Startup Weekend: How to Take a Company From Concept to Creation in 54 Hours (19 page)

Just a few decades ago, entrepreneurs were often based in their basements and garages, and they were usually alone. When the personal computer became a part of everyday life, coders started to meet up, but oftentimes (and we're only exaggerating slightly), it was merely to play video games and have fun programming them. The culture was still overwhelmingly male and comprised mostly of computer-based interactions. And even though folks had computers, there was no social networking; so entrepreneurs were mostly restricted to working with people in their immediate vicinity (like the guy in the garage next door). It's not that they couldn't communicate with others; it's simply that the distance made things more arduous and expensive. (Remember when we paid extra for long-distance phone calls?) Our networks used to depend more on our locality. For instance, even if we graduated from a business school on the other side of the country, it was still hard (except in a few cities) to find a critical mass of alumni with whom to work on a project.

What Startup Weekend has done is to gather people from different sorts of backgrounds—developers, businesspeople, artists, designers, lawyers, and so on—and encouraged them to talk about their common interest in entrepreneurship. It's almost as though we knocked on a lot of garage doors and got people to come out and be social.

And that is the next step in the evolution of an entrepreneur—the
cofounder leap
. This is the stage at which people have already learned more about startups and have decided it's time for them to meet the right people to get their ideas off the ground, or to get involved with someone else's idea.

This is where Startup Weekend comes in. This is when you start dating—when you find out who you like and who likes you in return. When you are new to this world of entrepreneurship, it is important not just to meet people, but also to meet the
right
people. You need to find people who have a real passion for entrepreneurship, who complement both your skill set and your personality, and who are at a point in their careers and their personal lives where they can give some time (even if it's not all their time) to launching a startup.

In addition to Startup Weekend, there are events like Coffee 2.0 meetups, Startup Drinks, Founder Dating, Women 2.0, and hundreds of local initiatives designed to help entrepreneurs get in contact with able, willing, and like-minded people.

The most important thing to keep in mind in all of these initiatives is that you have to
talk
to people, and share your ideas. There used to be a longstanding tradition among entrepreneurs that they must keep their ideas secret. People would practically walk around with nondisclosure agreements in their pockets. This is not an effective way of finding cofounders or colleagues—or even learning if your idea is worth anything. If you clam up, then the person you are talking to will clam up, too. Therefore, we encourage trust in Startup Weekend participants. Your idea won't be worth anything if you keep it to yourself, and going to Startup Weekend to chat about the weather is a total waste of everyone's time.

Meeting other people and forming a team is a great way to keep yourself motivated—to see that you don't keep making excuses for yourself. People tell us they would be launching a business if it weren't for their job, their family, their age, their place of residence, or whatever. It's natural. But we have met people in all the same circumstances who decided they'd stalled long enough and finally made a go of it—you can too.

The Startup Leap

The third step, the
startup leap
, is for people who have assembled a team and have the outlines of an idea for a business. People at this step are also good candidates to attend Startup Weekend. We have a couple of teams that are already formed but are looking for more help at many of our events. They may even have built something at a previous Startup Weekend, but need to develop their project further. These people can use the weekend as a time to advance their projects, move the idea to the next level, conduct more customer research, or find more developers or businesspeople. As long as they are looking for true team members, and not free labor, teams at the startup leap can find many essential components at Startup Weekend. It's not just the cofounder who is important to a successful startup. Charlie O'Donnell, one of Startup Weekend's advisers and a principal at First Round Capital in New York, says that getting “the first five employees right is vital.” According to O'Donnell, “Figuring out the right team and getting the right people is super important.” In fact, he thinks that one of the most important things a venture capitalist can do is to help a team make the right hires. A lot of people get stuck when they realize they're missing a particular skill set. O'Donnell says he can look at a mobile application, for instance, and tell teams what person they're missing. Maybe it's the sales team or the product development, or the user experience person. No matter what, he says, the plan would have been better if the entire team had been there from the beginning.

People who have formed well-rounded teams at Startup Weekend seem very inclined to continue the process. Indeed, the majority of Startup Weekend participants plan to continue to work on their team's idea after the weekend, with 36 percent reporting that all of the members will continue working on the project and 41 percent reporting that some subgroup of the team will do so.

It's not only that surrounding yourself with the most competent team is vital to your success at the beginning; it is also an important contributor to how well your startup will do in the long run. You may think you enjoy being alone, but being alone means that your startup will rise and fall depending on your outlook, and no one else's.

Some days, you'll feel great. You'll be thinking, “Oh my God! I'm going to develop all these things and create the perfect product. Being an entrepreneur is awesome.” Once you hit a few bumps in the road, though, you might start to feel bad. You may begin wondering, “What have I done? I'm never going to make it. These ideas are terrible.”

Your mood on a particular day may seem like a trivial concern now, but believe us:
It's not
. More people on a team can create an emotional equilibrium. Not every member is going to feel good or bad at the same time. Being an entrepreneur can be tough. There are times when nobody believes in you. You have zero money. You have this vision of something you want to accomplish, but you may feel like you're not making enough progress. After six months, after a year, you don't want to be alone because you don't want to give up.

There are other parts of the startup ecosystem that can help you find the people you need for your team and the kind of support you need for your vision. Bar Camps, for instance, are user-generated conferences to discuss not only new technological innovations but also ideas about politics, health care, transportation, and a variety of other subjects. Fail Conferences offer the opportunity to hear from experienced entrepreneurs and other leaders about some of the mistakes they've made along their way to success—mistakes they're hoping to help others avoid. Both of these are great opportunities to learn more about the entrepreneurial environment, and to meet people who you might want to work with in the future.

We're living in a wonderful, but also challenging, time for entrepreneurs. The world is flatter. With greater and cheaper access to technology, most people with a dream and a computer with Internet access can reach potential consumers across the globe and begin selling their product or service with a simple website. Creating a company is no longer just the undertaking of Ivy League graduates or trust-fund babies. On the other hand, it's even harder to get your message heard and differentiate yourself from the competition with so many more people sharing their creative output. Entrepreneurs are no longer just contending with the boutique down the street; they're up against every boutique that has a web presence—even stores in countries of which they may never have heard. Experiences like Startup Weekend help participants learn fast and outsmart the competition by allowing early-stage entrepreneurs to brush up against dozens—even hundreds—of potential customers, future team members, and mentors.

You know you achieved the startup leap once people come to you asking about your awesome product. This is a good sign to start focusing on the
funded leap
. If you don't have natural traction, it's a pretty good sign that your startup needs work. Go back to customer development—customers don't lie!

The Funded Leap

Show me the money? Well, not quite yet! We realize that a lot of people will want to see the money earlier in the process of becoming an entrepreneur. They'll expect to receive some kind of funding as soon as possible. You may be wondering: Shouldn't this be step one or two? The answer is:
absolutely not
. Part of the new entrepreneurship model is that you don't need money to start. You need time, and you need people. But you don't need money.

The reason for this is that most of the startups to which we're referring are web or mobile applications that don't require any initial overhead. As one veteran entrepreneur told us:

One great thing about Startup Weekend is that you could potentially be making money starting on day one, because attending doesn't cost much and the overhead costs for most of these tech startups are next to nothing.

While most people are not necessarily profitable from the very beginning, the point is that there is no reason to spend your money—or anyone else's, for that matter—until you have more information. Get the knowledge;
then
get the funds.

As we discussed earlier, you don't even need to actually
create
the product. You just need to give people a good enough idea of what the product is so that you can see whether they will actually buy it. You need to spend time, both during the weekend and afterward, talking to potential customers and testing out different versions of the idea. Don't just throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and see what sticks; throw individual pieces at the wall. If something doesn't stick, examine it, cook it a little more and then throw it again.

This will take place very quickly—and it
should
. Starting a business will happen faster than you think, maybe even over the course of a weekend. Two in five Startup Weekend participants believe that their team's idea could be ready for launch (defined as a first sale or transaction or the sale of the idea to a third party) in one to three months, while 28 percent believe that their idea could be ready in less than a month, and 19 percent believe that their team will need four to six months to ready their idea.

This is great news, not only in the sense that you want to get to the funded leap quickly but also because you won't waste time. Your time is worth something, and you shouldn't spend it working on an idea that's not going anywhere. If you use the techniques we've discussed in earlier chapters, we think you'll find that you'll get to success—or to failure—much more quickly. And if you get to failure, you can move on to the next idea and find success.

The Scaling Leap