A hacker-entrepreneur’s survival guide to Startup Weekend

Startup Weekend is an awesome concept. Strangers get together, pitch ideas, spontaneously form teams and by the end of a weekend have a working demo and pitch to show everyone else. As an attendee at last weekend’s Bay Area event, it was truly amazing to see the number of things built literally-from-nothing over 48 hours.

I’m a hacker-entrepreneur. I love to create ideas, turn them into business concepts, and then realise them in code. However, at Startup Weekend it seems the skillset of attendees can range from ‘just here for the ride’ to ‘hardcore $language programmer’ to ‘I love writing business plans’. Here are a few things I learned from the experience.

1. Pitch your own idea.

I didn’t. Then I remembered an idea I’d previously had about halfway through the weekend and was kicking myself for not pitching it. I definitely believed in the problem my team was solving, but I think there’s just a different energy level and focus, especially for me, when it’s your own idea. It would also have given me a better role to play during the weekend, that of leader/visionary/hole-filler/driver, rather than head-down hacker (which was a fun role to play, but I learnt over the weekend that it isn’t the role I enjoy most, any more.)

Even if you don’t get a team for your idea, pitching your own idea tells people a bit about who you are and why you’re there.

2. Pitch your problem, not your solution.

For both the kickoff night and the final presentations, the mantra ‘problem not solution‘ is key. Once the problem is clear, dive into the solution, but you gotta get buy-in on the whole reason you’re doing it. A few of the Friday night pitches asked the audience “How many of you…?”. Easy way to validate your problem and ditch the whole thing if nobody responds.

As the backchannel on Twitter said so clearly, if we don’t get it within 30 seconds, there’s something up.

3. For the love of god, don’t pitch something outside the scope of Startup Weekend.

I can’t believe how many people pitched existing companies (they were hiring, etc) or projects that were not Startup Weekend projects (here’s this thing I’ve previously built and I’ll drone on about it incomprehensibly). Whatever you already do, put it aside and embrace the creativity of 48 hours of collaboration.

4. Pick the team you can help most.

Friday night, picking a team, was tough for me. There were three teams whose ideas were pretty close, all problems I could sympathise with, and all ideas where my expertise could come in handy. I picked the team whose problem seemed the most in need of my speciality, where I thought I could make the most difference. Maybe this is just a cue to build a platform that I can license to all the teams…

5. Someone else will have the same idea.

One of the similar teams ended up pretty much building the exact same product idea as us over the weekend, which was quite amusing. Don’t sweat it. It just shows the problem you’re solving is real. If they do a better job, ask yourself why!

6. Don’t have too big a team. Especially if you lack technical direction.

We had six developers total, I think. Even now I’m not really sure what everyone did. We all used different platforms and languages, and nobody really understood how to put it all together. I didn’t even see working code from anyone else all weekend. Communications failure on my part, and role failure (nobody stepped up to be technical lead). I think we would probably have achieved a better, more-featured demo with only two developers both using the same platform.

7. Know what you’re being judged on and focus on it.

We also had a ton of business people, who contributed greatly to the business behind the idea – we had a business plan, I think we had financial projections, a twitter account, etc. The problem is that the weekend was being judged, almost entirely, on the strength of the idea and the potential of the solution. No time or reason to show slides on potential market cap, earnings in year 5, etc.

I think if you’re a business person, and you’re super awesome at financial models and market cap and P/E ratios and all that, and you want to contribute to Startup Weekend, you still can. Just don’t focus on one team and build out their investor deck when they haven’t even got a line of working code yet. Go around the teams and see if you can spend a few hours with a few different ones, helping them out. Or take on multiple roles for your team and man the twitter account, get some test users signed up, do some fake data entry, mock up some UI in Powerpoint, whatever. Make tea. Contribute. There’s a place for Excel, it just ain’t here.

8. Market research is awesome.

We sent out two surveys (one via askyourtargetmarket and one a Google Form) on the start of Saturday to validate part of the problem and get feedback on possible solutions. This process was really useful for streamlining some of the thinking higher-level, but we didn’t really have enough time to incorporate it fully.

9. Drink lots of water, not soda. Eat well. Sleep better.

There’s something appealing about staying up coding for 48 hours straight, but (especially if you have a day job to go back to the next day) looking after yourself is even more appealing. I put my survival through the weekend down to a lack of sugar, fat and general yuck. Too much pizza on offer, fortunately I couldn’t eat any of it.

10. Fail fast.

The advantage of prototyping and validating an idea in a weekend is the speed at which you can fail, and learn. If it isn’t going to fly, accept it and move on. You’ve ‘wasted’ a weekend, but there will be plenty of things you can re-use from the experience.

This is where the whole MVP/iterate thing comes in, too. If you’re not being lean, you won’t fail fast enough in the weekend to actually get something useful out of the experience.

11. Have funny pictures on your slide deck.

If all else fails, do an entertaining pitch at the end of the weekend and you’ll keep the fun factor high. (Bonus points if you do an entertaining pitch and seem to have built a working product!)

(Here’s another attendee’s take on lessons learned from Startup Weekend, too.)