This is where it all started
Bootstrapping a startup in 48 hours
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Last week, at the very same hour we were coding along with 1000+ hackers for a weekend of code.
Hosted by Jason Calacanis and his team at Launch — who did a great job on making the event rolling smoothly, the event was billed as the “Largest Hackathon in the world” and all the participants had to apply first to enter the competition.
We decided what would be our project only few days before the hackathon and I think we registered the domain name the night before. We had a lot of different ideas, certainly interesting ones (like this promising “Airbnb for Cats”) but pressroom.io was the one we found the most valuable and the idea that we thought best.
A perfect place
We focused on this idea because Launch Hackathon was the perfect place to pitch our target: entrepreneurs, startups, investors, sponsors, etc.
The idea could be summarized like so: our goal is to take the pain away from coding / designing / administrating your press page, just like you would use Tumblr for your company blog, Zendesk for your help/support page or Statuspage.io if you need a nice page to display the current health of your website.
Things getting real
“Build half a product, not a half-ass product”
― 37 Signals, Getting Real
As avid readers of Jason Fried & DHH we went for a MVP, cutting all the extra cool features we had in mind to build something that works and putting extra efforts in details so that people would want to use it right after the demo.
Since I’m much more a designer than a database expert I tackled the mockups and started designing in the browser, starting on the mobile version first and expanding to desktop view.
Benjamin, my teammate, nailed the backend (a Ruby on Rails app hosted on EC2 and using Parse) and we got a first working prototype in hours.
Then we decided to implement the features that would make the difference for the judges, starting with the “post by email” which is, to me, great in a lot of use cases.
Here is an example: you’re on the bus / taxi / Uber, and receive a tweet on your phone : a nice article on TechCrunch about your latest product; you want to showcase it on your website right away, problem is that from your smartphone you can’t really update anything on your website and maybe you’ll have to ask the technical guy how to do that, and he has a lot more to do on his plate; Now, with our product: on your Twitter App, you have an option “Mail link” — see where I’m going here? — well, from there you update your page in seconds, literally.
Judging round #1
“Create your press page in minutes and update it in seconds”
With this tagline, we had a pretty straightforward way to describe what we wanted to achieve and this is how we presented our product to our two judges, David Samuel & Erik Kokkonen.
And that’s how we made it to the finals. Here are the rating and comments of our judges:
Judging round #2
With the pretty good response and feedback that we had, we were pretty confident that our product could interest the final judges and/or investors.
But to speak English on stage when you’re French — the accent kills half of your pitch — , tired after two days of coding and not prepared for this exercise, well, that results in an awkward 3 mins presentation. :/
But at the end of the day, it has been a great experience, and we received some great feedback on the product after our talk. Some people are actually waiting for our product to be live, and for us it worth more than winning the first place!
So even though we are not great public speakers, we try to be great product builders, and that’s why we’re still working on pressroom.io and hopefully will be ready to release sexy press pages for our first client starting in December.
So make sure to grab an invitation we’ll contact you pretty soon!
