I attended Startup Weekend in Boulder, Colorado this past weekend and I’d like to encourage everyone and anyone looking to start any kind of company to attend one if they bring the event close to your town.
The format of the weekend is like this: you gather together Friday night, meet awesome people, propose ideas, gather enough support for your idea (in terms of human capital), and then spend the rest of the weekend assembling your idea.
On Friday night there were roughly 100 people in a small lecture classroom on CU’s campus. All of them are smart, motivated, tech-focused people, the kind of people you always hope you get a chance to work with, unless you’re already working for a startup of some kind, in which case, you probably already are. Everyone’s on Twitter and/or Facebook and/or every other social web service. Everyone reads the same people you read or knows someone you should be reading. Everyone knows the same current events on the web you know or knows something you should know. Some of them have flown across the country to attend.
I pitched a few ideas but ultimately decided to work with a small group that wanted to create a poor man’s content failover service for web sites that receive unexpected Digg/Slashdot traffic. We called it Hitsurance. By 11pm Friday night we had our idea, a name registered, and a dedicated server set up with a splash page and email submission form. I went home and crashed with my brain racing away on ideas well into the night. I woke up twice to write some notes. Needless to say, sleep was fitful.
We worked Saturday from 9 to 9 and got about half way there. We had a design, a logo, the basic premise for the demo fleshed out, a blog, SEO research completed, Google Apps for Your Domain acquired, a Twitter account, and some of the backend scripting in place.
All work and no play would be boring, of course, so part of Saturday the attendees spent time socializing, working, eating, and bouncing ideas. We had a short concert from local singer/songwriter Reed Foehl, which was unexpected and strangely appropriate. By the end of Saturday most of us were fried. I went home and crashed but again, didn’t sleep very well.
We returned Sunday and worked from noon to 7, finishing up as much of the demo as we could. We got the service working around 6:30pm with just enough time to eat and do some fine-tuning before the group demo session at 7. Our demo worked as expected and, dare I say it, the site and the signup experience look pretty sharp considering we started from nothing Friday night. As for the future of the service, my co-founders and I are still discussing it. It’s definitely a useful service and a win-win all around. Content producers keep their audiences going and hosting providers stave off potential server crashes, which makes the rest of their customers happy.
You can read about the other groups at the Startup Weekend re-cap. I think the Web2Splash idea is both cool and useful. I’m also interested in seeing the IMDB for Podcasts go forward. It would mesh really well with one of the ideas I proposed. If Jetrecord doesn’t take up all of my time I might contact Andy in the future.
Now how much would you pay?! If the whole experience of building a product over a weekend with good people is not enough, all the groups got to pitch their ideas and chat with Loïc Le Meur, Jeff Pulver, Guy Kawasaki, Eric Litman, and Stowe Boyd, each individually. Where else do you get a guaranteed chance to do that, especially with an idea you just came up with the night before? All for $40?
I had a great time meeting and working with everyone and to boot I got to use a few Perl libraries that I haven’t tried before.
Again, I highly recommend it to anyone thinking about starting their own company, especially one with a web focus. But any type of high tech idea is a good fit for this event.