Continued from “My life with the StartupBus: Part 2"

There we all were, semi-finals done, ready to celebrate CareerMob’s win and we’re told “no beer on the bus” by our driver. Naturally we did what we knew: we decided to work on another project on the way to Austin.

The idea

A team came up with the idea for Cloudspotting and we all thought about other ways to use the same concept. “What about writing on drunk people?” someone said. And thus, Drunkspotting was born. I opened my laptop and started working on a logo, a homage to the Cloudspotting logo. We had a bunch of code from the Mexican team (or so we thought) and started working on a native app. This wasn’t like the rest of the trip. We had the entire New York bus, a bunch of the Mexican bus, and a few stragglers from the Chicago bus all working on just this one thing.

The Hilton

Once we got to Austin, we setup shop in the Hilton lobby. It didn’t seem that weird because it was SXSW, everyone was going to be on their laptops, but not like us. We had 30+ people working on design, development, marketing, business dev and press. Within the first day we had a TV crew from PBS do a quick interview with us, another with Leo Burnett, t-shirts, a donations campaign and we were incorporated.

The finals

In the midst of all the Drunkspotting stuff, we still had the StartupBus finals in a couple of hours. Deliverish had just assumed that we hadn’t made the people’s choice vote, so we kept hacking away on Drunkspotting. The phone rang and we were told to be ready for the finals. We weren’t prepared. We hadn’t done any work on our demo, so we decided to wing it.

The aftermath

After a bunch of coding and partying, it was time for me to head back home. I was a little sad. Not only had I had an awesome time building some cool stuff, I had met a whole new crew of people and now I was leaving them. I soon realized that I wasn’t really leaving anyone. We all stay in touch and I consider of bunch of my bus-mates as pretty close friends.

The experience

Being on the bus was one of those things that has changed my life. I’m more confident now. I respect the community even more. Hell, I’ve taken some of the things I’ve learned and applied them to my day job.

If you’ve never done a hackthon or a startup competition and have been thinking about it, apply for the StartupBus. It just might change your life.