The start of Houston Startup Weekend
On Friday night I became part of Houston Startup Weekend.
I met the group at the Stag Head bar around 6 PM. I don’t have an exact head count, but I think there were around 40 or so people there. The goal for the night was to choose the business idea we would develop over the weekend. Each person spent 2 or 3 minutes covering their idea. I had four ideas to present. At the end of the presentations we attempted to use Vosnap.com (which was the first company created out of Startup Weekend) to choose the winning idea, but the program errored due text size limitations. So, we voted on coasters instead. The voting results weren’t even close. The group overwhelming chose Laura Mayes’ Social Media Directory for Bloggers idea. After the decision, we spent a few more hours fleshing out the business concept.
On Saturday morning I arrived at the Method Agency studio around 7:45. There were already three cars in the parking lot. The User Interface guys spent the entire night working on the wire frames. They were at Denny’s until 5 AM! Then they spent a few hours sleeping in their cars.
Throughout the weekend I have been part of the Dev team. Our goal is to take the input from the UI guys and the Creative guys and to make a website out of it. We only have 4 or 5 guys on the Dev team. They set us up in a small loft with huge windows. Down below we can see all of the other teams working. The other teams are set up on folding tables which are sitting on a photography studio.
This weekend I’m playing the role of database designer, which is not a far stretch for me. I meet with the UI team to figure out which data needs to be captured.
On Saturday we decided to use Rails as our framework. We only had ONE Rails developer available on Saturday. I’ve studied Rails but I don’t feel comfortable leading the Rails development. We spent most of the day getting the user login and profile setup code working.
We accomplished a lot on Saturday. The group came up with the name the company. The Designers came up with a beautiful front page design. The DEV team coded the template in HTML. The Admin person setup the server, with Ruby and Rails, etc. The Rails developer got most of the login and profile code done. A lot got done that I don’t even know about.
I’m really proud of the work we have done.
