The third time’s the charm…
After missing the first two Startup Weekends in Boulder (including the first Startup Weekend *ever*), I was finally able to sneak away for a weekend and join in the fun. (Many thanks to my hubby for braving a mostly solo weekend with our 2 1/2 yr old. She is not a mellow kid!)
If you’re not familiar with Startup Weekend, here’s a quick summary from their site:
Startup Weekend recruits a highly motivated group of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more to a 54 hour event that builds communities, companies and projects.
As with any new adventure, some parts of the weekend met or exceeded my expectations and other parts…meh, not so much. We were especially lucky to have two members of the official Startup Weekend crew visiting us this time and they’ve been very gracious receiving all of the feedback that’s been coming their way. (Thanks, Marc and Clint!)
The good stuff…
Friday night was a blast! We started by going around the room and pitching ideas and/or problems (well, that was where I started. I missed the first hour or so, so maybe I missed some of the intros…) I’d say we started with around 10 things, but over the course of the weekend, that was narrowed down to four or so actual projects — SpotGrab (@spotgrab, a WordPress plugin), Craigswishlist (@craigswishlist, a bookmarklet), a salon-scheduler, and MediaPatcher (@mediapatcher, a self-hostable YouTube/Flickr).
After pitching the projects, we all had some time to wander around the room and brainstorm ideas, eavesdrop on conversations, and generally scope out which projects we wanted to work on. There may be some science in pitching or selecting a project for Startup Weekend, but there’s also a whole lot of art as well – balancing scope, technical requirements, relevance, and sizzle – if you want to actually walk away from the weekend with some sort of working solution.
And then came the beer… My recommendation would have been more beer, earlier. Most of the crew ended up at the Southern Sun Pub after breaking for the night and, wow, after a few hours in an underground, fluorescent-light-lit classroom, it was a welcome change of scenery! It was also a chance to step away from the “work” for awhile and get to know some of the other folks who were participating (and, for some, a chance to re-pitch their ideas and recruit more talent for their cause.)
Most of the teams seemed to be in heads-down mode on Saturday, but midway through the day some of the projects started to fall through (one never was scoped down enough to be managable for a weekend, one discovered that a big company was already well covering that need, etc.) And, in true Startup Weekend style, those folks now without a project (or underutilized on other projects) reformed and started the process all over again. That’s definitely a success.
On Sunday, the teams really took advantage of the existing startup resources in the Boulder community. Many groups started out at The Cup (also home to Boulder Open Coffee Club and host to several cafe-working entrepreneurs), several others found a temporary home at Techstars, and still others spent some time at Slice of Lime, before heading back to CU-Leeds for the grand finale. There’s a definite advantage to having this variety of workable spaces all within a <5 mile radius {note to Startup Weekend folks – one method of sponsorship could be for local businesses to “donate” their space for part of the weekend.}
Oh yeah, did I mention that two projects are actually live, working, and available now (@spotgrab, @craigswishlist) and one more is close to launching (@mediapatcher, I think they’re still working out a few kinks.) Awesome!
The not-so-good stuff…
We had a handful of people who only came for the Friday night pitch – I don’t know if they couldn’t make the rest of the weekend, they didn’t hear a project that was of interest to them, or not enough people were interested in the project they pitched. With the smaller crowd this weekend, we could have used the extra bodies.
Saturday was q-u-i-e-t. I mean, I guess that’s good if you really need quiet time to work, but on that day, I really didn’t feel the community vibe. Groups seemed to be sequestered at their tables and not seeking or receiving interaction, feedback, general conversation, etc. from the other folks that were there. Seems like we wasted some opportunity there and that might have been prevented if we’d had a few more people stirring the pot — “cooks”, “facilitators”, “chatterboxes”, whatever you want to call them, I think they could have kept the energy up and brought a little more fun to the party (or they could have just annoyed people, I don’t know, but shared annoyance is a bonding experience too, isn’t it?)
The resource pool seemed to lean heavily towards the non-technical, biz-dev folks. I’m not quite sure why – if Startup Weekend is more attractive to them, if the developers are just too busy working on other stuff, if the projects weren’t as interesting to the developers… Who knows? Does Startup Weekend still work if you don’t have a code-heavy project? I think it would, but I don’t know if anyone’s tried that at SW before (guess I’ll have to do some research on that one…)
Generally, communication before the event was, um, sparse. It started to improve over the weekend as the Twitter usernames and #swb09 hashtags started flowing. Having someone collect and publish that info before or early on in the event would have been helpful. I think most folks caught on to the hashtags, but a central(ish) repository for this weekend’s information would have been helpful (and I think we’ve demonstrated that the *current* Startup Weekend website is not the place for this to happen.)
And the verdict is…
I’m grateful to Andrew Hyde for getting this whole thing started, to Marc and Clint for keeping it going (which, if you ask me, sounds a whole lot like herding cats), to the local Boulder community for feeding and sheltering us, and especially to the participants for showing up and pitching in. And, although I wish we’d had more active “hosts”, developers, and beer, the experience was definitely worth it and I’ll be looking forward to Startup Weekend Boulder 4!
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