Describing InOneWeekend In 500 Words
July 24, 2008
Given a half-page, Laura Baverman covered the launch of LifeSpoke and InOneWeekend thoroughly. Laura touched on all the highlights and included snippets of the human interest side of the event. I appreciate her coverage, and I’m sure she experiences the frustration of having to condense nearly 72 hours of content into, say, 500 words. That’s a challenge.
Fortunately there is no word limit in the blogosphere, save for the attention span of you, the valued reader. Surely holding your attention span is no small feat. So here are some of the details of my InOneWeekend experience to add to Laura’s.
Laura captured the core of Roy Gilbert’s talk. “Have a large and compelling vision…understand risk and embrace failure…and think beyond the launch to build a team,” she wrote. For me, Roy responded to a question I asked about how research work done by Google engineers actually become products released to the market. Surprisingly, although it probably should not be, Google will release without a business plan at times in order to know exactly how the market will respond. I don’t know if it’s a chicken-egg thing, but that seems irrelevant now that Google can afford to back potentially bad ideas as they work to launch the next great one.
We did spend Friday evening narrowing down ideas. I laughed when I saw the watchmesleep idea that allowed others to peer in on the guy who overslept. Nice. And as Laura reported, Vanessa Indriolo’s idea of online scrapbooking received the majority of votes. Supplementing this idea were four other similar ideas that coalesced into the concept of LifeSpoke.
The dynamics on site could have split the group and made the rest of the weekend unproductive, as nearly, if not more than, 50 percent of the participants did not vote for the scrapbooking idea. Those who did not throw their hat into the scrapbooking ring split their votes between an application that keeps track of receipts and an application that ranks great deals that people find on the internet.
I know I felt quite a bit of frustration as I had a hard time getting behind the group’s idea. I told myself that the process mattered much more than the concept, and in the end that proved true. By Sunday I was convinced that any of the ideas could fly given the horsepower of our team, and we just needed to pick one. My guess, though, is that we lost a few people on Saturday because of the polarity in the vote, and that some folks simply could not buy into the fact that their participation continued to prove valuable. I have to hand it to those who stayed involved. We made the weekend great with our commitment to each other first.
The InOneWeekend group split into technical, management and operations, finance, sales and marketing, business strategy, and branding teams to work on their respective responsibilities Saturday and Sunday. Laura describes the LifeSpoke financial model as “hazy, predicting a $16 million company in three years,” but if you were in the rooms, on the teams, doing the research, and watching the give and take of heated deliberation, I don’t think you would have selected the word “hazy.” With a competitive strategy based on real-life market comparisons of our actual competition, LifeSpoke’s birth is grounded in what I would think most participants would describe as conservative reality.
Still, the odds of success are long, and no one is cashing in their options quite yet. Laura got it right that “the Flash Activescript technology didn’t yet work,” but in business terms that’s a hurdle that can be overcome. A tangible outcome of the weekend is, as Laura describes, that a number of entrepreneurs came together to experience what they could accomplish as a team. We now have the connections we need to begin to succeed where we may have floundered on our own, without the proper support, in past ventures. And now that we’ve been through the process, we’ll be able to save ourselves a whole lot of time when we face our own challenges in the future.
- Andy
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Blog post: my personal additions to the Business Courier InOneWeekend story http://is.gd/12KM
Andy,
What a cool event! I’m so glad that you were able to participate. I look forward to you bringing the concepts of the weekend back into LUCRUM.