Startup Weekend ATL and My Idea

Since 6pm Friday I have been involved with Startup Weekend Atlanta. I've written about it quite enthusiastically in the past and it has been an greater experience than I could have ever imagined. In a nutshell, a bunch of (~60) talented developers, designers, business people and the like try to choose an idea and create a company within a weekend. We're at about the half way point and have made great progress, but I'll back track for a second and tell you about the idea.

Friday night was mainly comprised of 20+ idea pitches from various people. I was one of those people with an idea for a user-generated content suggestions service for bloggers. After many hours of voting, re-pitches, debating and convincing the business development people, my idea came out as the winner. In its most basic form bloggers put a widget on their blog that allows users to easily post an idea for a great post and other readers may vote on that topic. There are a ton of other features and implications of this service in the pipeline but I have to get back to coding/design/marketing/server stuff so I won't go into the details - hopefully, you'll find out for yourself when we launch Sunday night.

The idea is now called Skribit - a mixture of "scribe" and "it" mixed with the ribbit croaking of a frog, which adds a great branding element.

Overall, I was most impressed with how many talented people have become so devoted to initial idea and the different angles people bring in with them when brainstorming. So much has been going on in a bunch of groups - we have a business plan, a ton of UI wireframes, a server (courtesy of (mt), thanks!), a domain, a logo, lots of guys hacking away at an Appcelerator-based RoR web app, many large post-it notes on the walls and unfortunately, a shortage of beer.

For more info keep track of the Startup Weekend Atlanta blog and my flickr stream. By the end of this weekend I will officially be a co-founder of a company and hold shares, which definitely can't hurt my LinkedIn page and sounds cool to boot.

Oh and Leopard has issues with the current releases of MySQL for OS X, so you need to follow this guide. Thanks to Andrew Hyde for creating Startup Weekend in the first place.

Update: See What is Skribit? for more info.