In case you aren't familiar with it Startup Weekend is an event replicated in hundreds of cities where entrepreneurs, developers, designers and business/marketing experts get together to create a new business in 54 hours. My friend Willis got me to sign up locally, so I drove down to Philly, stayed in the city and dropped in - a little bit of apprehension dropping into unfamiliar territory.
To be brief, people with business ideas pitch to the crowd (about 130) for 60 seconds each (time pressure). These 45+ ideas are voted on and the best 18 were selected by the crowd. Then in a flurry of activity you all try and create teams, filling in the competencies you needed.
I got on a team with Shawn and Mike to work on Shawn's idea for a new iPad web browser, Yagglo. Shawn is a designer, Mike a developer (with 5 weeks iOS experience) and I was supposed to bring the business brains along. What ensued was a deeply invigorating and fascinating weekend. We did planning, Business Model Generation, talked with coaches, interviewed people on the street, did a mock-demo video, tested software for the demo, etc. I spent nights dreaming about the project, we were so deep in it.
Sunday evening came and the 18 teams presented to a panel of judges. 5 minute pitches with 5 minutes for questions. We described our problem, showed the concept, showed the software beta we created and answered some good questions. Pretty intense. There were some awesome ideas:
Seed Invest
Zazzberry
one2many
Credit Cardio
Qrag - laser tag game with your camera phone
Truxi
And in the end - we took 1st place!! Not bad for a weekend.
Shawn gets to move the idea on to other venues- he presented at Switch Philly last night. This is his baby, so he's moving on, I'm just happy to have helped out, met some great people and get to occasionally advise in the future.
More info here.http://philly.startupweekend.org/
And here is our concept demo by the way.
HRP
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