Startup Weekend Lessons

Nov 27, 07 in Entrepreneurship, Startups

3 Comments

After Atlanta Startup Weekend I needed some time to recharge.  A nice break from the Internet in general and blogging in particular over a Thanksgiving holiday that I turned into a week's vacation offered me a little time to reflect on the lessons from the undertaking.  As a facilitator more than a task participant I have a unique view of what transpired and the takeaways. Some of them are new, many just reinforced previous experiences with startups.  Here they are.

1.  The Atlanta technology community is strong.  We had over 120 people sign up for the weekend.  We also ended up with several firsts.  Jeff Haynie walked in with a prototype on 8:00am Saturday morning.  Sanjay Parekh and Michael Mealing put a provisional patent together.  On top of those a Google search for the brand name of the service we created returns more results than any other Startup Weekend product. And, most importantly, we launched.

2.  Good ideas are immediately apparent.  When Paul Stamatiou first suggested the idea that became Skribit on the idea wiki, you knew it was a winner.   It made it to the final four (but was rated lowest of the four.)  Once it get that far it took a little lobbying. : )

3.  Quick decisions are needed.  Andrew Hyde has some amazing facilitation skills.  While I was pretty involved in the planning of Atlanta Startup Weekend, one of my biggest worries was how we were going to go from over 20 ideas, down to 1 in less then five hours. Andrew led us through this process masterfully.

4.  Make something that people want and can grow organically. We ended up selecting the Skribit concept for a lot of different reasons.  One of the bigger considerations was that the group felt the application had the highest viral element to it when compared to the other candidates.  Skribit has the ability to grow by itself without a sustained business development or marketing effort.  The early traffic and use numbers support this belief.

5.  Somebody has to be in charge of product.  When Andrew first broke us into groups Erika Brookes mentioned that it seemed odd that there was no product group.  Did that one ever come back to bite us. Business development, marketing, and user experience were all telling dev what to build.  Of course dev had their own ideas as well.

6.  Leaders step up and lead.  Alan Pinstein was the second person that brought up the product lead issue.  Which led to a product development intervention on late Saturday afternoon.  During this meeting, while many of the said groups denied setting product requirements, Jason White stepped up for the first time with a solution on the dev side.  During a user experience meeting about an hour later a marketing person was introducing a new feature.  Lots of folks were indeed setting requirements.  Shortly thereafter Alan became the point person on product requirements and Jason took charge of the development effort. A bit later in the evening I was accused of being leaderish.

7.  Get the product out.  Late on Saturday evening it became pretty obvious that we were not going to launch if we continued down the same path that we had been following.  The Appcelerator team was confident that their platform could pull us out of the weeds. The decision was made to let them have a go at it.  They delivered.  It was amazing to look over Jeff Haynie's shoulder while Alan P was diagramming the product requirements on the white board and then have Jeff bring quickly bring the product to life on his platform.  By the time they left that evening most of the application modules were working independently of each other.

8.  All startups need milestones. Driving back to ATDC early Sunday morning it dawned on me what we had been missing thus far in the weekend.  Milestones.  All startups need them.   We had none.  Quick early huddles with Alan and Jason led to setting milestones of noon for an alpha and 7:00 pm for the first beta.  Not sure we made either, but having the goals made us focus and we reached our ultimate launch goal.

9.  Development has to be in sync with compartmentalized tasks. To get in a position to win we had to take a short cut.  The development team was not in sync Sunday on the product requirements. With the rate of code commits this created a situation where the devs were stomping on each others code.  This caused hours upon hours of rework, some raised voices (including mine) and nearly led to us not getting the product out.

10. Marketing needs to follow product.  Unfortunately the marketing team was not in communication with product development as well as they could have been.  Around 9:00 pm on Sunday they contacted TechCrunch and Guy Kawasaki. They did an amazing job.  Both of them covered us.  Which led to a good deal of traffic.  To a site that had nothing but a logo on it.  No app.  No way to capture email addresses.  A mad scramble ensured to correct the latter.  We had 6,000 unique visitors within one day of launching. If you Google  'skribit' you will find over 72,000 results on a term that did not exist two weeks ago.  No pr is bad pr. 

11.  You have to believe in yourself and your team.  At 11:45 pm Andrew asked if we were going to try and launch by midnight.  After about seven minutes of intense discussion the team decided yes.  Nate Clark frantically scrambled to move the code from the dev to the live server.  We were a launch.  We stayed for about three more hours fixing things as they broke, but we were a launch.

12.  Engage experts. At some point on Sunday, Andrew said something to the effect of "I could have told you this was going to happen" to which I replied "why didn't you?".  "Nobody asked me" he said.  Andrew was and remains the smartest guy in the world about building a startup in a weekend.  We should have been more proactive in reaching out to him.  As all startups should be with their expert friends.

While there were some rumblings here and there, I think in the end Atlanta Startup Weekend was a smashing success.  The only question is how long should we wait before we have the second one?