Continued from “My life with the StartupBus: Part 1"
I had partied all night with buspreneurs from my bus and from the Alumni bus. Luckily enough for me I didn’t have a hangover, I was just sore from sleeping on a random hotel room floor. My phone alarm went off in the bathroom and I realized that I might be late. I got my shit together and rushed to the meeting spot. Good news, there were a few people who were running even later than I was.
The introductions
We finally got everyone on the bus and started our trip. The conductors let us know how things were going to work: go to the front of the bus, tell us who you are, what you do, and if you have any ideas you want to work on. I got up, gave my spiel and hoped that somebody would like one of my ideas. No one did and I internalized a little bit of sadness, but that’s ok. If people had liked my ideas, I wouldn’t have met my team.
The team
One of the girls introduced herself and pitched her idea: a peer-to-peer delivery service. She wasn’t focusing on just the app or the website, she was thinking about the bigger picture of local logistics. I thought, “This is it. This is the idea I’m going to work on.” We re-introduced ourselves and I got acquainted with the rest of the team.
Erica Swallows: business development, slave driver
Wicky Mendoza: user experience, post-it notes keeper
Gandalf Hernandez: back-end developer, wizard
Allen Lafuerte: graphic designer, sleep-hoarder
Rui Da Costa (me): front-end developer, crazy t-shirt wearer
The journey
About an hour into the trip, I got nauseous. I never get nauseous so it must have been a combination of adrenaline, lack of sleep, driving and nerves. We started brainstorming and came up with the name: Deliverish. We purchased the domain and got cranking on the rest. From there it was a cycle of arguing, coding, designing, re-thinking and eventually sleeping for 2 or so hours at a time. We stopped along the way to pitch our ideas to the other teams and various “mystery guests.” By the time we hit Texas we had a working web-service, demo, presentation, and business strategy. We felt pretty good about everything…and then we pulled into San Antonio.
The judging
We were met at Rackspace HQ by a crowd of people, clapping and cheering us on. I felt like a rockstar, but we still had to present. We had a few kinks to iron out so we were hoping for one of the later time slots with the judges and we got it: 3rd-to-last. This meant we could finalize a few things, work on our presentation, shoot a Vine video, and relax. When it was time, we rocked our presentation and the questions the judges had for us. We were flying high.
The semi-finals
The funny thing about flying high is that you crash pretty hard. When they announced the semi-finalists, we were pretty bummed that we didn’t hear our name. We were already preparing for the semi-finals as if we were a sure-thing, so we did what anyone would do: we rooted for our friends and booed the “enemy.” There was one team that we couldn’t boo though, and that was the team from Cloudspotting. The entire New York bus went a little crazy after that...
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