So, you just won Startup Weekend. Now what?
One of the goals for me was to meet some cool guys that might want to hack with me, perhaps even one that wanted to hack with one of my many partially finished ideas. I really wasn’t expecting to have something pretty much finished by Sunday night, which is just due to the relentless of our team.
I think part of how it all came together was dumb luck. I had no idea how good our developers, UX, and business guys were. Just putting myself in the situation where something like this could happen was a (very) good decision in hind sight.
So, a bit about what we built. (elevator door opening) When a person needs help from a savvy professional, they can connect through talkible.com and schedule an immediate/future call via Twilio with an expert. When that call takes place there is a one time charge paid by the consumer. All the billing and backend stuff to make the connection happen is taken care of as well. That’s it. Talkible. Knowledge when you need it.
We’ve all thrown around lots of different numbers about how big or small this thing could get. The youtube billion dollar buyout and others have been quoted throughout the weekend. I think it’s human nature to think what you are building is going to work. It will be interesting and telling to see what happens when what we’ve done doesn’t work exactly as planned.
We are envisioning to start small and learn from local developers (our first vertical). Try and answer questions like do people really want this? If so, what kinds of people like this idea more than others? What kind of % are professionals willing to pay for this (easier) way to connect to consumers (aka “monetize your downtime”)?
But maybe even more basic questions need answering now, like where do we go from here? We were just a group of people thrown together for a weekend long hack-a-thon. What are the things that we haven’t thought of, that are sitting around the corner ready to derail our happy train of optimism and enthusiasm?
On a personal note, I’d like to say that this weekend was a remarkable experience. I spend a shit ton of time hacking stuff together, all pretty much by myself. The idea that we’ve (almost) already created something that people REALLY want to buy, is hard to explain in words. My sincere appreciation and gratitude goes out not only to my team but to everyone that made startup weekend possible.