Startup Weekend

This past weekend I was inaugurated into the club that few know about, but that every innovator- or entrepreneur-to-be should want to join.  I experienced a Startup Weekend.

This experience taught me volumes about generating an idea, getting people excited about it, leading a venture team, and communicating value, not to mention practical skills like programming PHP.  Here I recount the weekend as I look back on it.

Friday
On Friday evening, about 70 of us filed into a room in the Purdue Technology Center in Indianapolis.  Hands were shook, introductions were made: About 40% of the room were software developers, 30% marketing manager-types, 20% general manager-types, and a handful were artistically-inclined designers.

Each of us with an idea for a company had 60 seconds to pitch to the masses to attract team members.  I pitched an idea that had struck me two weeks earlier in my Marketing Research class: An SMS-based market research service that would recruit subjects by paying them $0.10 per SMS question that they responded to, and organizations (companies, political campaigns, other market research firms) would pay something like $0.30 per respondent for the service.  The client would get an auto-generated report with the results of their mini-survey within hours, since respondents would generally reply to the SMS immediately, and would get the results for pennies on the dollar compared to other market research methods (Internet, direct mail, phone, etc.).

My idea turned out to be quite popular, and as such there was no trouble forming a team.  The four of us claimed a table in a hallway and set to work figuring out how to get this business started.  It would be hard to find a more diversely-experienced team: a marketing expert with years of experience, a college freshman with self-taught coding skills, an athlete with no technical or management experience per se, but who was excited to be involved in a startup, and me, a trained software developer currently learning this business stuff.

One of our first tasks was the all-important naming of our company.  After recruiting some help in coming up with a tagline ("Text. Earn. Learn." describing the three core components of the idea), we did a massive domain-name-availability search and eventually settled on txtern.com, giving us the name Txtern.  By the end of Friday night we had our domain, a Twitter handle, a Facebook page, and a technical design.  It was smooth sailing!

Saturday
In the morning, after a PR update, we hit the ground running on the technical side.  But it turned out that we ran into a swamp, which led to a wall, which led to a precarious cliffside.  The technology gods were angry with our promising idea, apparently, as we battled with recurring server issues (we changed servers four times), database access issues, and this-is-harder-than-I-thought-it-would-be coding issues.  By 4pm, I was ready to declare this product vaporware and just pitch a PowerPoint on Sunday, and I was irritated when we were all shepherded outside for a forced rock-paper-scissors tournament when I really needed to get that damned Apache Tomcat server installed.

That's right: We were forced into a rock-paper-scissors tournament.  Believe it or not, it turned out to be the saving grace of our day-old company, as it gave us a much-needed break from the grind of constant roadblocks and allowed us to think of a new technology strategy.  It was the best-spent 15 minutes of the entire weekend.

Our new strategy was to build the whole backend in PHP, which, as it happened, neither of us programmers knew.  But since Twilio (our chosen SMS service provider) provided great documentation on usage in PHP, we decided we'd learn it along the way by buddy-programming our way to success.  And it worked: Within an hour, we were adding phone numbers to our database.  Within another hour, we were sending text messages.  And by the end of the night, we could type in a survey question, have it texted to everyone in our database, and record their responses.  Success!

All of this was accompanied by another round of success: An experienced designer and entrepreneur for 30 years decided he wanted to join and help us out.  He provided fabulous ideas, logo designs, and the little "extras" that go a long way in a new business.  I now fully appreciate the value of graphic design in making a new business appear 1) professional, 2) real, and 3) bigger than it actually is.

Sunday
The final day was largely smooth sailing as we integrated the backend technology with the front-end website and designed the visual part of our pitch.  I was so hyped up for the pitch that evening that I found myself pacing around the room and with zero appetite.  But rather than feel nervous, I felt more like I was in a zone, where the business really could provide incredible value to clients, consumers, and investors alike.  I just needed to explain that to the judges.

The pitches began in the early evening, with prospective entrepreneurs condensing their weekend of incredible work into just 3 minutes.  All of the presenters enthusiastically showed off their products, and did it with an essence of fun; there were no overly awkward moments or failed efforts, only head-nods, applause, and laughs.  (Check out all of the businesses here)

We were slotted as the twelfth and final presentation of the evening.  I delivered the pitch and fielded the questions, and I was quite happy with the performance: the website looked great (rather than PowerPoint, we had set up the visuals on our site to display during the pitch) and the judges easily understood the concept and the value to each party.

When the judge's scores rolled in, we found out that we were not going to win Startup Weekend.  Our score was in the middle, which I think was a testament to the great work that teams put together over the intense weekend.  I hope and believe that several of those teams will continue to work on their businesses, and maybe some will ultimately be successful (each Startup Weekend tends to produce at least one or two living businesses).  But the four of us at Txtern decided to chalk this up as a wonderful learning experience, and head back to our jobs and educations.