Start a Business With 100+ People In 3 Days…
By Luke Murray
Last month I went to up to UC for a couple days to start a company. Yes…start a company in a few days…a weekend to be exact. Apparently, I’m not the only person crazy enough to do this - there were 100+ other people there that planned on doing the same thing. And, just to clear up some confusion:
- No - We didn’t know each other
- No - We didn’t know how we were going to make money
- No - We didn’t have a business plan
- No - WE DIDN’T EVEN KNOW WHAT BUSINESS WE WERE GOING TO START
The only thing we all knew is that we were sure we’d have something by the end of the day on Sunday. Fortunately, Elizabeth Edwards (@eedwards), Bill Cunningham, Steve Boord, and Dr. Jeff Stamp had done this before last year. It was the second annual InOneWeekend event.
So how do you go about getting 100 people to make something from nothing in two and a half days? Well, I don’t really know for sure, but I did learn this:
- Organized chaos is unavoidable and necessary.
I mean both words. Organized AND chaos. Jeff and Elizabeth had a “plan” throughout the weekend. It started with teaching, and then ideation, and then consistent updates on the project’s progress. All weekend long we were trying to hit benchmarks and timelines. However, Jeff was careful not to make the decisions himself or to force us to do anything specific…which meant we spent A LOT of time not having a clue what we were going to do. I probably heard “I don’t know what we’re doing” about 1,428 times. The good part is that this confusion and lack of complete clarity didn’t keep people from participating. The participation, of course added to the confusion and the chaos (if you add 100 people’s two cents up, you’ve got more than pocket change…and a lot of pennies to count) but it ended up creating a REALLY well thought through idea. No angle hadn’t been considered. So once we were able to go…we really took off, which made me realize…
- Deciding on what you are going to do is at least half the battle
We started thinking about ideas at around 6 or 7pm on Friday and still hadn’t started “working” in the traditional sense over 24 hours later. We didn’t even have a name until Saturday night. BUT once we did clarify what our idea was going to be (Dipidee - a last minute local deal finder for services - i.e. sporting events) we made an amazing amount of progress. The idea had been scrutinized and clarified so much that when all 100 people were cut loose to start working on it they knew exactly what they were working on. How far we got by Sunday was what really surprised me the most though…
- It’s amazing what can happen when people set “unrealistic” goals
Yep, 100 people that didn’t know each other or what they were going to do ultimately were able to put together thorough market research, financials, screen shots, basic back end functionality, a logo, and even a short commercial. It was impressive to say the least, and I really am glad that people like the folks at Neyer Holdings are out there encouraging us to do something we wouldn’t have thought possible if we were doing it all by ourselves…especially not in one weekend.
So sign up for Dipidee to find out more about how this “experiment turned company” grows.
Dipidee - Jump on it!
http://www.dipidee.com/
