What a great time at Startup Weekend Bellingham this wekend. Now that I have had a chance to catch up on sleep and get back into my normal routine, I figured its a great time to write a summary.
How it all worked, the brief summary:
Friday night we pitched ideas to the group of about 70 people. The pitches were limited to 1 minute. After the pitches were complete teams voted for the best ideas. After the top 12 or 14 ideas were chosen teams were formed. At this point my idea didn’t have enough interest so I joined a team, which I quickly discovered was not a good technology fit for me.
Saturday morning: I resigned from the first team realizing that I didn’t have much to contribute, and joined another team. I would like to thank the 3Dconnect team for welcoming me in late. This team was a perfect technology fit for me. The tea quickly bonded and we start the agile development process to build a company. By noon we had finished 2 sprints, we had a website in place, and we had a really solid plan on where we were going.
Saturday afternoon: we were cruising on developing our product while the 11 other teams were working on projects too. We had a couple of pivots, or shifts in the direction we were going, but since we were using agile development, this didn’t slow us down at all. By then end of the day we had completed 6 sprints, and we had a website that accomplished most of what we were looking for. We also met with several mentors (thanks to all) during the day on Saturday and they helped guide or direction.
Sunday morning we kicked things off early at 7:00, and around 9:30 we had a possible customer, certainly an industry expert in our work space showing us a prosthetic hand that he had build using 3d printers. This really got the team motivated of the things that could be accomplished with our work. We also produced a short video showing off the site on Sunday morning.
Sunday afternoon worked continued on the business plans we built a second video to really show what it is we are doing. The team met with several mentors, and we prepared our overall presentation for the end of the day. We completed 6 more sprints on sunday for a total of 12 sprints over the weekend. The team really picked up the whole scrum sprint cycle and we benefited from it.
Sunday Evening – the presentations each team presented for 5 minutes with 4 minutes of questions and answers with the judges. The judges then went into a room and deliberated for what felt like a long time. After that the judges presented their over all thoughts on each team and the winning teams were announced.
The Teams
In order of the final presentations.
Town Scout: Making riding the bus cool again. Bus schedules on your mobile devices.
First Move: Every date should be successful. University dating site.
Ergo Minder: Product to lock your computer and force you to exercise.
3Dconnect: This was my team. Bringing 3d printing to the world. Connecting people with printers with people that want to print.
Bucky: Whats in your bucket list. Website to help people do things from their bucket list.
Intern Me: Connecting interns with business.
CBeyond: Bitcoin credit card processing. Bit plastic.
Houseware: Controlling your home from your mobile device.
Help Me Feed Myself: Personalized food tips, advice for the foodie.
Almost a Gentleman: providing lessons and a monthly package to turn you into a gentleman.
Livable Air Solutions: Scrubbing carbon from the atmosphere.
Voter Quotient: A platform for political data analysis.
Here is the team at work:
