Startup Weekend Boulder

8:30 meeting

Posted on Jul 08, 2007 @ 09:00 pm in weekend

SMS and email sending and receiving are working (one minor glitch with SMS). Basic UI is in place, but we’re told it won’t be “nit pick perfect” tonight. We’re expecting another working private beta in less than an hour.

There was a great discussion about how the company will move forward. From a show of hands, about 30 folks want to remain active in the company after the weekend. They effectively want to bootstrap it, and keep things rolling by meeting 2-3 times per week and handling email, bug fixes, etc as necessary.

5:30 Meeting

Posted on Jul 08, 2007 @ 05:40 pm in weekend

Working prototype?

Yay!

3 tests sent live, we are rolling.

The flying wombat

Posted on Jul 08, 2007 @ 03:24 pm in photos, weekend

Go ahead, zoom in. You know you want to.

Startup Weekend fans are night owls.

Posted on Jul 08, 2007 @ 12:50 pm in weekend

Visitors to this blog by time of day yesterday. You night owls you.

Then, here’s visitors to vosnap.com by time of day over the last couple of days. Everybody starts playing at 8:00am:

12:30 meeting

Posted on Jul 08, 2007 @ 12:40 pm in weekend

We’re expecting another alpha refresh at 130p here.

Some interesting stats:

Startup Weekend has 4000 unique visitors so far, 1800 on Saturday alone. 100k hits to the web site in total.

Vosnap has 200+ early registrations for launch notification, 1800 unique visitors, and 104 unique referrers to the site.

Lessons Learned

Posted on Jul 08, 2007 @ 11:53 am in weekend

For me yesterday was the day of the excitement (this idea is working!), today is the day of the lesson learned.

Simply put, at the 10:30 meeting I screwed up, big time.

The pressure is on, and if something doesn’t work in such a short period of time, people (like me) start wondering ‘what happens if we don’t launch?’  I jumped the gun with bringing up a backup plan, suggesting a change of a little thing called a ‘platform.’  Huge change, too late, with bad communication with the people that it affected.  Whoops, damn and seriously my fault.  I have talked to all the groups and we are back on the right track.

12 hours until launch and the ‘breakthrough’ hasn’t happened.  It is close, and everything besides one little piece has exceeded my expectations.  We are working on that little piece, and I am excited about a launch.

We now have a solution that is going to work really well.  The devs are doing some amazing work, and I am back to being the happiest guy in the room.

Some great work is going on!  Lesson learned.

The butt of the joke

Posted on Jul 08, 2007 @ 11:18 am in photos, weekend

Completely out of caffeine, Startup Weekend turns to crack.

Why Startup Weekend is more fun than BarCamp

Posted on Jul 08, 2007 @ 08:56 am in weekend

BarCamp is great. I’ve been to 3 or 4 now, in different cities. It self organizes into 3-5 concurrent “sessions” where topics are discussed with like-minded geeks. You get stretched a little technically, and you learn. And of course you network. All good.

But it doesn’t go deep.

There’s nothing to bring people together like working on a project with clear goals. I’ve actually worked with 40 or so new people in two days. I’ve experienced how they think. And not just about the technology. I’ve worked with user experience folks, and learned a ton about how that stuff gets done. I’ve worked with legal to document a company structure in a day, working through the complex issues of having so many founders. I’ve learned a ton about configuration management (the sysadmin sits across the table from me). The same is true of about 5 other topics.

I’m going deep. And I’m doing it in parallel on multiple fronts. I just can’t get that at BarCamp.

Sure, it’s tiring. We’re all working more or less non-stop for 52 hours together. But I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

Middle of the night madness

Posted on Jul 08, 2007 @ 04:59 am in video, weekend

It was getting late on Saturday night (er, um, Sunday morning). The wine was flowing. Somebody was working on a vosnap mockup pertaining to a question unsuitable to blog in “pubic” (and, no, that is not a typo).

So I caught them singing, that early Sunday morning.

All About the Community

Posted on Jul 08, 2007 @ 12:39 am in weekend

I hear that so much. The community, the community, the community.

It is late here at StarupWeekend, and I can feel the energy.  There is some amazing talent here today.

Some points from the day:

• The Boulder tech scene is amazing
• Integration of people that have never worked together worked, really well
• Group grew by leaps and bounds
• Focused on the product
• Feature creep was stopped
• 15 hours of work today, some people are still cranking
• People are creating a company that is built to last far after the weekend is over

We still have a few things to get through tonight, should be a late one.  The live video will start up in the morn at 8 or so.

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