We built a company in a weekend (sort of)
A couple weekends ago, I participated in my second Startup Weekend event in Louisville, KY. I had a blast for a number of reasons. I worked on a really cool concept, got to see significant development in a type of business I’ve never worked on before, and had an amazing team to work with. Also, the support of the event’s facilitators and sponsors made everything run really smoothly. Most of all though, it was a fantastic learning opportunity. And unlike my experience in school, I absolutely love learning as much as I can about entrepreneurship.
So what was this great learning opportunity? Over the 54 hours of Startup Weekend, I joined a team with Kela, Izaak Prats, Mitchell, Vinny, and an impressive 15 year old Andre to build SnapHunt, a platform for streamlining user discovery and interaction platform for Snapchat. Snapchat itself is a beautifully-designed, intuitive solution to one of social media’s biggest problems; the digital layers between people reduces the “socialness” of social media. We interact with Facebook and Twitter, not with our friends. But with Snapchat, we get the raw reminders that our friends are real people (whether that is good or bad is yet to be determined). It also has a lot of potential for business.
However Snapchat isn’t without its own flaws, namely the fact that finding quality content creators outside of your direct friend group is nearly impossible. Enter Snaphunt.
SnapHunt solves the biggest problem with the world’s most personal social media platform; it streamlines the process of discovering and engaging with new, relevant content. By filling this gap, SnapHunt will draw more users to the Snapchat platform, thereby ensuring that today’s generation is not swamped with impersonal, ad-filled social media. SnapHunt’s discovery and engagement features will bring the social back to social media.
If you’ve read any of my other posts, you’ll know that I’m COO of another startup, Inscope Medical Solutions, that is in a totally different industry — medical devices. So why would I care about a social media platform? Well, despite being an engineer, I do actually like people and interacting with them, so I’d like to help improve Snapchat. But it’s mostly because of the aforementioned love of learning about startups. Here are some things I learned at Startup Weekend while working on SnapHunt.
Sometimes customer discovery shouldn’t be your main focus. If the market is already asking for a solution, maybe you should just build the thing they’re asking for the most and iterate from there (through customer discovery, of course). The people want Snapchat search (really, really, really badly), so we built it. A couple weekends later, we have over 8,000 users. Now SnapHunt just needs to keep improving search and build out features to keep people on the site longer.
Marketing is surprisingly fun, especially when you’re working with others who are passionate and don’t take themselves too seriously. We could have gone the stereotypical Silicon Valley route of praising our own efforts to “revolutionize communication in the modern age” or some other BS. Instead we realized that SnapHunt is the goofy lovechild of Google and Reddit that just wants to be friends with Snapchat.
When you start from a place of making fun of yourself, you get to have more fun with your marketing. For example, I tried to start a twitter war between two national brands. It didn’t work. I also tried to get free coffee from Starbucks in return for more Snapchat followers. Still no coffee. But we were able to get good feedback from some Snapchat pros like Justin Kan, Morgan Brown, Mark Suster, Everette Taylor Jr., to name a few.
Team dynamics are super important. I know, I know. This is nothing new. But, like many old pieces of wisdom, the benefit is in the reminder. We watched other teams struggle with egos, overzealous protection of ideas, etc. while we just got shit done. It was such a good reminder for me that I was better able to address a minor issue with my “day job” team in Inscope as a result of Startup Weekend.
Finally, I learned how the scrum development method can be implemented while still allowing flexibility. I’ve been looking at how to bring scrum into my Inscope to help with medical device development for a while, but thought the rigidity might hamper some of our contractor relationships. Startup Weekend helped me see how to get the scrum spirit without full implementation.
Over the weekend, we didn’t do any standup meetings. Instead, we’d just notice when someone slowed down, ask what was happening/how we could help, and loop all members back into forward momentum pretty quickly. We also didn’t outline specific sprint goals for each day, but we did identify key features that could and should be tested to allow us to improve our goals over time.
Finally, we didn’t put much effort into forcing a team unity around a project bigger than ourselves. Perhaps it was a result of the hype of Startup Weekend, or perhaps it was an unconscious part of our team selection process, but we all recognized that we were working on a really cool project that could be pretty big. Thus motivation issues were pretty non-existent during the weekend, and have continued to be the least of our worries.
If you enjoyed this, follow me (and on Twitter) for more. I’ll be writing a weekly recap of lessons learned during this new program, along with some occasional more general posts about medical devices, startups, healthcare, etc.
