Plucky Reflections on Startup Camp (Melbourne, 2008)

Startup Camp Australia was the brainchild of Bart Jellema (of Tjoos), running first in Sydney (September 5th-7th), and over the last weekend (October 3rd-5th) in Melbourne.

I attended the Melbourne event with fellow Mayhem team mate Matt. The weekend-long event was held at the same Fitzroy location as Melbourne Jelly, provided by Maxim Shklyar of Kisla Interactive. Matt and I spent the afternoon at Jelly working on our own projects awaiting the start of the event. At 6pm, the it kicked off, and by 7:00pm the proceedings were well underway. We started with a warm up brainstorming exercise, and then partitioned into 3 groups of 6. By the end of the first night each team had developed and pitched 6 project ideas, selected a specific direction, domain name, and roughed out a project plan for the next 2 days.

I ended up in the "green team" which quickly focused on the direction of location-based mobile application with notions getting people together. Two competing ideas within our team were an underdone CV (Linked in like) site (like iworkontheweb) perhaps with the addition of user-generated aptitude tests, and a "dine with strangers" app where people cooking at home offer a seat to a registered random stranger. Importantly, these competing ideas transformed the "bluetooth dating" application into an SMS-based random meet up app, where users are matched based both on their location and bio. After much flip-flopping around the words "ad hoc" and "meet", we arrived at the name "a bit of pluck", as in you need "a bit of pluck" (courage) to make that first step to engage a stranger in conversation. Before the end of the night, Steve from our group pitched the evolved idea to room, with finesse.

We had a solid team that naturally gravitated into a sub-group of 4 hackers and another of 3 marketing/business development guys. The dev side made the decision to go with PHP given that more people in the broader team were familiar with the language than anything else. Initially the Joomla CMS was proposed as a platform for the prototype, although this was changed to CakePHP the next morning given that Joomla appeared to heavy for our needs, and CakePHP presented itself as Rails for PHP.

Our reasoning was sound, although the collective lack of experience with CakePHP, especially from our technical leads, hurt the development of the prototype and the productivity of the team. From Saturday Morning, we had until approximately 10am Sunday morning to have a functional prototype. By 6pm Saturday evening, we still did not have half of the functionality for our core use case, and due to a miss-configured DNS record, we still did not have a working domain name or landing page. We were in really bad shape, and the pressure was on.

We collectively made the decision to scrap the last 8 or so hours work, and start a fresh using Ruby on Rails, and yet another hosting environment. At this point, the development shifted from being driven by consensus, to being driven my the two technical leads. The late change made a huge difference, resulting in a prototype with more functionality than the PHP sibling within 20 minutes, allowing the rapid development of an (until then) missing look and feel, as well as a renewed focus on the in-bound and out-bound SMS integration problem at the core of the application.

After a long, hard, all night grind by all four developers, we had a functional prototype. Users could sign up and manage their profiles. They could specify their location either via the web interface or via a direct message on twitter to the bitofpluck account. Those users in the same location at the same times could then be matched based on their profile data, and both be sent an SMS (again, via twitter) arranging the meet up. We still had a few minor technical difficulties, but the core use case worked, and more importantly, it worked during our first demo to the other groups, and to the second demo that included the VC guy. Unfortunately, the broken DNS for our bitofpluck.com domain name was not resolved by morning, so we went live with our backup domain abitofpluck.com.

The 24-hour stress-fest meant that the developers were left mostly in the dark regarding the hard work by the business development side of the team. I can't speak for my fellow hackers, but we knew we our business guys were good. Steve's pitch the night before was awesome, Pieter's meticulousness was apparent, and Duncan's experience and confidence were obvious. Our demo was simple, really only an application exhibition. The second presentation was the real pitch, where we got to see the fruit of our business teams hard work, and damn was I impressed! Most importantly for me, it connected the abstract and functional aspects of the nights development work with real business and market concerns, something I had no time to ponder. Unfortunately, the VC didn't like the idea or the personalities, or something and let us know about it, which dampened the feelings of achievement in the team (to say the least).

Matt worked on MarketBeagle, likely the popular winner of the weekend for its simplicity and VC kudos, and his design skills shone through especially with the logo. I understood the third app iSportster, but I can't say I was excited by it.

I took away more than I expected from the weekend. I went in happy enough to meet new people and hopefully walkaway with a finished prototype. In addition, I was exposed to a much larger segment of the rich underground web entrepreneur crowd in Melbourne, and was shown first hand the clear need for business and marketing savvy and the will to execute along that axis. I expect I'll be at the next Startup Camp Melbourne event, although I'll try and get more into the business development side of the project, and suggest that technical leads make technical decisions.

Check out the team project summaries, the flickr stream, and videos taken from over the weekend. Check out Steve's reflections, Matt's reflections, Duncan's reflections, and a post on TechNation Australia.