[CentralOH] Startup Weekend: Persuasion

[Jay Clouse]

In response to Thomas and Kurtis' emails, I wanted to go into a little more detail about the structure, what you can expect, and what my personal experience has been.

Friday night you pitch ideas (everyone has 60 seconds until no one wants to pitch anymore). Then, the crowd votes on around a dozen ideas they think are best, and teams form organically. The rest of the evening is typically spent mapping out tasks that need to be completed over the course of Saturday and Sunday.

Saturday is a dev and design heavy day, with the business-minded folks doing some market research and validation. Throughout the day, mentors and speakers give feedback and advice on your product.

Sunday morning and afternoon is spent finishing a prototype (ideally) and crafting a final pitch. That evening, teams pitch their ideas and judges choose their top three.

I participated in my first Startup Weekend over a year ago with not only very limited business skills, but no technical design or development skills. After pitching (Friday night) a few ideas and not having any of them voted upon for work over the weekend (I didn't get a single vote!) I latched on with a team including a front-end developer, back-end, designer, and a marketer. I basically audited the weekend while doing some market research and helping put together a slide deck. And it was incredible. 

So to answer David's question from earlier, the weekend is open to everyone and extremely valuable to anyone. For developers and designers, you can pick up a lot of best business practices from us non-technical folk. The relationships you build are awesome, and at the end of the weekend you typically have a working demo or prototype to show off and maybe work on afterwards.

Candidly, I would say probably more than 50% of the projects are not continued after the weekend is over. But many are! It depends on your team and your passion for the problem you are solving.

Saturday is usually a long, development-heavy day that you have to fight through. By all means, if you want to attend and there are talks that day at PyOhio, sneak out and catch them! It may help fire you up and recharge the batteries.

The people I have met and the business skills I have learned (not to mention the inspiration to learn some design) have changed my life. If you choose your team carefully and pick an idea you would enjoy working on, I see no downside.

Jay

On Jul 17, 2013, at 4:46 PM, Thomas Winningham wrote:

> No yes, that is an extremely good thing to post I remember that movie.... I was trying to be fair, but maybe I didn't express my own misunderstanding going into it. I think the NSF thing sounds almost exactly was Startup Weekend perhaps is, or at the very least should be viewed as being... er... without the NSF non-profit slant maybe.
> 
> 
> On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 4:17 PM, <jep200404 at columbus.rr.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 17 Jul 2013 14:14:13 -0400, Thomas Winningham <winningham at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > I did however think that in some ways trying to get team members, some kind
> > of things that happened where you had to "prove" your idea was worthwhile,
> > was something of a hindrance, ...
> 
> Hindrance?  Uh oh.
> 
> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/07/but-you-did-not-persuade-me.html
> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/10/the-one-thing-every-software-engineer-should-know.html
> 
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