Robert Gremillion’s Blog

Over the weekend I participated in Houston Startup Weekend. The goal was to implement an entire web company during ONE weekend. We didn’t quite reach our goal, but it was fun trying.

I’m not sure if it is actually possible to pull this off, but I do have some ideas on how to improve the odds.

1. Set Up Your Source Control on Friday Night. We decided to use Subversion, but it wasn’t working until SUNDAY MORNING. We eventually had to to resort to SVNRepository.

2. Work Around the Clock. You won’t make it if everyone treats the weekend like an 8 to 5 (or even an 8 to 10) job. We had UI guys that worked up until 5 in the morning, which helped a lot. Still, we lost 13 hours while people were sleeping. If you had a small midnight to 8 shift, you could probably knock out a lot. And that crew would be able to focus with less people around.

3. Dedicate At Least One Developer to making Prod Deployable. Unfortunately for us, we only had one strong Rails programmer. He had to work on setting up Prod, which means he couldn’t work on coding the site.

4. Get the Main Application Template Designs done AS FAST AS POSSIBLE. Don’t waste time making them PERFECT. Remember, your templates still have to be converted to HTML. If it is Sunday and your developers don’t have coded HTML templates, you’re toast.

5. Use Agile Development. If you are doing Rails, I recommend that you use Agile Development. ONE (and only one) of the UI guys should sit along side of the Rails developer as he or she codes the site.

6. Call in Help Early. If you do need to call in help, do it early. You don’t want to have to explain the entire application to someone new on Sunday afternoon, as we did. Be honest with yourself. If you need help and you know it on Saturday, CALL IN THE HELP!

7. Don’t Waste Time Adding Fancy Features. We all want to add the fancy AJAX features. But save that for NEXT weekend. This weekend you just want to get the basics done.

8. Define the BAM (Bare Ass Minimum) Requirements. In order to make the Sunday deadline you will have to reduce the features a lot.

9. Build Off of an Existing Admin System. Almost all web applications need some type of Admin system. Start with a generic framework that already has all of the login / user set up type of functionality built in. I wish I knew of a generic Rails Admin system, a simple base to build off of. Something like Drupal would have probably worked for our application, but no one on the DEV team had Drupal development experience.

10. Pick ONE Repository to Store All of Your Designs, Documents, Etc. Our group was using Basecamp AND Pbwiki which really got confusing after a while. There should be ONE primary repository with everything.

Houston Startup Weekend was a great learning experience. I highly recommend Startup Weekend to ANYONE who wants to be part of a startup!