Start Your Engines

Bobby L. Hickman

November 13, 2008

W hat happens when you put a wide range of technical innovators into the same space for 54 hours and challenge them to create a new company from scratch?

That's the concept behind Startup Weekend, a series of events across the country that helps launch entrepreneurial ideas and build stronger ties within the technical community.  

Atlanta's second annual Startup Weekend, held November 7th - 9th at the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), "was better in every way than the first one," says, Lance Weatherby, venture capitalist at ATDC, the local event's primary sponsor. "There was more of everything: more people involved, more companies created, more excitement, and more interest in the technology community."

Participants bring a variety of skills, including programmers, graphic artists, marketing, business development, strategists. The first Atlanta event in 2007 began with 70 participants, dwindling to about 25 at the end. This year, 130 people registered; more than 100 showed up Friday; and by Sunday evening, there were still about 80 people involved.

On Friday night, presenters share their ideas for a startup. Participants vote on which projects they want to develop. Then people work all weekend on that product and present their results Sunday night.

Last year's event group launched Skribit, a blog content provider. This year's weekend spawned seven companies. Weatherby said one of those is operating in "stealth mode." The other six are:
•    CloseBuy.me, a location-based inventory search engine
•    Fuutprint, which will produce virtual business cards
•    GivingTi.me, which enables entrepreneurs to help each other one hour at a time
•    Jumbis, a platform for using social media to drive product sales
•    Reepli, a rapid response public relations service
•    TwitPay, which would provide simple payments via Twitter.

"The basic concept is getting a bunch of smart people together and see what they can create over the course of a weekend," Weatherby says. "But the real reason for doing this is to build a stronger technology community in Atlanta. We want people to get together, talk and learn what each other does. That's why I'm so excited by the number of people involved this year: the event seems to be achieving its primary goal."

He says Skribit "is probably the most successful company to come out of a startup weekend, and they have them all over the country - probably 25 weekends out of the year."

Paul Stamatiou, co-founder of Skribit, says, "We would not nearly be this far along without Startup Weekend. I wouldn't have met Calvin (Yu, the other co-founder), a huge driving force who led lots of the development tasks. We also wouldn't have the support of Lance (Weatherby, a Skribit advisor) and other people we met." Before the 2007 event, he says, "I really didn't know that many people in the Atlanta tech/startup community." At that event, "I pretty much met the entire Atlanta startup community the first weekend."

Stamatiou says this year's event was different from the first one. Creating multiple companies and working in smaller teams was a more efficient approach and kept more people involved.  He adds he knows of several people who picked up work based on connections they made at 2007 event and he saw similar opportunities this year.

Stamatiou says Skribit had been "an idea of mine quite a while before I pitched it at the first Startup Weekend. But I didn't have technical know-how to build it from scratch." So, when the group agreed to build his concept during over a weekend, he welcomed the opportunity. He and Yu have continued working on the product.

Skribit addresses the problem of helping bloggers find ideas. Stamatiou said, "The product has had surprisingly wide adoption, consider that we've spent no money on marketing. It has found its way through word of mouth." Skribit now has more than 4,000 registered users.

Stamatiou graduates from Georgia Tech in mid-December and will then focus all his attention on Skribit. Around January, he says, the company will introduce professional paid accounts. "Paid accounts won't help that much on the money side," he says. "It's more a proof of concept to show investors that people value our product enough to pay for it. We'll take our results and start talking to investors more seriously."

One of the companies emerging from the 2008 Atlanta Startup Weekend was CloseBuy.me. Founder Colin Ake says the product "helps people save time and shop smarter by searching local retailers' inventories."

Ake says he has been talking about his concept for months. Startup Weekend "kick-started the development process and gave us a starting point for technical and business development going forward. We have a platform, a prototype and some good ideas about how to develop it moving forward."

He says the event "connected me to developers I normally don't have access to - a pool of talent that will help get CloseBuy.me up off the ground soon. Without Atlanta Startup Weekend to help out, I likely would still be talking about the concept."

Ake and others hope they can follow in Skribit's footsteps. Weatherby says the Skribit co-founders continue improving product and "they're getting more users every day. It looks like the company may be able to get a little money into it so Paul can focus on Skribit on a full time basis. If that happens, we just created another entrepreneur. It's a good feeling when you can have that type of impact on somebody's life."

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