{"id":446,"date":"2011-08-27T20:10:31","date_gmt":"2011-08-27T12:10:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gergely.imreh.net\/blog\/?p=446"},"modified":"2011-08-27T20:06:08","modified_gmt":"2011-08-27T12:06:08","slug":"startup-weekend-taipei","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gergely.imreh.net\/blog\/2011\/08\/startup-weekend-taipei\/","title":{"rendered":"Startup Weekend Taipei"},"content":{"rendered":"

I really should have started to write this up about two weeks ago, just after StartupWeekend Taipei really happened. Better late than never (if there was ever a good excuse then this is), so taking some time out on this typhoon weekend, here’s my experience of that good 54 hours.<\/p>\n

\"Board<\/a>
StartupWeekend Taipei #1 logo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Start<\/h2>\n

After StartupBus<\/a> and the Taiwan Enterpreneurship Challenge<\/a>, I cannot deny that I have a lot of fun at these kinds of events. So I signed up for Startup Weekend Taipei<\/a> quite a long time ago, especially since I had a free StartupWeekend voucher from Microsoft BizSpark.<\/p>\n

I kept recommending the event to more and more people and it seems there were quite a few of my friends who wanted to come but couldn’t because it was all sold out. “Sold out” in this case is 150 participants. That’s probably about the same number of people as on all the Busses, though this time stationary and all in one place. I wasn’t sure what mixture of people will come, just that it will be quite different as Taiwan still seems to have less of a hacker culture.<\/p>\n

It turned out that more than 2\/3 of the people were Taiwanese and much smaller proportion of foreigners than I expected. This is great – for Taiwan. For me it was a bit of a roadblock.<\/p>\n

25 people went up to the stage to pitch their ideas in the hope of getting a team. Of those, only 5 were in English. After the pitching everyone got their three pieces of voting post-it notes and could mark which ideas they liked the most. Based on the votes, only the most popular 12 pitches were kept and only those people could carry on their ideas. Well, since Taiwanese were really not voting for ideas pitched in English, there were in the end 2 ideas that I could join up with… This time it worked out well (oops, is this a spoiler?), but next time probably the organizers should look at this whether the procedure of setting up teams worked or not.<\/p>\n

12 teams for 150 people also meant that every team was huge<\/em>… At the Bus our team had 8 people and I felt it was pretty big. Certainly if I want to start my own company I would probably get going with less then that.<\/p>\n

Actually, that large team count is good for getting things done once we agreed on what’s to be done, but it’s pretty bad for reaching such agreement.<\/p>\n

Our team had 7 people: 3 coders, 1 designer, 3 marketing\/business planning. One (two) sentence pitch: Restaurant search engine for menu items. Tell us what you wanna eat, we show you where are the restaurants serving that in the neighbourhood.<\/p>\n

\"Whiteboard<\/a>
Whiteboard planning for FoodJing interface and functionality<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Simple idea, but with our team we had quite a bit of back and forth when discussing the focus of execution. I tend to get very involved once I’m sold on an idea, maybe a little bit too involved. After a bit of discussion I had the role of back-end designer, creating the infrastructure on which all of the user-facing services can be built. I choose that one, because I felt that’s the part of the architecture where I can add the most in terms of making something that other people can rely on and can build on relatively easily. I do feel that without a good back-end no amount a front-end glitter can save things….<\/p>\n

Of course in part I chose this role because on the Bus I worked with a great team who taught me a lot about that and wanted to try myself out.<\/p>\n

Exercise for the first evening (Friday night): A long, long discussion about a name. Next up is\u00a0getting some ideas of the feature set then simplify, cut, reduce and then reduce some more. It’s great, I recommend it to everyone. I think I was a bit too combative at that time (sorry, Dobes!), but at least I realized that and tone back quite a bit. Since at 11pm they closed the venue we went home till the morning. I wanted to get something little done by that time so I can show that off for the team. Of course I slept like a log instead.<\/p>\n

Next morning (Saturday) I woke up quite early, earlier than usually on a weekday. That’s a very good sign. At the venue they already had some breakfast prepared for everyone. I was too nervous and excited to eat in the beginning. Then when I tried my bagel an hour later, it was amazing! Run back to the table to get another one, but obviously everyone is enjoyed them a lot and were less nervous. All of them were grabbed up.<\/p>\n

\"Filled<\/a>
Breakfast time at StartupWeekend, these were totally yummy<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After some more discussion we got working on an actual thing. The technology used:<\/p>\n