Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company From Concept to Creation in 54 Hours by Marc Nager, Clint Nelsen, Franck Nouyrigat Page B

participant reported, “Startups thrive only when there are constraints. By locking ourselves into this weekend-long sprint, we were forced to make tough decisions and refine the problem, solution, and market down to their very essential cores.”
    Eric Koester—a veteran Startup Weekend attendee and now cofounder of Zaarly (a marketplace where people can buy and sell products or services from each other on the spot)—says, “It is critically important to understand how short a time 54 hours really is. Basically, you need to have a minute-by-minute plan of what's going to happen and what it's going to take to get something that you can showcase on Sunday night.” He recommends visualizing the presentation and then “working your way backward.” If it seems too overwhelming, then you just have to pare back. “Start pulling out the gasket, the fan—all those kinds of things [that allow you to] have an engine that will turn on and [give you something to] show to the audience.”
    Nicholas Gavronsky, whose team at Startup Weekend New York City created Animotion (now an iPhone app) says that simplicity was the key to their success: “We came up with hundreds of ideas and additional features. Many [people assume that] the more features you add, the better [the end product will be].” But Gavronsky and his team disagreed. “Too many features overwhelms users and takes the focus away from what you are trying to do. Ultimately, you need to [concentrate] on the core of the idea, iterate, and launch the most simplistic version.” Of course, you can always build it out later on.
    The final aspect of experiential learning that we have found to be important is the instant feedback it frequently provides. A formal classroom setting usually requires you to turn in assignments every so often to get feedback from a professor. If you use some of the principles we discuss in the next chapter, you will find that you can get immediate input from many different people (i.e., potential customers) about what you've built, or even what you're planning to build. Sorting through that information—and some of it may be contradictory—is a difficult process. However, there is no substitute for learning it firsthand and turning back to apply it to your project.
    Nick Seguin, who says that attending Startup Weekends is like a drug for him, has been amazed at what people will teach themselves under pressure. “There's a necessity part of the experience; I can't get anyone else to do it, so I'm going to Google things, look them up, and figure out how to do it myself.” Because time's a wasting!
    Braindump
    So, let's get back to the actual Startup Weekend experience. The first thing we ask participants to do is a braindump . Friday is a late night at Startup Weekend. The teams often aren't assembled until after 10 PM; however, people are excited by then and want to start working. The beginning of any startup should involve getting all the ideas on the table. It's the group leader's job to make sure to give others a chance to offer their feedback. It's important to set the tone early for letting everyone have a chance to give input. At the end of Friday night, we find the whiteboards in the room are covered with lists and diagrams. Looking at these is a good way of understanding how ideas truly evolve.

     
    Sometimes this braindump can result in a complete change of plans. For example, we witnessed one team begin with the idea of creating a mobile application for bars. As you walked around a neighborhood, it would tell you what bars were nearby and what kind of drinks they were offering. Bar owners could send coupons instantly to the app's users to attract them to their establishments.
    However, after doing a little digging on Friday night, this team realized that someone had just created this application and released it two weeks before. And they had done it really well. The