Seattle Startup Weekend

Could it be? Since about 3:30pm, people here and there have been testing code that Dev has pushed out at the special secret squirrel location. This in itself is amazing.

Proof that even though there are a lot of us, we really are still a startup:  the wireless router we’d been hoping to rely on for non-Dev folks to reach the test site died within minutes of being opened up for that purpose. Now we’re relegated to the few spare hard-wired ports not already used by Developers.

UserEx is handling much of the early testing even though there are a lot of the rest of us anxious to get our hands on the new toys too. For now, though, just a couple of people are in there finding the obvious big rocks kinds of breaks so that they can get fixed and we can begin move on to something more stable.

Ultimately, the goal is still to be able to push out something tonight that you can see for yourselves. And even though it will still be rough, hopefully you’ll agree with us that it is good start to implementing an awesome idea that has great potential to live on past this weekend.

Marketing folks tell me that they’re finished with the PR / Marketing plan and they’re coordinating with UserEx to finalize final email copy and get that part all set up.

Having KING 5 here is a major first for Startup Weekend. Seattle’s skillbit ™ is the very first SW event to have television onsite. Way Cool.

So if you want a better flavor of the event - complete with pictures - I highly recommend you check out Anthony’s blog. He’s got great insights.

Nevertheless, mad props to the three Django guys who spent the whole day acting as roving professors — I overheard some of their conversations and they are awesomely critical to the success of the weekend. Great job!

and

The UX team (Cassie, Bob, Adam, Jocelyn, a couple others whose names I didn’t know) did an AWESOME job of putting together a functional diagram for our website, with help from Matt on our team. Everyone loved the specs, especially the developers, who now know what they are supposed to break.

You can also check out Matthew’s blog, which is also has some cool observations.

I came in thinking about how I was going to immediately start posting. Instead, before I even had my jacket off and stuff set down, I was in two quick back-to-back meetings. The first was on support costs for the financial model and the second was looking at next steps in BizDev, which includes synching up the actions and public-facing language.

The public-facing language is important - once we got past the thrashing and wheel-spinning yesterday, we started moving pretty quickly, albeit very organically - and the result is a mish-mash of language that’s not yet cohesive. In fact, there were some branding errors that went out in last night’s press releases that have to be corrected now today. Oops. And you know what - these things happen in real life too, so it’s good to notice now, fix it, and move on.

Maybe that’s the motto for how we work - Notice, Fix, Move On

I managed to get some tea in there somewhere too, and some awesome Costco bagels, courtesy nPost, and while I was still not yet set up and connected on the laptop, I took the opportunity to wander through and see what everyone else is up to already this morning.

UserEx is continuing to hash out look and feel with Design and functional specs with Dev Liaison while the Dev folks are off in their corner doing what they do to “make it work”. Wish I could provide more detail on exactly how that’s happening except that in my effort to mostly leave them alone to do their work and as a result, it’s mostly black box to me at the moment. Heck, I only just learned that the D in Django is not silent. Silly me.

Hitlist is empty! Let’s put some milestones up there!

Biz Dev went to get coffee - fill-in reports two models explored, both broad and vertical. The numbers on the broad play won out. Wow, knowledge-based decision-making at its best!

Design - getting navigation worked out - may have a template complete within the half-hour

Dev - at 7pm, did a post-mortem of previous 8 hrs while having dinner. Found out who knows what (maybe wish we already have the product in play!) . Starting to hear more about functional specs so can figure out how to move forward.

Marketing - competitive analysis done, still working on financial models. Putting finishing touches on the pitch.  Also have a press release completed and ready to send out to major local media outlets tonight with the hope to get someone out tomorrow for coverage.

- Kimm

Functional map for entire website created. I don’t understand it yet, but it looks pretty. There are also placeholder pages… in place.

Matt is describing to us what that map looks like, and how the website is currently designed to work.

- Kimm

So the idea is to build a product that helps a group - small to medium size company or a team or department in a larger organization - identify the skills each person has.

Some of these may be technical skills. Some of the skills may be more right-brained-directed. Usually I’d call these hard skills and soft skills but I have a huge amount of respect now for one person who makes a strong argument for not differentiating them that way so we’re working right now in a classification vacuum in that regard.

However you call them, there may be additional skills and interests worth sharing that are more social than business-oriented in nature. These improve and increase the social interactions that help business get done efficiently.

With that in mind, we’re developing features around a few key areas

• Manager view and control
• User profile pages and access to search for specific skills
• Skills field matrix - working with the data that’s collected

There are also already some ideas for what sorts of features would be great for Phase II and later.

- Kimm