• By Imran
• on Dec, 8 2009
• in General

Last weekend I was fortunate enough to attend Startup Weekend Boston at the Microsoft NERD building in Cambridge. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the idea of a Startup Weekend, it’s pretty well described on the official site. Essentially, the idea of the weekend is to network, pitch ideas, establish teams, and build a company in 54 hours. On paper, it seems like a daunting concept, but everyone at the event was ready to rise to the challenge and hit the ground running. This is by no means a complete account of the event’s proceedings, for further reading I’d highly recommend taking a look at Scott Kirsner’s post on Boston.com

Friday

The event began with a few hours of networking greased by copious amounts of alcohol (which I did not partake in) and pizza (which I also did not partake in, as I knew I’d be eating horribly for the rest of the weekend anyway). I got to meet a lot of cool people, and from a personal perspective it really felt like I had a really easy time talking to everyone at the event. One of the networking issues that I still have to work on is being able to “work the room” better without rudely disengaging from conversations (to anyone I talked to, don’t take this as an insult, I just wanted to get to know as many people as possible. I had one horrible wrinkle though – I didn’t get my business cards to come in on time before the event, so I was left with nothing when people offered to trade cards with me (can we just get to the government implanted identify chips so I can just scan people I meet with my keychain?) Oh, and before I go any further, let me just say that every time I see the Microsoft NERD facility I am more and more impressed, that is an awesome event venue and I hope that more people choose to use that venue for any tech events here in Boston.

Once the networking subsided, we went through the pitches. We had more than two dozen ideas come through during the course of the evening and without going into any particulars I will say that there are a lot of smart people near Boston. One problem became pretty evident though – many of these smart people don’t have the oral communication skills to present their ideas effectively. This idea is further evidenced by the fact that by the time the pitches were wrapped up and voted – the pitch that ended up winning was the one that arguably had the best presentation. The presenters couldn’t rely on powerpoint or flashy visuals (they weren’t allowed during the pitch process), so the recognition went to the pitchman with the most charisma. His charisma worked, as I joined his team (along with 6 others!). The idea was simple: create a web comic aggregator that gave comic consumers a streamlined way to view their webcomics without having to navigate RSS feeds or bookmarks as well as provide authors with tools to monetize and analyze their comics. We had a big team, we had a big idea, and we had the youngest person at the weekend (a 15 year old code cruncher named Bruce). Now all that was left was execution.

Saturday

The first day of development started off with some breakfast graciously provided by the startup weekend crew. Bagels, donuts, and coffee – not my usual choice for meals, but I went for it anyway. In retrospect, my diet was probably one of the reasons why I found myself crashing into a sugar/calorie coma towards the middle of the day.  We began by having a scrum, something that I was exposed to while at gamerDNA, but never really got into a real one until Saturday (I’m a self proclaimed business development person, so I still need to work on my development skills). We spent over an hour pitching ideas – no idea was too small or too large, and we filled both sides of a whiteboard with our brain dump. After the dump, we discussed each idea point by point until we decided on a solution that we could complete in 48 hours. One thing I noticed right off the bat, however, was that our startup was missing the all important answer to the question on the minds of every investor: “How do we make money from this?” For now, we just resigned to “banner ads”, with future opportunities for affiliate marketing with comic authors and user currency options for supporting comic authors. One thing I noticed more than anything was that in this idea trimming process each of us became aligned with the vision of the product – we wanted to create a webcomic viewer that put the authors first.

We had a large team, so we split into three: a development/backend group, a marketing/business group, and a product management/front end group. I of course was in the marketing group paired with a social media veteran who was already making wordpress, twitter, and facebook accounts as soon as he booted up his machine. I spent my team working on a strategy for rapid user growth (since our revenue was dependant on it) and also tried to figure out the best way to get authors to allow us to let them bring in content. We all got to work on our individual tasks, while our team leader walked between teams doing regular checkups and acted as a “voice of the vision”, ensuring that whatever we were working on aligned with the vision of the company. Throughout the day, we had visitors from the tech industry walk around and provide us with advice, including legal teams and new media marketing expert Justin Levy.

By the end of the night, we were all getting tired, but we had agreed on a focus for the weekend – the first iteration of our site would be something similar to “hot or not” but for web comics. This would allow readers to read their favorite comics or discover new web comics while also engaging with the authors through voting on their favorite strips or series. Our team leader was also a front-end developer, so he took on the task of building the front end while the rest of us trudged home and went to bed.

Sunday

Fueled up with another round of bagels and donuts, we got to work on producing the prototype website while also focusing on the presentation that we would be making 9 hours later. Throughout the day I noticed that many teams were really hitting their stride, it wasn’t uncommon for me to walk by a laptop screen and see a great looking logo, some awesome concept slides, or even fully functioning prototypes. The social strategy was also in full swing, as my twitter feed became clogged with product announcements and hubris (nothing is wrong with this, evangelizing your product is necessary).

We were all getting pretty tired, and we could tell that we were also starting to get on each other’s nerves. It became increasingly difficult to focus but at this point we all knew that if we didn’t get things out the door today, we’d be throwing away a valuable opportunity.

Our presentation strategy was unique – I think the best way for me to describe it would be to call it the “Steve Jobs” approach. We would put our team leader on stage and pair him with extremely simple graphics. The goal was to sell the audience on our idea through putting our CPE (chief product evangelist, I just made this up) in front of the audience. This person was our team leader. After sitting through some fantastic presentations from the likes of ReleaseQ, Motini, iZaazu, and doodlebugging, our leader got to the front and delivered the presentation. Unfortunately, the lack of sleep and unique presentation strategy hit us and the jokes that we thought were funny when we wrote them didn’t quite hit the audience in the way we wanted. Regardless, our team leader was as charismatic as ever and was able to brush off some probing questions from our audience.

We didn’t end up winning (that honor went to the fine folks at doodlebugging), but I can say I came home happy. I had been bitten by the startup bug, and the connections that I made will serve me for years to come I’m sure.

Thanks to everyone who made startup weekend a great time, and I look forward to seeing all of you in 6 months!