Part of any collaborative process is the opportunity to reflect on what just happened and move toward another iteration. We took some time in the afternoon, before our dinner at Opie Taylor’s, to gather and share the strengths and weaknesses we experienced over the three days of Bloomington Startup Weekend.
We began with a small group, a half-dozen founders breaking from their work, and steadily grew to more than two dozen. Originally, the purpose of the gathering was to arrive at a plan to do this again, but so many people participated in the discussion, we barely had time to make one trip around the room.
In two earlier posts, I have attempted to summarize this feedback about the strengths and weaknesses of our experience together. We do this not only to allow the people who participated in our event to discuss the process, but also so future Startup Weekends can use this information to iterate the framework.
Founders past and present are encouraged to comment on these lists so the lessons learned from our experiences can benefit future founders.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Lorraine Ball // Feb 11, 2008 at 1:39 pm
This is more advice for future attendees
Don’t wait to be asked or given permission - jump in if something needs to be done.
Don’t work alone or keep it a secret. If you have jumped in, are working something let lots of people know, you will avoid redundancey, confusion, teritorial issues, and you might find others willing to help.
2 John Wayne // Feb 11, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Strengths:
We had an amazing facility in which to work.
Our combined brain power could not be conquered by any problem. I was amazed at the intellectual prowess of our groups.
We were always feed, by either means of our sponsors, or someone taking the liberty to make orders to local restaurants for everyone.
Having a separate room (and private network) for the development team really really helped, especially once people learned to go through me to get to the development team.
Weaknesses
The building lacked the bandwidth that I desired for network connectivity. Sometimes it was really slow.
The ideas on Friday could have been better organized with a set structure given before hand.
People starting falling away from 7 minute arguments and things sometimes got drawn out.
Overall
The weekend was a smashing success. I personally networked like crazy. I feel the need to do this again, and again. The excitement was very great, even though legal reasons kept us from publicly launching. I love, love, love it!
3 Mike Trotzke // Feb 11, 2008 at 6:49 pm
Key piece of advice to future weekends:
**Don’t combine ideas during the pitch phase.**
We had a number of ideas in the same area. It seemed to make sense to put them together. In the end it caused a number of problems.
1. Political dynamic
Not saying our idea didn’t turn out great, but the combination caused it to win. Voters from multiple voting blocks were combined when the ideas were combined. Many voted on Friday for something that wasn’t what they thought it was.
2. Lack of definition
We spent a lot of Saturday trying to figure out which of the multiple ideas was really the one. We had no single point for clarification, since there were multiple originators who gave the pitch. Evolution of the idea is one thing… but this was actually still picking the idea without the benefit of democracy.
3. Teams working out of sync
Duplication of work across different teams is a somewhat unavoidable problem. But our duplications were more inefficient as teams were working on different core ideas. So marketing was marketing toward one of the ideas, while user experience was designing another. If the person that pitched one of the multiple selected ideas was in your group you went towards that take on the problem.
If you’ve got 3 ideas in the same space and really want to combine them– at least do a run off of the original pitches for clarification.
4 Rick Dietz // Feb 12, 2008 at 5:10 pm
A few thoughts…
1. Project Selection
I agree with Mike Trotzke that the selection process was flawed. The conflation of multiple projects into one was problematic. It should be fairly trivial to set up a digital approval voting or ranked voting system that leads to semi-finals and final voting with re-presentation of winning concepts at each stage until a final project is chosen.
2. Bandwidth
John Wayne mentioned bandwidth; he’s the first to mention that this was a problem (at least to me). Was this isolated to the development room? Or City_Public wifi as well? Let me know about the specifics so we can improve next time.
3. Next Time
I am willing to commit my time and Cityhall to hosting another startup weekend, blitz, tsunami or whatever we want to call it in the next 6 months. I can also bring a 501c3 charity, Humanetrix, on board as a fiscal agent for the event on a continuing basis if that would help: http://humanetrix.org. Humanetrix is a spot-on match as a NFP partner (contingent on board approval).
4. Next Time pt 2
I think we have all learned enough that we can reconstruct the positive aspects of this first effort and make significant improvements as well.
5. Facilities
If anyone had any problems with the facilities in any fashion, please let me know so I can plan to address them.
6. People Power
I am thrilled to know dozens of amazing people that I didn’t know just last week.
7. Pictures
I’ve posted my photos from BSW at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=28624&l=f7d1b&id=713916261
and
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=28635&l=0a84b&id=713916261
That’s it. Thanks for bringing Cityhall to life.
-Rick
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