So, you just won Startup Weekend. Now what?

[chocoheadfred]

We are a team of guys (and a gal) randomly thrown together in a prolonged tech hack bender known as Charlotte’s Startup Weekend. This event is part of a larger nationwide Startup Weekend group which promotes this idea. The concept is to see what happens when you put entrepreneurial minded people together for a short defined amount of time and say “go”.

One of the goals for me was to meet some cool guys that might want to hack with me, perhaps even one that wanted to hack with one of my many partially finished ideas. I really wasn’t expecting to have something pretty much finished by Sunday night, which is just due to the relentless of our team.

I think part of how it all came together was dumb luck. I had no idea how good our developers, UX, and business guys were. Just putting myself in the situation where something like this could happen was a (very) good decision in hind sight.

So, a bit about what we built. (elevator door opening) When a person needs help from a savvy professional, they can connect through talkible.com and schedule an immediate/future call via Twilio with an expert. When that call takes place there is a one time charge paid by the consumer. All the billing and backend stuff to make the connection happen is taken care of as well. That’s it. Talkible. Knowledge when you need it.

We’ve all thrown around lots of different numbers about how big or small this thing could get. The youtube billion dollar buyout and others have been quoted throughout the weekend. I think it’s human nature to think what you are building is going to work. It will be interesting and telling to see what happens when what we’ve done doesn’t work exactly as planned.

We are envisioning to start small and learn from local developers (our first vertical). Try and answer questions like do people really want this? If so, what kinds of people like this idea more than others? What kind of % are professionals willing to pay for this (easier) way to connect to consumers (aka “monetize your downtime”)?

But maybe even more basic questions need answering now, like where do we go from here? We were just a group of people thrown together for a weekend long hack-a-thon. What are the things that we haven’t thought of, that are sitting around the corner ready to derail our happy train of optimism and enthusiasm?

On a personal note, I’d like to say that this weekend was a remarkable experience. I spend a shit ton of time hacking stuff together, all pretty much by myself. The idea that we’ve (almost) already created something that people REALLY want to buy, is hard to explain in words. My sincere appreciation and gratitude goes out not only to my team but to everyone that made startup weekend possible.

[kodeshpa]

We have gone through similar situation and my first piece of advise is,if team members are ready to keep aside their ego's then put your efforts with them else as startup weekend idea's are open, go ahead and work with people you know better. Secondly, give people proper roles and set expectation right on front else if at all you grow it creates problem. Lastly before registering company as per roles and involvement decide on equity.

Idea's are worthless, implementation are priceless.

[chocoheadfred → kodeshpa]

Definitely need a solid base before moving forward. Personality, chemistry etc are everything. I think these are readily fleshed out in a weekend though. There was one dude who kinda self excluded himself. Not sure if we are ready for roles yet. Like a vinn diagram many of us overlap, in a good way. The equity discussion should be fun. Any recommendations? What worked for you?

[kerryfalk → chocoheadfred]

  "Personality, chemistry etc are everything. I think these are readily fleshed out in a weekend though. "

If you met a girl/guy and had one awesome weekend - would you believe you've figured each other out enough to commit to marriage?

People are complex. Walking in with optimism is great but with a blind-eye to respecting the complexity of human nature may be unwise. In every social dynamic there are storming stages and if the relationships aren't strong you simply won't survive the storm. Or at least, most probably won't.

The next step seems clear to me though. Keep communication levels within your team high and find customers. Avoid the rocks and keep your eye on the prize. Welcome to the fray.

[chocoheadfred → kerryfalk]

@kerryfalk Good point. It's easy to be smitten with googly eyes. So, how do you know then (for a business), and with like ~8 people is probably exponentially more complex. I wonder if though some people/personalities will more or less cancel each other out...making it easier than with just two people.

To make a dating parallel though, I think we def got at least a triple.

[kodeshpa → chocoheadfred]

These dude are always there to spoil the party. Don't give/commit any equity upfront. Workout chemistry, commitment level,start building a real world product and on the way distribute equity amongst those who stays with you along the path. We know how we built products in startup weekend :).

[chocoheadfred → kodeshpa]

Any recommendations for when to make this distribution decision? If applicable, what have other (successful) startup weekend guys done?

[ig1 → chocoheadfred]

What I've seen work: everyone who worked on it has full rights to the IP generated by that team (so if there's a split of opinion on how to proceed, separate team members are free to fork). Then you can move forward with the team members who want to continue and agree equity going forward on the same basis as any other startup.

[russjhammond → ig1]

Can you expand a little on the IP part. I was at the same Startup Weekend, which the Talkible guys certainly deserved to win.

My team is getting together this week to have "the talk" about moving forward. Our idea is has a ton of IP but know that not everyone wants to move forward and/or work with each other.

Additionally, I came up with a pivot while working on this one that is related but certainly different. I have not shared it with the rest of my group yet(mostly because I thought of it 2hrs before we had to present), would they have any claim to that IP if I ran with it?

[ig1 → russjhammond]

In terms of code, graphics, etc. there are two common approaches:

1) Release everything generated on the weekend into public domain or under a general free licence (LGPL, Creative commons) that for practical purposes let's everyone use what was generated.

2) Draft an agreement which says something along the lines of "anyone in this group is granted a perpetual licence to use the IP generated on the weekend for whatever purpose they see fit"

What you want to avoid doing is granting equity based upon IP created on the weekend, that will just cause you a nightmare down the line. Equity should only be given to people who are making a long term commitment to the project, and use cliffs, etc.

Typically IP only covers code, design, etc. it doesn't cover ideas, so an idea for a pivot wouldn't be protected by IP law regardless of who came up with it or where. If you decide to build a startup based on your pivot idea just don't use any code, designs, etc. from the weekend unless you've got some kind of agreement in place for it.

[fourspace]

Another team member here. I did the UX design and HTML/CSS for the site and I don't think I've ever worked so hard and so efficiently in my life. Thanks Startup Weekend!

We've set up an invite page at http://talkible.com if you're interested.

[jzcoder]

Before you get too confident about being the next YouTube, consider there are already at least two startups doing this exact thing. I can only remember one now, VoiceTap, but there is at least one more that I remember had a single founder.

[fourspace → jzcoder]

There are other competitors as well, but that just validates that there is market interest in this field. Having no competitors is much more suspect!

I don't know that anyone on the team seriously considered a YouTube scale exit. In fact, thinking about exits this early is probably a giant red flag.

[chocoheadfred → jzcoder]

Thanks for this info. What was the name of the other company?

[bmelton]

Having recently done my first SW, and forming a company with the team, I'll throw some ideas out at random. Note, we didn't win, so we didn't have the baggage any prize winnings or office space or whatever.

- The biggest thing that we ran into were a couple of personality clashes. They were evident during the weekend, but grew to be more obvious as the idea proved worth pursuing. We ended up shedding some people in the process, mostly due to attrition.

- We welcomed everybody to keep going, in the hopes that roles (CEO, CTO, Cwhatever) would become organically defined. In reality, it's mostly just collaborative brainstorming, and the real roles won't become apparent until we have a product to sell.

- Don't incorporate too quickly -- let there be some time for people to realize that they don't really have time for this in their lives. A weekend is one thing, but every weekend (and afternoon, and day, etc) is another. People have lives that they can't necessarily divest themselves of. The last thing you want is to name somebody CEO and then they stop showing up.

- Try to figure out an equitable split in the event that people start talking about a big exit. Our team started as 10 people (we're down to 7) -- our initial number was 5% per person, vested, and with more to be potentially allocated later.

- Try to figure out a way to keep people on for the long term. Monthly profit sharing is an idea that potentially can kickstart someone into leaving their day job to work on it full time.

- Find the shortest path to revenue. Make dollars immediately. Even if it's just a tiny fragment of the feature set -- take one defining feature, build it, and start trying to generate revenue.

- Try to keep everybody focused. Some of our team is biz-dev, and while there's not obviously as much for them to do during the development cycle, they can be lining up sales, blogging, marketing, networking, attending related conferences, etc., etc. People that aren't looking for those opportunities should be addressed.

- Try to capitalize on the publicity you got. During our weekend, we got national press, 3 beta customers and were able to pitch with a working product and a solid business plan. Keep that going. Perpetuate that.

- Get a contract in place with everybody -- vest some shares to ensure that they get a piece of whatever happens, but make it fractional depending on how long they stay. Make it equitable -- developers can still own their code, but can't take it away from you. All works contributed become patentable, ownable, redistributable and sellable by the company. You might need a corporate entity for this to work, not sure.

- Avail yourself of legal counsel. We were fortunate enough to have a conference lined up right after which dealt with company formation from some very qualified attorneys -- we asked them a lot of questions. This might be good enough for you, or it might not. IANAL, but find one and talk.

Good luck.

[chocoheadfred → bmelton]

@bmelton Thanks for your detailed response.

What is your SW startup?

Have you ever consider kickstarter.com for funding your SW startup?

What's the best 3 ways you've found to keep everyone focused (project management system, group chat, weekly meetings, etc)?

How were you able to get national press?

What lawyer did you use?

[bmelton → chocoheadfred]

What is your SW startup?

- I'll keep that one under my hat for the moment. We'll be announcing something in about a week, so if you add your email to your profile, I'll let you know when we do.

Have you ever consider kickstarter.com for funding your SW startup?

- We're bootstrapping, and don't really have a way to make use of funds other than hosting, but it's immediately profitable after the first sale, and hosting isn't a huge part of the cost.

What's the best 3 ways you've found to keep everyone focused (project management system, group chat, weekly meetings, etc)?

- We're on Skype always, and aside from a recent hospital trip of mine, we're in pretty constant contact. We use pivotaltracker for bug-spotting, Skype for general chat, Group.Me for mobile contact or finding people who aren't on Skype, Google docs and GoToMeeting for collaboration. I'm sure there's more I'm forgetting, but those are the main things.

How were you able to get national press? - We put some of the non-developers on buzz-building during the StartupWeekend. By the end of the weekend, we had over 100 Facebook likes, 900 Twitter followers, some blog coverage and a phone call + a couple of mentions on Twitter by Robert Scoble.

What lawyer did you use? - Steve Kaplan of Pillsbury Law is who we consulted with, and whose insight proved to be invaluable. Like I said, we were able to exploit his wisdom at a conference, so we aren't regular customers of his (yet), but he was extremely savvy in answering our questions and even provided follow-up answers via email for some questions we had that were outside of his focus. - http://www.pillsburylaw.com/ - If you'd like his contact info, email me, and I'll be happy to provide it for you.

[chocoheadfred → bmelton]

I did (I think). If not, it's bigcheeseatmousekickdotcom

Thanks for your comments about kickstarter. I think we are in the same boat but just interested in what others are doing.

So, national press doesn't mean like a "national" site...just lots of people all across the place. I think the tweets by Scoble probably are a lot better for buying street cred though.

I'll check out this site. We are all meeting this week and this will be something we'll be talking about (lawyer/legal stuff)