Startup Weekend_One week later

It's been one week since the Startup Weekend in Salt Lake and I've had a bit of time to process the event, the outcome and my personal experiences with this phenomenal three day marathon. First, let me say that I heard of this event after complaining that Utah didn't have a lot of entrepreneurial type conferences. I take back some of what I said and have to admit, if a single event were to come to this state in lieu of all others, I'd be okay with Startup Weekend being that event. For those of you not familiar, this is a competition where people pitch ideas, research, plan and execute a group of start up businesses in a three day period. That said, here's more about the event- what I would do differently, some of my favorite aspects and what's happened since last Saturday.
If I had it all to do over again, I'd do almost all of it different. I don't know if I've ever felt that way before, but it's true for Startup Weekend. For example, I would have bought my ticket in December instead of waiting. I would have scheduled less work to avoid the intense stress that my day ended up including. Once there, I would have pitched a totally different idea. I feel a bit dumb about this but, we played an ice breaker game and I keep thinking I would have been better off pitching 'Hot Delicious Sauce' -the idea my team and I had for that game. I know we were all told by Al who put the event on, that ideas pitched should be a brand new ideas, not worked on projects that just need capital- but for some reason it rang no bell. I pitched my school funding business that I had been working on, thinking about and had ideas for, but for which I had hoped one of the audience members would have an idea of how to simplify implementation. That didn't happen, but no matter. I did my pitch-56 of us did-and my pitch went okay, though I forgot a couple of things.
During opening speeches, I had sat next to this really involved and funny guy, who turned out to be one of the highlights for me. I'm not sure he's aware of it, but his pitch was the most ingenious (in my not so humble opinion). It was fun, random, flexible and something about a sexy unicorn. After all the ideas were tossed out there, we used an advanced voting method involving post it's to vote for the best ones, then we formed teams. At first, I was on a team that wanted to track bad tenants for property owners. The team was huge, we took a cool pic that first night, discussed ideas and I worried that I wouldn't be needed (there were something like five or six other business people). I know it's a competition in a lot of ways, but I really wanted to be involved. When I saw someone I recognized in a small group that had only five people, I decided I'd float between the two and do what I could.
When I got home for much needed rest, my little one was sick and I wasn't sounding too hot myself. I thought about all the pitches and decided my witty neighbor's was the best. I had the intention of letting him know, hell I wanted to join his team no matter what it was just because of his speech, but I didn't. I was about thirty minutes late the second morning after getting the kids off to school, but caught up with both groups and decided to commit to the smaller one, Market Health. Rate My Tenants didn't seem to like the idea of me working with two teams and they had a few issues I couldn't wrap my head around. So, it was transparency in medical billing.

Day two was much more intense. There were charts, speeches, a lot of candy and a lot of post it notes. Our group was stuck on revenue models and launch feasibility for our medical procedures pricing comparison chart (yes, on a Saturday afternoon, and yes, I paid people to let me do this for three days). My team got stuck for some time and decided to come back to profits after we did client validation. We split into two groups and divided tasks. Three of us went to the mall to survey people and three of us were supposed to stay and start on the development of our MVP (minimum viable product). When we returned from the mall, only two of the developers were there. Immediately after lunch, a second team mate left, leaving us with four members total and only two developers (most teams were double our size). We worked and thought, discussed revenue sources again. We decided to focus on a niche and became Price My MRI instead of Market Health, and decided to focus on one procedure at a time. We were still stuck and lacking motivation, so the other business individual and I went to a nightclub around the corner to survey an older crowd that had expendable income.
We sat and watched the people, talked about what they were doing and why. We didn't survey any of them and I though on our ay out-this is what you have to do in business-let people have fun. We found drive and some focus for writing a business plan and starting on the setup of other parts of the business that we could tackle without programming. We stayed late, though not as late as some of the other teams. I left at 11 pm with a very sore throat and a somewhat deflated sense of accomplishment, glad to go home to my girls. Recapping the night to my twelve year old, it was interesting to see what she did and did not listen to, what she was doing when I bored her and her overall reaction to the businesses I talked about. If you don't typically engage your kids about these things, I'd say it's one of the best things for young minds and a great source of pure and honest feedback. Not all topics are appropriate, but after talking to my daughter, I got some ideas, looked at research and medical jokes for quite some time and went to sleep happy and excited.
On that third and final day, I should have worked on nothing but the presentation. It didn't occur to our team to put any time into collaborating on the speech or the slides and it showed. We were even told by a mentor to start discussing it, but the developers were in development and questions, comments and discussion went unanswered. We waited too long to move on without the others and by we I mean I. I didn't want to step on the toes of the team leader and instead put together something my kids would be ashamed of. I was wrestling with technical issues while doing this remedial task as well which didn't add to the outcome.
We decided that the team lead would present with me (and I had almost no voice), but we never practiced together and I had anxiety which I am sure showed. I forgot a couple things and said "travel tourism" instead of "medical tourism" when discussing a potential ad source. We did manage to discuss the market, idea, MVP, and potential revenue sources, but lacked the evidence and proper showing of our work. Many mistakes, but still we got some great feedback. We had numerous people follow up and discuss the idea with us-most in the medical field themselves. The judges were easier on us than they should have been, but it was a great experience to be in the hot seat-it's been a while since I was put into such an arena and I truly love it. I love speaking, presenting, researching. I just was off the mark-I didn't really "get" Startup Weekend until I was through it. Then I instantly wanted to do it again.
Once over, my team expressed some interest in continuing until the day after at which point it was decided any of us could develop the business in any way we pleased. Seth, the charismatic gentleman I sat next to opening day who also saved us in the design process and developed his own "Unicorn Sex Appeal" app graciously offered to help get the last bit of coding issues worked out. There is some interest in moving forward, but it's sporadic and disconnected, like seemed to be our experience throughout. If the code gets worked out, I've had a marketing idea that may move it far enough to re-interest my team. It's a great idea in a heavy need market with a lot of emotional factors and high revenue potential. We will see. It's only been a week, but compared to how time moved at the event, it's been a really long time.
All in all, I would say that this was the most worthwhile event I have done outside of hosting my own which I also learn masses from. Highlights were seeing so many incredible and talented people come together and the excessive sense of determined aspiration I have. I learned a lot about business development, had the SCRUM method brought back to my attention and I met some more people that I'd only known online. I saw enough talent and genius in this one weekend to make me believe that if the world is to move forward in leaps and bounds, it will be because of individuals like those I met at Startup Weekend.