Stephen Yeargin

A few hours ago I arrived home from a successful Nashville Startup Weekend, a marathon-esque experience where teams come together around ideas vetted by their peers to create brand new companies. I had heard about the event last year and had given some thought to going, but ultimately decided against it. This year I wanted to at least take part in the experience, even if I was not able to stay the entire time.

Friday night we heard about 37 two-minute pitches from participants wanting to bring their idea to market. Some were well thought out, others were created on the fly. I decided against pitching an idea that dawned me halfway through the evening, largely because I was not quite ready for the possibility of it making the cut. The list was whittled down to a top ten (the ties were kept for this round) by allowing everyone to cast three votes. The list of around ten was cut to a final group of five by allowing everyone to cast just two votes. Here is a brief synopsis of the ideas that were pitched.

(Note: If you read any of these descriptions and it totally does not match what is on the other side of the link, I may have either misunderstood the aim of the project, its changed in the interceding time, or the domain was allowed to expire. Such is the nature of Startup Weekend.)

PlanetPE.com (first introduced as PETeacher.com, so it was a good move) is an educational resource provider for PE teachers where they can download lesson plans and guidelines for physical education classes. A teacher would pay a subscription to the curriculum that included hundreds of individual modules. The group completed four modules in the course of the weekend and had a well-designed site ready for beta testing. The company is on Twitter at @planetpe.

LawSleuth.com was our group. The project was pitched as an iPhone application that would enable the user to research legal topics from their iPhone. Seeing the trouble with obtaining that kind of information, it then morphed into a legal research portal, to finally being a training Web site with a similar site architecture as PlanetPE.com. Instead of instructions on how to do research the codified law, the final curriculum was a video series about how to do investigative research on individuals, companies and related subject matter. More about ours later. The company is on Twitter at @lawsleuth.

SkippingLine.com (first introduced as “Office Hero”) sets out to reduce the hassle of sending someone to a local fast food restaurant to pick up lunch by handling the order entry and payment process. The “hero” sends out an invitation to by e-mail to co-workers informing them of what restaurant he or she is traveling to. The invitees can create an order and pay for it online so that it can be bundled in with other co-workers orders when the “hero” picks it up. It is a very cool concept. The company is on Twitter at @skippingline.

SortaCare.com was originally pitched as a daily sports briefing for non-sports fans. The idea from its creator was that she did not want to actually have to watch, listen or read about sports in order to carry on an abbreviated conversation. This group was challenged with finding a revenue model to work within the niche they had identified. It looks like this one is headed towards being an ad-supporting blog and newsletter site. The company is on Twitter at @sortacare.

Focus Radar is perhaps the most ambitious of the five projects presented at Startup Weekend because it enters a crowded market with a very different spin on the topic. The end product will be an Adobe AIR+Flex application to manage tasks and events. It is also ambitious because it aims to integrate with popular mail clients like Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Outlook client. The “radar” component comes from how it presents icons representing tasks and events on a canvas, where objects closest to the origin being both more important and more timely, while further items away from the origin can be less important, less timely or both. I cannot wait to see the beta. The company is on Twitter at @focusradar.

“Hiring” for these projects was as simple as following your favorite finalist into whatever room he or she claimed. Some groups were development heavy, some design heavy and some marketing/business heavy. Ours was well balanced, although an extra designer might have been helpful in polishing our overall look and feel. You know that a group has had to “dig deep” when I end up doing both Web development and graphic design.

Closing thoughts

We also venture capitalist in the room listening to our presentations. I heard one of them comment at the end that Focus Radar and SkippingLine had the most potential. It will be very interesting to see how things progress past this weekend for some of the projects because I could tell there was a lot of momentum that was not simply going to stop because Monday is coming.

As I said before, I really enjoyed working with our group on this project even when it was going through its various incarnations and business models. That little component of change is what made this “simulation” that much more real. Business is all about making the right changes at the right time and succeeding in the marketplace as a result. The oddest part came from the actual production of the course material. Because I am a terrific sport, I volunteered to let the group use my online identity as a test case. At one point, the project was about to have its name changed to “ReallyScarySh**.com” to accurately communicate the feeling of shock and surprise when one realizes just how easy it is to piece together their private lives by doing just a half hour of Web searching.

If things work out, I certainly want to be back next year. The organizers did a fantastic job of securing a great venue in Vanderbilt Owen School of Management, provided exceptional meals and solid event management all at a price that could have easily been three times as much. While I will not be forgoing my steady paycheck from my current employer anytime soon, it was a lot of fun to dream very big for a day or two.