Redmond Startup Weekend Reunion

I recently attended the Redmond Startup Weekend Reunion in Seattle where the star of the night was Friend Mosaic. Roy Leban handed out our Startup Weekend Friend Mosaic shirts and took pictures. Not sure if those pictures have been posted online yet, but if I find them I’ll post the links here. Roy’s camera, while taking said pictures, identified the faces in the shirts as real faces. It was quite amusing. I learned that it’s difficult to take photos of the LCD screen of a camera. If you look really closely, you can see a thin green box around the face in the shirt on the left in the left photograph.

 

It was really great seeing lots of people again without the pressures of shipping a product by 7pm. The gathering was a much more relaxed atmosphere where everyone had a story or two to share about their SWRedmond projects or other current business endeavors.

Marc showed up (who did not attend the SWRedmond), but Clint, who ran the event, was not present. What’s the deal?

I learned that stories written in online articles about a product don’t necessary result in sales of the product, simply views of the website.

As for my own startup from SWRedmond, Find Common Ground was not ready to go live for this event. I will be spending some time on it this month. There are a few features that need to be implemented before going live. I will definitely blog about it when that happens.

There are two more Startup Weekend events coming up that I plan to attend: Seattle and Corvallis.

Thanks everyone for a great night and a great event.

P.S. Here are the links to my previous posts about SWRedmond:

http://ryankyle.wordpress.com/2009/09/05/startup-weekend-in-review-friday/

http://ryankyle.wordpress.com/2009/09/25/startup-weekend-redmond-in-review-saturday/

Startup Weekend Redmond in Review – Saturday

Check out Startup Weekend if you have not before. There are events going on all around the US and around the world.

This is what the Microsoft Conference Center looked like at 8:30 in the morning. You can see all the white boards and huge notepads on the right. People started pouring in around 9:30am.

Two people showed up out of nowhere to help out Find Common Ground.

First, a woman named Pam came around to my team’s table (where I was sitting alone) and essentially asked to help out. Pam walked me through all the steps of designing a business plan and brainstorming of revenue generation. Pam was incredibly helpful and after 10 minutes we had the outline of a business plan. Shortly thereafter, she left the building. As far as I know, it could have all been a mirage. It was like magic! Thank You Pam!

The second magical person showed up just a few minutes after Pam left. His name was Bruce. Bruce decided to join my team for the duration of the event. He was not able to make it on Friday and wanted to contribute. As luck would have it, Bruce is a developer (and a good one at that). Thank you Bruce for joining the team! Again, like magic!

As my two other team members showed up, we started working out the details of the application, Find Common Ground. We worked in 1 hour agile iterations.

Speakers

There were several speakers provided by Microsoft, including Scott Guthrie and Adam Kinney. Other speakers included Andy Sack. Thank you all who presented and shared your knowledge.

We stayed programming until about 10pm. Another late night.

Startup Weekend in Review – Friday

Last weekend I participated in Startup Weekend in Redmond, WA, hosted by Microsoft BizSpark. See my previous post for a little more info about the event. This post is the first of a mini-series of three about each day of my experiences at Startup Weekend Redmond.

Pitches

Shortly after arriving at the Microsoft Conference Center, I heard about pitches. People would have an opportunity to get up on stage and pitch their idea for a software solution. I figured that I should have one myself. Why not? So just two hours before pitches started, I began brainstorming ideas. I came up with four ideas, but one looked like it could actually be done in a weekend and be useful.

My Pitch

So I actually went up on stage and pitched my idea in front of 200+ people! The problem I wanted to solve was that finding a meeting place and time is cumbersome and requires a lengthy phone call or series of emails. My solution is a website where each user can input their location and time available and it figures out places and times that work for both parties.

Voting

The audience was allowed to start voting before all of the pitches were done. I put all three of my votes into my idea. I got three other votes total from two other people, bringing my total up to 6 votes. That was enough to make it to #14 in the idea rankings. The top 15 were chosen as the startups of the weekend. Yay!

Team building

This was the most difficult aspect of the startup process and the part I was least successful at. Having one of the lowest ranked ideas chosen, people really wanted to be a part of other teams. I had to fight to get people to even consider joining. In the end, I found a team with a relatable idea that was not chosen and got them to join with me. At this point “Meeting Place” was me and two guys from Romania. One was a backend developer and the other had skills in marketing. I have experience with end to end development, which meant that I became the UI guy.

Rest of the Night

Several people went out to a local venue to continue talking. After that, I spent the rest of the night, without sleep, rebuilding my laptop as a VS 2008 development box. VS2008 installed on the ride over (in the back seat) to Microsoft at 8 in the morning. The team had no business plan and no name.

Common Ground Team at Startup Weekend

Hi all,

I’m writing this from Startup Weekend in Redmond, WA. Today is the last day of the event. It has been incredibly exciting. I pitched an idea on the first day, Friday, along with about 35 others. I put all my votes in and a few other people supported it. The idea managed to be in the top 15 (#14), which made it one of the software projects of the weekend.

The idea of Common Ground is to find a mutually acceptable location and time for 2 people to meet. With only a few developers and two days, we are developing a working prototype. We will be presenting later today, in just a few hours. The current url is http://www.findcommonground.biz. Presently parked, it will host our application in the near future. Look for it soon! I have a wonderful team of hard working developers and deep thinkers. I think we are fairing well given that we are one of the smallest teams of the weekend.

I will be posting a series over the next few days documenting my time here at Startup Weekend.

Ryan D. Kyle | Concord Mfg LLC