Well it’s been a busy two weeks. Obviously I didn’t update throughout the weekend like I was hoping but here’s a rundown of what happened.
Friday: People pitched maybe 50 ideas. All the ideas were put up on the wall and then we voted on the best 20 or so and formed teams around them. We then all went home by 10pm as the building was closing.
Saturday: This was the major workday. I got there a bit before 9am and we worked for 12+ hours until the building closed again at 10pm. A few people never showed up for the next day and a couple teams went by the wayside. I guess this was inevitable, but it’s kind of oddly funny seeing the teams shrink over the weekend. We probably had one of the biggest teams. We started with around 10 and by Satuday it was down to 8. We also had a lot of developers. 6 of us wrote code and the guy whose idea it was and a microsoft PM on our team worked on the market research validation side. I certainly learned a lot as it was the first time I’d really coded in a group. The fact that we had so many devs was both a blessing and a curse in my opinion. We spent most of our time coding and actually got a working demo going where as most of the other teams just had mockups or non working html files with no backend, but I think we were weak on the presentation and market validation side of things.
Sunday: This was presentation day and most of our time was spent meeting with advisors, preparing the presentation and finishing up some coding. Unfortunately we didn’t win. That award went to corki a wine menu rating converter app. If you’re interested you can see the pitches here Our pitch was around the one hour mark.
Here’s a short highlight video of the event where I make a cameo around the 10 second mark.
The site is live right now tonightsplaylist.com It doesn’t look too different from the initial launch right now. Our team has met once since the event and made a bunch of backend code changes that you can’t see. Overall it was a great learning experience and I’d definitely do another one.