Chapel Hill Startup Weekend

The champagne has popped, the cards have been swapped, the final handshakes have been made.

But no public launch of the site.  It will remain in private beta, until the core team polishes up the site to a launch.  Tomorrow night, a launch site will be at WorkPerch.com.

I am sure a flurry of posts will be up tomorrow, addressing all the happenings of the weekend.

My final thoughts of Chapel Hill are as follows:

• Great Dev Talent.  Even with a Rails Conference in Charlotte this weekend, there was still plenty of Rails talent to spare.
• Solid Usability core team, comprised of several individuals stepping out of their comfort zone
• Smart people (stepping out of their comfort zone)  Several creatives did design that was out of their comfort zone
• Brilliant startup scene (I expect great things)

Goodnight all, we have a bottle of Champers to finish.

The 25 people pictured in this photo (if you’re hidden, don’t worry…we have headshots coming soon!) have been an integral part of making this weekend wildly successful. Whether or not we launch, get to market or sell for a few million, the picture captures the spirit of the energy here this weekend. I’m so proud of the energy, passion and focus every person has brought to this project. It’s been an honor. And it’s only just beginning!

We built it on Rails!

(Not pictured = photographers Matt Tyndall top pic & Gwen Bell bottom pic)

It’s nearly one and the teams are head’s down. A few updates from the morning.

We have–

1) headshots of everyone on the team
2) some feedback coming in based on interviews of participants
3) a new, permanent blog
4) new posts coming in all the time
5) lots of team work and collaboration going on
6) a one person PR team (*ahem*) so anyone that has experience in that (you know who you are) with passion for the proj, let us know workperch at gmail
7) mad love for the folks following along w/us!

Check out our fledgling blog!

Follow us on Twitter.

More updates coming in the morning!

Hm. I am no Micah. I am no Jeff.

Great work everyone! We are rocking out and doing NC/Chapel Hill/Carrboro/RTP proud.

In addition to group goals, it’s vital that we set personal goals periodically throughout the weekend. My personal goals for today have included:

1) Facilitate wellness of participants (by bringing in healthy food, leading yoga, checking in with folks)
2) Help out with design (by listening in and offering feedback when asked)
3) Help make sure the 5,000 feet level of coordination runs smoothly (everything from being present for people to staying healthy myself!)

–

Those are just a few personal goals (of many) and I am sure that many other people had some personal goals coming in to the weekend. Before you go to a weekend and throughout it, it’s great to check in with yourself and your goals. What were your goals for your weekend? What are your goals for future weekends? Did you find those goals changed a lot mid-way through?

Seems like tonight we are going to need to dig deep and discover what it is we think we’re going to be able to do this weekend, realistically and in best case scenario. Knowing that will help us figure out what the rest of the weekend will look like. At 10pm we hit the real half-way point, and it really does feel as though we’re in the middle of it! Yay goals! Go team!

At our 3pm meeting we were hit with the hard fact that in terms of hours, we’re nearly halfway through the weekend. This is the point of the weekend where we feel the crunch. Teams have responded by breaking off into smaller groups and the Dev team is now working in pairs.

Breakdown of the Dev Team looks like this–
One team is working on Migrations/DB (homepage)
One team is on Registrations/Dashboard
One is on Finding/Booking
Another is working on the Manage Space page
A final piece of the Dev team is working on Deployment

Let’s see what they create!

Design team has firmed up the logo. We’re now looking at color schemes, pounding out hex code to be uploaded to Basecamp and laying out pages.

Biz Dev is moving around the room and leaving the building, as far as I can tell. They’re also planning to have the executive summary up by the 6pm meeting.

Rock on, team! You’re doing great.

The teams have created goals to have achieved and share at the 3pm meeting. Here they are!

Dev: dev setup done/spec’d out features
User Experience: detailed flows to dev team by 2:30 (that’s 1 hour from now)
Creative: logo options (3 solid ones)/put to vote at 3pm, layout concepts, 2 concepts to show at 3pm
Biz Dev/PR: exec summary & elevator pitch
Front End: basic positioning w/o styles–styles applied to a few pages by 6pm

Let’s knock ‘em out. Looks like most teams are on target and showing signs that they’ll be ready to show what they’ve got at 3.

One of the first things we needed to do after deciding what the software/business idea was going to be was find a name. Several people sat down Friday night and threw out name ideas. Gwen wrote them all down on several big sheets of paper.

The concept involves offices, space, and desks. So lots of ideas came about with those words. In true web tech fashion many had two names. ex. vosnap

Then I suggested that we select a few of them and see if they were even available as domain names. That weeded out lots of them.

Suddenly someone said out loud jokingly, “How about ‘A Desk Called Wander’.” Several people started smiling. Others laughed. A few people said nothing. Some how this phrase resonated with people. The more people we told the more smiles we saw.

Then the next morning… feelings changed. No longer was the surreal sentence a viable brand idea. The Biz Dev folks thought of another name(s). WorkPerch, SpotGap, and Perchr.

Looks like that’s what we’re going with WorkPerch …

Last night we saw a group of about 40 people get together at the Blogads offices. We met some milestones within our first five hours together as a group including:

- Narrowing more than 20 ideas down to five, then three, then one (code name: Kwopr)

- Fleshing out the concept so that everyone could understand it–the plan is to offer a website/service that allows people looking for temp office space to find cooperative spaces where they can work in their local area.

- An example of a place that already does this cooperative workspace is in Denver. It’s called The Hive and it has shared desks, chairs, white boards, meeting rooms, etc. I went once with Alex King and would never have known about it unless someone had told me he had some space there. This site would make that information more readily available

This is the latest from our 9:30 am meeting:

-User Ex guy TJ gave us a great presentation with basic workflows beginning to be laid out (pictured above)

-Andrew is walking around w/a “Hit List” board getting people to give info about where they’ll be at target points throughout the weekend

-Dev is leaning towards using Ruby on Rails this weekend

That’s the latest! I saw some twitter talk about Ustream getting up. Not sure if that will come to pass, but if it does, we’ll update you here!

The final idea left standing on Friday night was Kwopr. The concept, as I understand it now, is to create a maps mashup to help people find a temporary office or meeting space. Businesses, property managers, building owners, and others who have a bit of furnished space (I use that term lightly) can make $ off a micro-rental. I think the time people use this space will be measured in hours. More info to come!