend which was in august I had a blast having the opportunity to work with the most talented people around, they got lucky as well by having me as one of the developers ;).
Here some tips and advice to make most of your time during the event, and the end of the day is not about which team is the best, is all about having fun and discovering great people with who you might keep in touch after the event and work together in some other projects.
Day One
On day one we pitched, two of the ideas we had in mind, I did the second idea and my pitch was really bad I have to recognize I need to improve in the pitch area, I got nervous and started wasting time, but at the end we got one of the ideas selected by the people. I did not code that night, I saw some other dev people getting ready for the night as I was packing to go home and have some rest. Next day I woke up early and getting my mind ready for the rush and intensity that needs to make this happen, being this second time I participate in a similar event.
“Our winner idea was a hotel tonight like app but to stay for hours instead of nights”
Startup Toolset
So it began, we needed a landing page a nice one, with our own branding and nice design, so I quickly grabbed the following:
- Bootstrap
- Heroku
- Rails
- DNSimple
- Mailchimp
- Mixpanel
And bam! it took only a couple of hours to get it running, it was sad to see some other people trying to set up some of the tools they provided at the event like a google app engine box which requires a lot of previous reading and understanding, some other trying to set up AWS which by itself takes some time to set up, and all others who used services like wordpress, weebly etc, A couple of minutes later we needed an app so we did a webapp, no too many time to code a native one, no time to lose.
So the other developer which was having a hard time trying to get rails up and running on his machine, he had front end experience so he took care of it and started modifying a bootstrap template and making it look nice on iPhone.
We had everything setup by Saturday afternoon, a nice landing page with a nice little app with the listing and pricing. During that time we got lots of activations and people added to the mailing list around 60, after lunch we started to have questions about if it was real and if it was ready for use, so then we said yes! it’s ready.
Ok shit got real so now we needed a way to start charging for the rooms and setting up the mails with the confirmation and payments. For these I used a personal paypal account linked to the instance we had running on heroku, and it worked just fine. Later on the business people started working on getting more rooms so they got out of the building in other to get more customers.
On the social media department we had a lot of help with someone really savvy on both design and marketing, so she took care of it and it was really funny to have a lot traction using catchy phrases related to rooms by the hour, By Sunday we had everything in place and ready to kick butt in the last presentation.
Big time came and we pitched the product which got a second place, I was absolutely fine with it, it was not fair to have first place just because we got something working really fast, I think the judges were evaluating some other things like business and estimations more than having the product ready to kick butt.
Long story short, this was a nice experience and I think it will be a breeze if you take in consideration the following advice which I hope works for you in a similar situation.
- Know your tools: Don’t focus on scalable at this point, just worry about getting something of the ground and show stuff.
- Let them do their job: key people should be working on their key areas, delegate and split work to the most capable person in the pool.
- Socialize but keep in mind that you must ship: Take breaks to stretch and chat around but don’t waste time having meaningless conversations.
- Get out of the building: this is not a dev related one but it deserves mentioning that thanks to the people who went hunting we got a lot more validation.
- Be DRY: Last but not least don’t repeat yourself, if you have pieces of code of some other projects you can use, go ahead and put in place, It will save you a lot time.