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.

(This sounds like some sort of exciting, maybe slightly off-color, night club.)

Most of the User Experience (UX) group is at the School of Informatics right now. We’re still establishing the basics behind the business and the needs so we can do some actual interface design.

As I mentioned before, we’re really feeling the stress of tonight. The other groups are all waiting for what we have to say, and that’s exciting! We have a really important role (as do all the other groups, of course)…. but the pressure put on us for that is, well, palpable.

We’ve finally been able to split into groups and put some more ideas on paper (or whiteboard, as it turns out).  As someone with a lot less experience than many other members of the group, I’m really learning a lot and it feels fantastic to be able to share my ideas too.

As we’re going over different experiences that we’ve designed, a lot of our questions are being answered.  I can’t wait to share with the rest of the BSW people tomorrow!

Well, not help, but coffee makers. If you’ve got a coffee maker that you’d be comfortable bringing tomorrow and Sunday, please do. We’ll take good care of them, and, as of right now, we have coffee coming (freshly ground!) from Bloomingfoods.

If you’re willing to loan out your coffee maker for a day or two, please bring it. We’ll take good care of it. And we all know caffeine is IMPORTANT.

UPDATE: Bring your own coffee mug if you can, too.  Thanks!

Andrew has described this weekend as a series of sprints for all of the different groups involved.   As Friday night draws to a close, the User Experience group is definitely sprinting.  The stress level is pretty high, but necessity is the mother of invention, right?

We’re presenting an idea right as I type.  One of the biggest problems we’re facing is trying to find a way to input information without using a standard form.

Brainstorming while waiting on a final few sentence description on what the product will be. In the mean time we are searching domains. Having some good luck…. with some funky names. We are trying to come up with a name by tonight… Event Flock seems to be the leading candidate.

Current list:

EventFlock

Goto see what

Flutter Out

Scoutable

Event Heard

Whatsyourleisure

The dev group started off with getting everyone connected to the server one of our team members brought in and set up. I’m sitting next to it.

We’ve gone around the room and given a short, short description of our skills.

We decided earlier on LAMP (PHP) because there were more PHP people than others.

We’re discussing the server for the public (production) site. We’re going to have to wait and decide that tomorrow. We’ll be using the in-room server for development.

We’ve decided on Bazaar for our version control (this was a slightly haphazard decision, IMO).

I can’t believe 7 people are still watching us on the web cam still. This is the DEV group people.

We’ve just signed our lives away on the Founder’s Form. I’ll update again later once something happens. We’re waiting on wireframes.

We’re also trying to figure out hosting. That’s the big question right now.

Quotes from the night:

• “Does everyone want to just use the root account?”
• “Is this the design group? NO… Ah, I should have known just from looking at you guys”

Hey guys! Raymond here from the Product Management giving the first update from our department of the night.

Each team is trying to define what we will be doing with the project.

Right now I’m hanging out in the programmers room where they are debating what they will do for a server.

At the moment they don’t have a lot of direction as to what to do without an outline from the other groups.

Evan says hello

Event Fandango - Ok, so we won’t be calling it that.   From here on out my updates will be from the PR and marketing team, and other teams if I get bored.  Naming is next and really tough.  Here are a few we really like so.

EventHeard, Event Flock, YourDailyScene,

8:45 The top three are Wife 2.0
Fandango for Events
Greenhouse / Competitive Recycling

The Biz Dev team has looked at competitors for each of the products what is already out there.

Next question are you solving a problem, or creating a problem to solve