San Antonio Startup Weekend

WOW!

That one word could sum up the whole Startup Weekend experience, but it would leave out all the fun and amazing details that happened. As you can see from all the posts that Celeste Diaz Ferraro and Shaine Mata wrote, there was a lot going on over the weekend. Although the blog was quiet yesterday it didn’t mean the SWSA energy had faded or that the teams had stopped working.

On the contrary, the iDre.am Team http://idre.am had a fully functional site by 1 a.m. Monday morning. They were the team pulling the notorious all-nighters during the whole weekend. They also obtained their EIN# and set up their corporate structure on Monday. The buzz that iDre.am is receiving online and in the press has been quite impressive. As someone who is using idre.am via their Twitter integration app, I can say it’s been fun to read the analysis of my dream and see the subsequent ratings of the analysis. To use simply @idreamed and it is automatically posted on the iDre.am site for analysis. Of course you could also submit your dream for analysis directly on the iDre.am site.

The ForceXchange team has a live site which is being readied for a soft beta launch this week. We were lucky enough to have 2008 Sundance Film Festival Official Selection filmaker Pablo Veliz use his talents to create the main site video promo. During the planning phase we discussed the business model with an active duty soldier who offered us his wish list for an auction site. It helped us hone in on what should be part of the site and weed out unnecessary features. Thanks Kenneth for making yourself available, offering your insight and being our “man in the field”.

The RentEscapes team had the most ambitious idea for a weekend project. They faced some planning challenges, but are moving forward with the project. They have a clearly defined list of goals to bring the site live within 30 days. The team had a recap meeting on Monday evening and have another meeting planned for Wednesday.

Overall, Startup Weekend San Antonio was a complete success. We went from a room full of strangers to company founders over the course of a weekend. Stay tuned as we keep folks updated on the progress of iDre.am, ForceXchange and RentEscapes.

We finished our sandwich lunch and had a round of Microsoft prizes. We pulled names out of a box to choose winners. There were some winners of Halo 3 and other assorted prizes.

We finally got around to having a meeting as a whole to update each other on the progress of our projects. It appears that we have all decided to go with the projects in the long term. One item of note, in case we did not mention it, is that we will create a “phantom” person, in the form of a company, that will own a portion of each of the companies that come out of this project. This way, everybody has piece of the pie in case one hits it big.

The event is officially over, though many of us will hang out until we are “done”, whenever that is. At the meeting, idre.am announced that they will be done by tonight. They are merely tweaking the site.  Both RentEscapes and ForceXchange are going long-term, so there is marginal value in sticking it out much longer; yet we are here. We just don’t know when to quit.

We had a mixup with our lunch vendor regarding our legitimacy. After all, who orders for 25 people on a Sunday, right? So, after a couple phone calls, we had that straightened out and even scored some cookies for our troubles.

Philip Wheat, from Microsoft, is on site with some tech demos. I was just checking out a Lego robot thingamajig that seems like fun. There are a few giveaway goodies in store. There is a film producer on site, the press is here, and it’s a bit of controlled chaos. We’re running around; but we have purpose.

While we are waiting for lunch, we are putting finishing touches on our work. The number of files is beginning to multiply. We are starting to see a need to have a central place to keep our documents.

We are having meetings to start off the day. If you were watching on Ustream, you probably caught the ForceXchange meeting. The meeting is over, so we’ll be working on getting our deliverables hammered out by the end of the day.

I hear the RentEscapes team having their meeting in the hallway. I don’t have details on what they are up to, they are currently in the middle of something so we may have a briefing later.

The Idre.am team is constantly in a meeting. We kind of forced them to listen in on the ForceXchange meeting. The beauty of their work is that you can actually see their progress. Their business model is so simple that it really comes down to getting the product working.

We are clearing the fog from our brains with a bit of coffee from a global coffee chain this morning. Breakfast tacos just came in. One thing we learned is that we need to run to the breakfast quickly before the food runs out. Once the food and coffee kick in, we’ll be ready to go at it full-force.

Team ForceXchange will be having a brief meeting to update everybody on what we’ve done so far and what we expect to have done by the end of the day. There is a sense of urgency to get as much done today as possible so that we have less to do to carry the project forward once Startup Weekend is over.

Breafast beckons, I go.

If you stop by ForceXchange.com, you’ll see that Johnathan Ianotti and Jonathan Kelly have been pounding out the code today. They had to make up a lot of ground after some setbacks with off-the-shelf products; but they’ve done a great job of making up ground. We have put together a lot of the business process. We are finding that our business model currently bypasses a lot of the standard business plan line items.

For you business geeks, our business models currently have limited startup costs. Our biggest cost, to date, will be incorporation fees to the Texas Secretary of State; a total of $300. Then there is the $18 for the domain name. We have no payables, no payroll, no rent, no utilities, and a great many other items. I have the forms set up for our financials; but I find that we have extremely low costs for startup. We won’t start incurring serious costs until AFTER revenue has started coming in. Most of what would be business assets, normally, is already owned by the team. We all have computers, we all have phones, and so on. For me, it’s very strange to see financials with a lot of goose eggs on them. None of us expect to draw a salary or to incur costs that will break us. On the surface, it seems like it is all positive. Of course, time will tell. In the meantime, we’ll just enjoy the good vibes that the plan gives us.

Given time constraints, we have decided on a few key deliverables for tomorrow. There will be a soft launch of the service so that we can prove the concept works before making improvements to monetize. If we keep it small, we can expect that we can maintain the “free” costs until we are ready to deliver full production deliverables. In short, we have a small number of key deliverables for tomorrow to get us rolling. We are not expecting a full-blown business coming out of this; but we will have a damn good, workable start.

We’re winding down and may be leaving soon, maybe.

We had supper a while ago, which consisted of Rudy’s Bar-B-Q. Good stuff. Then it was back to work at our respective businesses. I am with the ForceXchange team still working on the financials. We have divided up the business planning responsibilities and have been at it for a few hours. The developers are sequestered in their office hammering out some code from scratch after a couple setbacks with off-the-shelf products. As we get late into the second day, we seem to be working a bit harder to meet our objectives. At this point, all we have left is to plug away so that we have as little to do as possible tomorrow.

In other news, we’ll be shooting video tomorrow so that we can promote ForceXchange. I also hear good things about the other teams. They seem to be working really hard on their projects.

Live Video streamed by Ustream

We are being entertained by the talents of Matt Barker while we wait for dinner to arrive. You should be able to catch the archive on Ustream. One of our developers decided to join in with percussion on a couple of waste bins.

By now, the projects are maturing. We are starting to flesh out the business plans and marketing strategies. We are a bit behind on the website development due to some setbacks, but our developers are confident that they can pull it off in time.

I’ve taken on the responsibility of doing the financials for the ForceXchange site. It’s interesting that we have good representation by developers of different flavors, but we also have a strong contingent of marketers and traditional businesspeople. It’s amazing to see the same emphasis on developing the business models as the websites. We have much work ahead, we’ll keep you posted.

Things are at a little bit of a lull right now, so I stealing away to write this blog post before diving into another task. As you have read, there are three projects going right now. There is a plenty of jumping around between projects amongst some of the team members, especially our only graphics guy.

We stopped for lunch a bit after 3 pm. We were so focused on our projects that we forgot about lunch. We even forgot about blogging, it seems. We had some trays of Thai food delivered and quickly wolfed that down. We just acquired some beer. The knottiest amongst us had chair massages. In a while, we’ll have some live music.

We’ll be putting our nose to the grindstone again shortly. You are welcome to join us by visiting our Ustream feed.

Lots of discussion about Startup Weekend’s new multiple project structure, shares and how to manage the fact that people/talent will float between teams. In keeping with San Antonio’s friendly reputation, we all agree that people who are not primary members of each team will get rolled up into an LLC and get a minority share in all the other teams. Assumption is that this is a small enough group that we’ll all cross-pollinate anyway. That’s so San Antonio. I love this town.