Oct15th2007
We were very excited to learn that StartupHouston was featured in an article about StartupWeekend Houston in last Friday’s Houston Business Journal, however it appears that they gave us too much credit.
While it is true that StartupHouston helped to promote the event, participated in the event, and helped to even find sponsors for the event, the main credit for organizing the event and bringing it to Houston in the first place goes to Erica O’Grady. You can see the video interview I did with her here where we talked about her being one of the original founders of the event and how she sees Houston startup community evolving. Many thanks to Erica for getting this started, as well as all of the other great things that she has organized such as Refresh Houston and BarCamp Houston. We wouldn’t be the same town without her.
We’re also happy that TipDish got a lot of coverage in the article, but TipDish would not have happened if not for the hard work and creativity shown by all of those who attended the event, those who sponsored the event, and those who hosted the event. So to share the love, I’ve listed them here:
StartupWeekend Houston Founders:
- Andrew Hyde, Anthony Nguyen, Chris Doelle, Chris Massey, Chris Pitre, Chris Pratt, Chris Schilling, Erica O’Grady, Geri Druckman, Greg Thibodeaux, Gwendolyn Bell, Josh Tabin, Kelsey Ruger, Kurt Stoll, Laura Mayes, Marc Nathan, Marco Ramirez, Marcus Mateus, Matthew Alberty, Matthew Wettergreen, Melissa Garcia, Robert Gremillion, Tony DeMaria
TipDish Concept
- Laura Mayes came up with the concept for TipDish, and what a great concept it is. Out of all of the previous startupweekend events, most people think this one has the best chance of making money. You can see my video interview with her here to see where she got the idea and what’s up with her new venture Sk*rt.
StartupWeekend Houston Sponsors
StartupWeekend Houston Hosts
- The Method Agency generously let us invade their digs for the full weekend and all I could keep telling myself as I looked around was ‘What a cool place to work.’ They said they had an interview with the Mayor there the day after we left. Hope he helped himself to some leftover pizza and granola. :)
- You can see some pics from their office on our Flickr set.
Finally, a big ‘Thank You’ to Andrew Hyde and Gwen Bell for bringing StartupWeekend to Houston. We appreciate the chance to show the other cities what makes Houston a great place for startups.
If we’ve left anyone out, feel free to drop us a line in our comments section or come tell us about it at our next OpenCoffee Club meetup.
Oct8th2007
Well, it took longer than I wanted to get this together, but after wrestling with Ulead’s Video Studio 11+ for over a week, I have finally put together a template that makes it easy to output and upload videos. So here we go, the first of a few more videos that we have from the StartupWeekend event.
I was able to get Erica O’Grady to sit down for a few moments to tell me her take on what is going on within Houston’s startup scene, as well as what she liked about the Startup Weekend Houston experience. I think her feedback is great and shows that we still have a lot of work to do to continue to build up Houston’s startup community, but with events like Startup Weekend Houston, the Web Design Group’s Web Design Mayhem project, the upcoming Rice Alliance IT & Web 2.0 Venture Forum, Air Houston, and OpenCoffee Club, we are also making great progress.
http://www.vimeo.com/332817
Oct1st2007
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.
Sep30th2007
Monica Danna, editor of the Houstonist blog stopped by today to do some guest blogging. You can check out her first post here.
Sep30th2007
So how do the people here at StartupWeekendHouston decompress after a long day or development session. Why Yoga of course! At least a version of it that Gwendolyn Bell shared with us. Here is the video below.
http://www.vimeo.com/324065
StartupWeekendHouston does Yoga to relax from Startup Houston on Vimeo.
Want to take some time to decompress? You can also see all of the other videos that we have taken at StartupHouston for the event on Vimeo here and see all of our Flickr photos here.
Sep29th2007
So now that we have the first 24 hours of Startup Weekend - Houston under our belt, here are my initial thoughts:
- Developers, developers, developers;
- It is hard to avoid the feature creep;
- Everyone is a marketing expert;
- Market research is of UTMOST importance;
- Pizza can get old quickly; and
- Developers, developers, developers.
Here is what the team has been able to accomplish so far:
- Business model well defined
- User interface done (for the most part)
- Positioning is forming, but we keep getting stuck in the weeds on small stuff
- Development work coming along but slower than hoped due to lack of development resources
This is turning out to be an eye opening experience as it relates to Houston, Web 2.0 and entrepreneurship. I plan on packing it in shortly but will be back online tomorrow to dish out some more tips on the experience.
Sep29th2007
The top names are:
- TipDish
- MediaConnectr
- MediaMatchup
Right now it looks like the group is leaning towards TipDish. It’s catchy, and it has 8 characters or less in it’s name (which is what Gwendolyn Bell tells us) and we’ve come up with a way to use the name to describe people who use the service (Tippers for the PR firms that use the service and Dishers for bloggers and other media outlets that will cover their info).
Update: We have officially decided to go with TipDish as our business name. Keep your eyes on TipDish.com for more.
Sep29th2007
Last night was a blast and today looks like it should top it. Here’s what we’ve seen so far:
- WiFi without power is a problem (Erica to the rescue);
- Coffee and Macs don’t mix (my heart goes out to you Gwen);
- People seem to gravitate towards form over function…perhaps it is easier.
The project seems to be gaining momentum as we hash out differences on business model. We are still in need of additional developer horsepower so if you have some time to spare, take trip over.
More in a few.
Sep28th2007
Well, as luck would have it, VoSnap couldn’t handle the amount of text we gave it to try and decide who the winning idea would be, so everyone wrote their votes down on used coasters from the bar. So I guess we’re using 0.5 technology to decide what our Web 2.0 app will be. The coasters were gathered together in a glass jar and counted out (we’ll have the video in a follow up post)
The coasters have spoken and the application we have settled on is….
You can see the official tally on the StartupWeekend site or also via the VoSnap site (counted after the fact) here.
http://www.vimeo.com/324002
StartupWeekendHouston Idea Vote from Startup Houston on Vimeo.
Sep28th2007
We are going around the room now and listening to everyone’s top three votes for which ideas they like the best for StartupWeekend Houston. Here are my votes:
- Media directory (would provide a directory of all blogs and social media site contacts)
- Startup tracker (would track all startups, including those that end up in the deadpool)
- Regifting (A site to trade and sell gifts that you don’t want)
Here are Josh’s votes:
- Media directory
- Startup tracker
- Regifting
Hey, wait a minute. Both of our votes are the same. Well, I guess great minds think alike (sorry, couldn’t resist).
We’ll find out soon who the chosen one is.
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