Los Angeles Startup Weekend

I will be recording another video, similar to this one from Startup Weekend San Francisco.

The video camera batteries must be conserved, so I use my seesmic account to grab an interview with Darren about how we are planning on making tons of money.

We do! Our rails coders showed up a few minutes before the 3pm meeting, they must have stayed out to late last night. Those rails guys are insatiable. Allow me to share with you our development so far:

Overall the news was good. Bizdev thinks we have a 50 kajillion dollar market and they are totally right. Dev is excited to have their full team and predicts a 400% increase in productivity moving forward. Game Design went to lunch (seriously) but the one member that attended the meeting say they have all the game logic figured out. Rockin’

Andrew Hyde has joined the Creative team, bringing the grand total to two. Two allstars are all that’s needed: Our mockup of the app is done, logos are close, those two are freaking impressive.

We closed on a quote that Andrew shared:

“The key to startups is to pick half the day to work as hard as you can, it doesn’t matter if it’s the first 12 hours of a day or the second, you just have to work hard for half a day.”

The team is working frantically to prepare for the 3:00 meeting. They are running chaotically. We’ve got some deliverables that are due at 3:00pm and I’m excited with the anticipation of seeing what’s happened. I’ll be posting an update in 20 minutes or so and let you know which major milestones we’ve hit.

We all know that LA is the land of stars. One such bright light was spotted eating today at the In-N-Out burger in Marina Del Ray. Our skilled paparazzi were out in full force and snapped this photo of the unsuspecting Boy Wonder.

Please notice the destruction that has befallen Andrew’s meal, and the content smile on his face. Fun Fact: Andrew is vicious in his devouring of double-doubles with cheese.

Here’s some biz stuff circa 10:00am. World, StartupWeekend is officially the only allowed time to utter “ugh, that was so two hours ago.” Thanks for abiding by the new rules.

Here’s the subject list of the meeting:

• Company Name
• Biz Plan
• Monetization (Ad Network vs. Ad Sales vs. Sponsorship)
• Write basic game copy
• Do we build a website?
• What are our product names and categories?
  • Dev liaison updates us on what avenues they are going down (and invites us to play in 10 minutes, Yay!)

Marketing/PR is taking a standard web2.0 route of targeting Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook, blog mentions. Rana explains Facebook invites, which we all agree needs to be the biggest area. Now we will get to writing press releases targeted at different audiences. Our first game is targeted towards teen women, and that will be one area of focus. Also we will target Celebrity

I know I’m in LA, Bizdev leadership asks if we know anyone famous that we can ask to play this game” and two people step up saying that indeed they do. Here’s hoping that one of those celebrities is Corey Feldman. I stopped blogging, in interest of going to play our game. Wheeeee! I feel like a kid again.

An interesting thing is happening here in this meeting, we are all so enthralled in the game that we are hesitant to talk about issues in the game. Anytime anyone brings up a question, we all say “let’s play the game and see how that works.” Haha, this is neat.

We’ve enacted the 10 minute rule and we are now coming up with really good suggestions about the game play. Essentially our game will focus on building virtual popularity and giving your friends the ability to build up your popularity or decrease it.

This former number 8 rugby player loves this quote on gameplay: “If your friend gets in trouble for defending you, you have a rugby like obligation to come in and defend your friend from the masses. Your actions are all about identifying with a team.” Sweet, keep on ruckin’ and maulin’!

So we’ve had our first seven minute meeting of the day. Usability has delivered the document and done a bang-up job, somebody suggested a name that is perfect for what we are doing (someone is checking if it’s used by anyone else). Promises were made about playing the game, which has a prototype (I know, we rock), but this humble author has to participate in a business development meeting. Business guys never get to have the fun.

Hey Startup-Junkies,

By way of an introduction; I’m Tyler Willis and I’ll be blogging this event on this site, sending tweets (except when twitter is down tomorrow) and posting cell phone camera shots to my flickr. I organized the San Francisco Startup Weekend and I’m infected with the inability to escape Startup Weekend. It’s an amazing experience that I’m looking to repeat many times in the future. Now you know me, and have access to all the public information I’ll be sending out. On to Content:

Now that formalities are over, we plowed through our voting and came up with three top choices: a multiplayer game within the facebook environment, a free election system for secure online voting, and an electronic Christmas gift for our friends (tis’ the season). The Christmas gift was deemed “to easy” for our team of dynamos. So we wiped it off the whiteboard to a few scowls and the grinch’s delight.

That left us with two options:

Nothing could stop the two camps from waging battle with each other in a scene vastly reminiscent of a high school football game.  Camps on each side cheering and yelling as the match unfolds, everyone passionate about their side. All hoping that last bit of noise would convert the non-believers, pure energy!

In my experience, this battle of ideas is the peak of what I’ll dub the “omigosh” feeling that happens every weekend. Andrew uses a nice metaphor for this: the tension one feels as a roller coaster climbs the first hill, and you realize there’s no going back and you’re not quite sure what the first fall will feel like. Here people fight desperately for their beloved idea, and have probably the deepest emotional reaction to any decision of the weekend. The truth is, it doesn’t much mater. The community is the important part of this event and it’s the last few ideas out of a group of 40, it’s going to be a good idea!

So with two left, we picked CRUD - a facebook game that’s engaging and aimed at what we think is an untapped market. First order of business? Changing the name of the project will be good, but first things first.  We need to decide what the game will do, and how it will work. Once we decide the storyline of the game we can go about choosing a name.

Travis Savo pitched the winning idea and had this to say about the concept, “it’s easy to appeal to untapped areas and most importantly it’s fun and something we can build and fully deploy in a weekend, no problem.” They way everyone is talking about it, it’s got some teeth that could quickly make it a pretty big idea. This humble blogger is sold, we’ve picked the best idea for the job.

So, as always, usability is on the hook to deliver and deliver quick. We’ve been told to expect the document in less than 40 minutes. So startup fans, this begins another weekend in the boilerplate. I’m off to record some quick video and grab some z’s thanks to couch surfing.

The unstoppable team of laptop wielding maniacs shows no sign of stopping (there is even talk of sleeping here). I will be back tomorrow in full force.

Força!!

Well, here we are, Startup Weekend #12, or #13 according to Andrew.
Lots has happened since we started, including Leopard misbehaving on my MBP, prohibiting me from pushing the blog posts live.

Here are the main happenings thus far:
1) Andrew can’t count
2) LA traffic sucks
3) There are lots of people here from other Startup Weekends around the country
4) A surprising number of people can fit into Streetfire.net’s conference room upstairs
5) We’ve broken into our groups of four to come up with ideas
6) Ideas have been posted up on the wall
7) We’ve broken up into our core groups (dev, creative, marketing, etc)

8:07pm Idea Pitching
We’re all discussing our respective ideas in the Streetfire.net lair. David Hasselhoff is watching over Andrew’s shoulder, keeping him in check.
Some ideas include:
Digg for marketers
Share a Ride
Recipes Link
GPS Mapping
Fixito

8:17pm So, we’ve gone through about half the ideas, and we’re taking a break to regroup before continuing with the idea pitching.

8:26pm Idea Pitching Part Deux
Technorati for social network
PopTube
TrackOmit
ClickItNoTicket