Saturday saw major progress on the “Boom or Bust” idea. The team definitely satisfied Aaron’s stated goal for the weekend to “get some shit done.” Now the question was, was it enough to take the top prize?
After thanking his team (Atoms Matt Fletcher and Mike Marsiglia, Scot Rumery, John Rumery), Adam DeLong demonstrated a Boom or Bust ad embedded in an existing website (RateBeer.com). The Boom or Bust ad asked a question about the advertised product. The ad showed thumbs up and thumbs down images just below the question. Clicking on one of these images cast a vote in response to the question and resulted in some nifty animation of the ad. The ad flipped and revealed another image from the advertiser once you expressed your feeling, along with the stats from the question (“78% answered yes”).
Meanwhile, back in server land, the team caught the vote and recorded it. Advertisers could then visit the Boom and Bust website to see the response to their question. The graphs presented showed total votes and the result of the voting. The server was live, hosted on Heroku, one of our current favorite sites for hosting Ruby on Rails apps.
After the presentations, the four judges [full disclosure: I was one of the judges] sequestered themselves away to select the winner. The criteria included feasibility, progress on the idea during the weekend, presentation, and a demonstration of the technology. I’m happy to report that Boom or Bust was selected as overall winner of Startup Weekend.
I had a great time at Startup Weekend. I was honestly surprised by how much progress all the teams made in a single weekend, and how successfully the teams adapted their ideas based on what they learned. Several of them seem like good candidates for Momentum, or a similar incubator program. I met some smart people I didn’t know before, and came away excited by the energy, ideas, and enthusiasm bubbling up out of the whole event.
One Trackback
[...] start, finish and retrospect was also documented by bloggers at Atomic Object. We thank them for their [...]