Startup Houston

It was clear to me before heading into this weekend that launching a company over the course of 48 hours was stuff of fantasy. Now that the weekend is behind me and I had a chance to catch up on some well needed sleep, I have a different perspective.

TipDish is a social media directory and wire service that connects companies, organizations, PR and Marketing Professionals with the leaders and influencers in social media. It exists for two reasons:

• To give influencers direct, targeted access to the latest news and information from communications professionals (Tippers).
• To give communications professionals (Tippers) a smart, easy connection to the right social media influencers (Dishers)

I’ve been involved in several startups,, in a variety of shapes and sizes. I can safely say that this was the most educational of them all.
Rapid startup is becoming the new medium. Amazon Web Services is currently running a startup challenge that comes with over $100,000 in prizes to the winner. The winner is judged from entrants that operate or have launched an application that is “leveraging AWS to build its infrastructure and business.” I have several friends with companies utilizing different AWS tools and I am impressed with what Amazon has created. It is a business in a box.

This weekend we did not use AWS for our infrastructure: we went with a sponsored dedicated server from our friends at The Planet and Ruby on Rails as the development platform. We had a group of eager and hungry young entrepreneurs who worked their tails off to create content, a user interface and a marketing plan. Some of us “not so young” folks contributed with our experience by setting milestones for the weekend to keep the weekend on target. The biggest challenge for the team was making sure we spent time on important items that helped us achieve the goal of launching and not getting sidetracked on collateral issues.

Part of what is difficult about the Startup Weekend challenge is that building a web 2.0 business requires some planning before development can build the application. The user interface team worked hard all Friday night to get wireframes in the development team’s hands by early Saturday. This gave the dev team about 30 or so hours to go from start to completion on the application. I don’t know about you but I would not feel comfortable launching anything after 30 hours of coding. That is not a knock on our development team who I think did a fantastic job of getting something out the door.

So let’s break down the weekend (we started at 6PM Friday night and went until 9PM Sunday night so we are ticking off 51 hours):

• 3 hours to meet and pitch our ideas (48 to go)
• 1 hour to discuss and select our project (47 to go)
• 1 hour to break into teams and identify what needs to get done (46 to go)
• 10 hours to define the business model and market (36 to go)
• 3 hours to build wireframes and set site design (33 to go)
• 33 hours to code and launch based on 18 hours of planning

That’s a tall order for anyone. I challenge you to do better. Perhaps at the next Startup Weekend in Houston?

I plan to see where we can take TipDish. I hope this is just the beginning and not the end. We shall see.