If the participants at Startup Weekend are lucky, they’ll go into the event tonight with a great idea and come out 54 hours later with a functional web startup. If they’re extremely lucky, Ashton Kutcher will show up and invest a few thousand dollars in it.
Kutcher and Demi Moore caused a buzz when they showed up at LA’s Startup Weekend in February, and they were more than just a pair of pretty faces, too. Kutcher ended up investing in Zaarly, a marketplace startup concocted at the event by a Seattle-based techie named Eric Koester.
Admittedly, the prospect of Hollywood celebrity turning up at Toronto’s Startup Weekend is pretty low (although I hear Robert Pattinson is in town). That doesn’t mean it’s not a golden opportunity for the city’s developers with day jobs to finally launch a project of their own.
The sold-out event, which is going down at the Burroughs Building over the next three days, is the developing community’s equivalent of an extreme sport. Participants show up on Friday and make pitches for startup ideas in an open mic session. Anyone able to inspire other attendees then forms a working group that spends the next two days building a web product. By Sunday night, the teams present their finished products and are judged by an expert panel. There’s a ton of work and not a lot of sleep involved. The $99 registration fee includes bottomless coffee.
Since the event was founded in Colorado in 2007, Startup Weekends have taken place in over 100 cities around the world, from Skopje to Ramallah to Lima, and according to organizers 36 per cent of the startups born at the events are still going three months later.
Many of the project ideas are community-minded and altruistic, like Jimmy Fairly‘s buy-one-give-one glasses scheme. Others are downright creepy, like Hottie Spotter, which lets guys snap photos of good-looking women and then post them on a map so they’re easier for other men to find. Stalker app, anyone?
The project that came out on top at last year’s Toronto event was Brian Gilham’s Task Ave., an app that serves as a location-aware shopping list. It allows you to make a list of items you need and then it alerts you when you’re near a store that sells them. A short 102 days after Gilham walked out of Startup Weekend last summer, his app was being sold in Apple’s App Store.
Gilham says the most important aspect of Startup Weekend is the collaboration.
“I find developers to be very solitary. So the big benefit that I got was it really teaches you how to come in and work on someone else’s idea and have to work on a team,” he said. “And the short timeline teaches you about putting out the best product you can in the shortest amount of time. You end up using technology you didn’t know about before.”
A year on, Gilham says he and his five Startup Weekend team members are still working full time so Task Ave. remains a bit of a side project. It didn’t help that one team member got his laptop stolen.
“Things might have slowed down a bit, but as a learning experience and the opportunity to give yourself some exposure it was fantastic,” he said. “To be perfectly frank, it’s still bringing in money.”
Some members of the Task Ave. team have signed up again this year (the event is now sold out), although Gilham has other commitments. He does have some advice for those looking to grab the top prize this year.
“Get to a working example of your product as fast as you can. The products that were most successful last year were the ones that we had a working example that you could show somebody,” he said. “And be prepared for very little sleep. It sucks at the time, but it’s worth it.”
