At the end of September, I took part in a Startup Weekend for the first time.  While I had participated in a number of Hackathons, Startup Weekend Blacksburg was the first competition that wasn't entirely "code code code!", but additionally focused on business development and market validation.
After pitches on the first night, I joined a team with six other people, consisting of five software developers, and two business majors. Â The pitch, which later adopted the name Pet My Pets, was for a website for pet owners that would match people who needed their pets watched with people who wanted pets but for one reason couldn't take one on full-time. Â Effectively, it was AirBnb for pets.
From left to right: Joe Fletcher, Matthew Hubbard, Michael Liu, Wilson Mitchell, Subir Jolly, Phil Sayre, and Andrew Mussey.
Our focus for the weekend was to build the website and to verify that there were customers that would be willing to either have their pets watched or to "rent" pets.  Interviews with people throughout the Blacksburg community resulted an overwhelmingly positive response on both sides.  While some people were concerned about letting a random person from the internet watch their pet, they said they would be put at ease if there was some sort of verification or background checking in place.
For our website, we set up a Python Django application backed by SQL Lite with a Bootstrap template on top. Â SQL Lite functioned perfectly for rapid, distributed development. Â If the idea were to progress beyond Startup Weekend, we had planned to migrate to MySQL. Â Dynamic content on the website was scripted using jQuery, and the page was hosted on AWS (thanks to the free Startup Weekend credits). Â While the app isn't online yet, we were able to launch a landing page on the very first night using a Bootstrap template backed by a Lua script hosted on Webscript.io. Â The Webscript.io platform served as a great, quick, database-free way to get email addresses of interested customers and to send them a fast "Welcome" message.
We didn't come out of the weekend with any awards, but we did close out Sunday with a ton of knowledge.  My biggest takeaway came in the form of team dynamic; while developers at Startup Weekend events are typically harder to acquire, our team containing five almost ran into the opposite issue of having too many developers.  A single developer could have played the role of product manager and more effectively divvied up the workload for the other programmers.  This would have been a huge help in preventing overlap and improve efficiency while building.
The Roanoke Times has a great writeup on the weekend, which includes more information about Pet My Pets. Â If you're interested in the idea, you can check out the Pet My Pets website at http://petmypets.co.
A huge thanks goes out to Alex Meng, Viktoriya Leshchenko, David McGrath, and Lauren Rose for offering up their pets for the production of the video at the top of this post.
