Controlled Chaos – The 501K Story

Updated 11/15/2010 – add link to video presentation.

Over 12-14 November 2010, Don Smith and I participated in the Seattle Startup Weekend with over 100 other developers, designers, entrepreneurs, and business managers. Some attendees came with the intention of getting help with their startup that is in-flight, others came with ideas that need watering and the soiled tilled; Don and I came to have fun and to contribute to the community in any way we could.

During the orientation meeting on Friday night, 12 Nov 2010, 35 of the 100 attendees presented ideas for a startup. I interviewed several of the startup idea presenters and chose the 501K startup idea presented by Eric Koester (http://www.greentrepreneur.org/).

At the end of the interview process, 15 teams (startup companies) were formed; the stage was now set for what was about to happen (keep reading…).

Saturday and Sunday were devoted to fleshing out the business scope, business model, design and program the business product.

Finally, on Sunday evening, each team would give a corporate presentation to four independent judges; presentations needed to included marketing materials, business plan and product demonstration. Judges would critique the team’s business plan, presentation, and product; feedback was designed to point the team down the path of success.

501K

501K provides online services making it easy to set up and execute reoccurring donations. Visitors are presented opportunities that target causes in their community as well outside their community. Additionally, it allows members (membership is free) to set up their own causes that others can contribute to. Causes are one or more charities clustered together.

View presentation video here.

Over Saturday and Sunday our team:

• scoped our business objectives
• developed a business plan
• iterated on product design and requirements
• designed marketing materials
• created a corporate presentation
• designed the web site
• created the web site art work
• created all of the web pages
• programmed authentication integration with Facebook (more providers to follow)
• programmed recurring drafts using Amazon services (more payment providers to follow)
• wrote the code for the ASP.NET MCV3 web site
• created a SQL Server 2008 database with an abstracted repository layer for easy data access and testing
• gave a corporate presentation that included a live demonstration with all of the above, including live interaction with both Facebook and Amazon.com (no demo-ware or smoke and mirrors)

Team 501K

Most team members had never met or only knew one other person before this weekend.

Meet our diverse team:

• 5 – business folks (lawyer, consultant, company owner, and university students)
• 1 – designer
• 2 – Non-.NET programmers with Mac’s, no Visual Studio 2010
• 3 – .NET developers with Visual Studio 2010

I’m astonished how folks from diverse backgrounds and skillsets came together, gelled as a working unit, put the project ahead of their personal goals for the weekend, and delivered what we did; on time and one budget (free).

Tell Me the Truth – What Really Happened – How was the Sausage Made?

What transpired over this weekend can best be described as high octane controlled chaos. Think about the pot we dove into. Only two days to actually start from scratch and deliver all of the above.

To pull this off, each group in our team had to work autonomously, yet in parallel. We had sync up meetings during both days; sometimes a meeting could result in one or more groups being reset, requiring adjustments to their time constrained deliverable.

From the designer & developer side of the house we had to stay flexible to survive the ever changing requirements. Trust me, Gumby has nothing on us. With only two days to deliver, we had to start working without assets developers and designers normally expect from business.

Think I’m pulling your chain; check out our beautiful running web site until late Sunday morning.

Team chemistry and trust is everything. Without this, the stress can easily derail a project. Focusing on the steak and not the peas, made this team very successful, and established a highly energized and creative atmosphere where each team member could deliver at their maximum potential.

Our designer, Facebook developer and Amazon developer worked on their Mac laptops. As progress was made the work was integrated into the ASP.NET MVC3 project.

Our .NET developers worked on the ASP.NET MVC3 web site, abstraction layer for data access and the database. (See below section on LINQ to SQL).

It wasn’t until after the Saturday 7:00pm team meeting that we had a concrete picture of the deliverable from a requirements, product workflow and 3^rd party product integration perspective.

We continued to work until 1:00am Sunday. At this point, each piece of the puzzle was working autonomously; integration into the final product would start on Sunday after 9:00am.

Sunday was all about integration of each team members assets into the product and presentation. Business made a few additional product adjustments and the team collaborated on wordsmithing the deliverables.

Measurable Result

This was a bottom to top team effort. Each of the eleven members provided critical feedback and assets that lead to the overwhelming success of this work.

Our team was chosen as winners by the judges’ panel and we have been entered to compete at the national level.

Startup Weekend Food – Deluxe Geek Food

Only the finest for our geeks!

LINQ to SQL

Over the weekend, several Twitter Peeps asked me why the team elected to use LINQ to SQL for our demonstration product over the weekend.

LINQ to SQL has outstanding code first capabilities and features that are much simpler to implement than Entity Framework.

Remember, to set the team up for success, developers had to be incredibly flexible. We had to be able to adapt to change, delete the database, recreate it and then populate it with data. This change had to be accomplished in minutes. We had to have a process in place that allowed for a change at any time, including right up to game time that would not negatively impact the deliverable.

You must also consider that the data entities needed to play nice with ASP.NET MVC3. We wanted to be able to take advantage of some of the features that require entities to expose metadata in the form of attributes.

I did look at both solutions, neither of which I had ever used; in the end LINQ to SQL made the most sense for this weekend. When we move to production, we will move to low level ADO.NET for all data access.

Video

View presentation video here.

Close

I encourage you to attend at least one of these Startup Weekends in your area; it will be a growing and very fun experience. To locate an event in your area visit: http://startupweekend.org/cities/.

Have a great day,

Just a grain of sand on the worlds beaches.