Trust me … I was there. 

Last friday night at Code Academy 24 people stood in a hot stuffy room on the 3rd floor corner of the old Montgomery Ward catalog warehouse. We were buzzing about our Startup Weekend.  We listened to the definition of just what a startup weekend really is: spend 40+ hours validating our models, interview and develop customers, create a marketing plan, write a budget, make a forecasts, and figure out how to bring it all to fruition.  Sure we wanted to do all that, but come on… we were going to build the whole thing too.

At 5pm that night we stood in that room with nothing but each other.  We split up into five teams and 48 hours later... we had built 5 startups. It happened by validating the ideas, making changes, and then building the software.  It was crunch time and we all threw everything we had at it.  

There were people with families at home sleeping on the floor just to get a couple hours of sleep, pizza boxes, coffee cups, beer bottles, and MacBooks were everywhere you looked.  It's amazing what you can accomplish when you are with a group of passionate people.

When it all was over we had legit companies.  By legit, I mean validated business solutions, marketing plans, vendors, customers (REALLY), and the web application. BUILT. 

Startup weekend never happened…  

Build and Launch a Startup Weekend … DID

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