For this weekend, I was at Startup Weekend Redmond@BizSpark where entrepreneurs who are skilled at programing, business planning, legal advising, etc get together to build a business with working product just over the weekend. My team created an iPhone application “Learn That Name” which helps you remember the face/name of the contact on your LinkedIn account to avoid embarrassment. Although my background is a business development, I end up working primary as a lead web developer. I was just amazed at what came out just over the weekend, and my team won the first place by the vote from the other 14 teams.
I’d like to summarize what I think were the success factors which brought us a honorable mention at the Startup Weekend.
It’s all about a team work
With 16 members, we were the second largest group ever formed in the Startup Weekend. About half of the team were programming while the other half were putting together a business strategy. The key here was to coordinate 16 members who just met for the first time. Here are the steps we took to coordinate the whole team.
1. We first put Eric Koester, who came up with the idea, as a leader of the group since he was a visionary guy (tho he wish he had a programming skill!). We also appointed overall leaders and communication leaders in each of our programming and biz development department.
2. Before the first night was over, I collected everyone’s contact information on excel spread sheet and sent out everyone an email & poll to keep track of their availability by using Doodle.
3. The next morning, we had a meeting to put everyone on the same page. Again, what’s very important was to make sure all 16 members are headed to one goal.
4. To keep ourselves organized, we setup a Google Group (to share files and to have one email address for mailing list) and Dropbox (to share files between people who do similar tasks).
5. We frequently talked each other to make sure who is doing what by when. Everything just flow smoothly from that point.
Get objectives straight
There were many ways we could have developed our application: build web-based application for everyone to have access, build app for facebook audiences as opposed to LinkedIn, develop it on Microsoft stack to be eligible for receiving prize money, to add more fun features. We did none of those because we had a clear objective in mind: to launch a working product for LinkedIn audience in iPhone platform at the end of the competition. It does not satisfy the greater number, but it excites the few for sure, and that’s what we needed exactly.
Do not rely on partner services
Unless the process is automated, I do not recommend you to rely on getting ‘free’ subscription to any sort of services offered through Startup Weekend partners. We had issue getting a free 3 months trial hosting services from one of the partner and we never got it serviced. I decided to just pay $20 to get my teams website up and running.
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