Three Startup Weekends

For 3 weekends in a row in May, we participated in 3 intense startup events in San Francisco: Startup Weekend, Podio Hack Day and Lean Startup Machine.  On top of our normal work during the week, we chose to spend these weekends meeting new people, trying out new ideas and hacking code under a tight time constraint.

Our main takeaways were:

• Deadlines lead to focus and urgency.
• Talk to your users before you start to design and code.
• Working on a weekend project is a great way to learn new things and get to know people.

Through these events, we got a chance to put Customer Development (user interviews and surveys) into practice, as well as try out some new technologies (such as SendGrid API, Twilio API, Rails 3, omniauth).  Also we met some very interesting people who we hope to get a chance to work with in the future.

Here are notes on each event:

StartupWeekend is a full weekend event (Friday night to Sunday night), held at locations around the world.  We attended the one at Parisoma in San Francisco.

• Steve Blank spoke at this event about the Durant school of entrepreneurship (versus the Sloan school of management).
• There’s an extensive startup culture in San Francisco, so many of the attendees were veterans of previous StartupWeekends. Of the 100 attendees, it was amazing that 60 people pitched ideas! 
• The process of team formation was fascinating. It was literally a marketplace of ideas, with people holding hand-scrawled signs and shouting out their ideas to the crowds of entrepreneurs. By the end of Friday night, everyone had clumped into teams of 5 to 10 people.  Order out of chaos.
• A team needs to have a good mix of business people (non-technical “hustlers”), designers, and developers.  Also, the team size can’t be too big —  John’s team had a good balance (2 business, 2 designers, 2 developers), but Mei’s team got merged with another team to form a very messy 12 person group.
• It’s important to push back on features so that the project can be completed by Sunday.
• It was very helpful to get feedback from the experienced entrepreneurs who dropped by as mentors.

Note that StartupWeekend Taipei will take place on August 14, 2011!

Podio Hack Day was an extremely well prepared event, with a great gallery-style workspace, full catering, and great prizes.  We used this chance to try out the Twilio API (and Podio API) for the first time, and set up a simple demo of making calls to the user’s Podio contact list.  It was an adrenalin-filled race against time as we rushed to finish a working demo in time for the 6pm presentation.  

More details are on the Twilio blog and Podio blog.

Our thanks go to Podio for such a great event and for the iPad 2!

Lean Startup Machine is also a full weekend event (Friday to Sunday) similar to Startup Weekend.  We attended LSM-SF, held in the Mission District at the Typekit office, which had an awesome view of San Francisco!   

• It started off with interesting talks by Laura Klein, Janice Fraser, Hiten Shah, Patrick Vlaskovits and others, on user testing, lean UX, analytics and customer development.  
• The emphasis of LSM was much more on customer development and “validated learning about users” than on hacking together a working prototype.
• Eoin McMillan proposed an interesting idea to clean up sketches (“doodles”) and we joined him to become part of Team Doodle.
• First, we did user interviews with multiple users and learned that designers were not our target audience.  Then we followed up with a survey that had over 70 responses!  (Note that during the event, we compiled the results by hand… but later found out that Google Forms has the ability to auto-generate charts of survey results.)
• On the technical front, we used this opportunity to use the SendGrid API to parse incoming emails and did image filtering using ImageMagick.
• We developed a prototype app called doodlescan.com, a service where you can email your photos of whiteboards to have them cleaned up using image filtering. 

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John and Mei