Last weekend in Boulder, Colorado, a group of about 70 or so entrepeneurs, investors, software developers, Web designers and marketing geniuses, plus at least one massage therapist, got together with an audacious goal: create and launch a new online business in 72 hours.
Conceived by 23-year-old graphic designer Andrew Hyde, Startup Weekend was an experiment in company creation and an attempt to set the land-speed record for entrepreneurialism.
In marathon small-group sessions punctuated by hourly meetings (and 90-second yoga breaks), the flash entrepeneurs winnowed a group of 10 business ideas down to the three and then chose one: VoSnap, an online voting tool that “facilitates group decision making quickly and easily” by allowing boards of directors, business colleagues, knitting clubs to cast votes and share opinions immediately using a laptop computer, a mobile phone, or any other connected device.
Exhausting just to read, the Startup Weekend minute-by-minute blog is a look inside the sausage factory, from the early consensus on the initial group of business ideas, to “Legal has incorporated the company—it’s real now” at 1:50 a.m. on Sunday, to boos and applause from the punch-drunk crowd, to business-building decisions made in minutes instead of weeks.
The launch of VoSnap.com was supposed to happen by midnight Sunday evening; unfortunately at 3 a.m. on Monday, the small core of developers still at their screens “were ready to launch *something*” reports David Cohen, one of the instigators of the weekend, “but were crippled by the timing and the disbanding of the group. Nobody had the right passwords to the production servers, or whatever. It didn’t get done.”
Photo by VoSnap.
CapForge on July 16th, 2007 at 10:49 am
In my analysis, the vosnap idea just isn’t goint ot work. There are way too many scenarios where it won’t have enough information to make a choice that will be compatible with what the people involved will actually want to do. The analysis is from a larger look at “how to tell if your startup idea sucks- in 10 secods or less“.
FranchiseBrief.com on July 16th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
I don’t think the purpose was to create a multi million dollar company overnight but to show that it is doable to create a company rapidly from scratch. I guess you won’t be able to tell if it will work or not until you see the final product anyway…
Jay Hamilton-Roth on July 16th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
What a great challenge! While the business may sink or swim, by actually launching a business (and doing the teamwork to do so) you’ll learn lots more than reading lots of books and articles. Making mistakes is a great path to learning.