Bloomington Startup Weekend

If you think about Startup Weekend as the first year of a startup crammed into one weekend then we’re three months into it. While the usability group burns the midnight oil I thought I’d take a minute to describe tonight in some detail.

At 6:30 Andrew Hyde kicked off the weekend with a short presentation. The presentation ended with Andrew instructing us to turn to three people around us and discuss startup ideas for 10 minutes. Next was dinner. We all stood around and ate pizza. This was a good way for everyone to mill around and meet some of the other people we’d be seeing a lot of over the next two days. After dinner is was back to business.

Once everyone was seated again Andrew asked for ten people to give pitches. We ended up with a few more than 10 pitches in the end. It was really interesting to hear the pitches and see how everyone reacted. Getting the audience to laugh was key. After all the pitches were given and everyone had gotten a chance to discuss we broke off into groups based on our chosen roles (Developers, Legal, Business Development, User Experience, etc).

Each group was tasked with picking four of the ideas pitched to nominate. Being part of the developer group we analyzed the complexity of the ideas, discussed platforms and then took a sequence of votes. We ended up with five ideas in the end that we nominated.

It was cool to see how business development evaluated ideas and which ones they chose compared to how developers approached the list of ideas. All of the groups were then pulled back into the main room to vote on the idea list together. This led to a smaller list of ideas that would then be whittled down further throughout the night by subsequent voting. By 9:30 we still had not chosen an idea, which was cutting into the rest of the schedule. It had come down to two ideas. Wife 2.0 which is billed as a service for busy professional women to essentially hire a woman to be their “wife” and run errands they don’t have time to. The other idea was at its heart an events directory site. Andrew pressed the group hard to make a decision and get on with the agenda. After a few minutes of stumping for each idea it was clear that both ideas had a strong following. A final vote proved that the events directory idea had more momentum though and it garnered more votes in the end.
With very little time left we broke back into our groups. Each group has a room designated for their use. The developers promptly found their room and unpacked their gear. A Linux server was setup, laptops spread out and desktops brought in and powered on. It was beginning to look promising.

But tonight would be an early night for developers. Without wire frames from usability we were left to decide on specifics such as what version control software we wanted to use. Subversion and Bazaar were the two up for consideration. Bazaar was voted for over Subversion 4 - 2. Never having used Bazaar I quickly installed it and started checking it out. Bazaar is a distributed system that is different from Subversion. With Subversion users share a central repository. With Bazaar each user manages their own repository. I’m excited to get my hands dirty with it.

With 15 minutes left before we all had to leave our digs at City Hall we took a vote on a list of names, which one of the groups had worked up. There was a good deal of discussion around the names but in the end we didn’t have much time to argue so we took a few votes and came up with a winner.

Then it was time to pack up and head out. Usability was far from done and found a suitable off-site location to finish their work. Tomorrow we get to see what usability came up with.