Startup Weekend Auckland 2nd place getters JumpOnBoard.co hard at work.
Photo courtesy of the wonderfully talented Janine Barr.
Post written by: Ursula Hoult
It's 6pm Friday night and 54 hours from now you're expected to have worked an idea up to investor pitch quality.
Welcome to Startup Weekend!
Obviously there are many factors that contribute to team success (or otherwise) over the weekend but the software tools you use, can be one of the factors that make or break you. Not only on the weekend but into the future as you build a real live business from what was once just an idea.
I've listed five tools below – all of which were used by the Startup-Platform team as moved we from being:
- three Startup Weekend participants moved by our team leads pitch to
- a pressure cooker weekend of work to
- a Highly Commended placing to
- the hard work of putting together a real live business getting ready for its first trial in the field.
Trello.com
Free and easy to use. You can set up the bulletin board to replicate the headings on the Lean Startup methodology. Then each team member can login and add, edit or move to do items as necessary. We found it a great way to keep the ideas that were bubbling around, recorded and moving along.
Github.com
A private repository costs $7 USD per month but you can add as many team members to that repository as you want. This is a more programming focused tool than Trello and is useful for reporting bugs and creating a code review.
Skype
It's likely you'll find yourself having many a late-night (moonlighting on your day job) conversation. The free version is fine for audio conference calls but at least one team member with a premium account is required for video conferencing or screen sharing.
iwantmyname.com
Once you've decided on a product name, you'll need a URL – this is the simplest and easiest way to buy and host your domain name right then and there. It can even be done without technical skills! Which is important because you're already got your developer working on code for your product :)
unifiedinbox.com
When you're in a team that won't physically be together after the weekend, a tool to manage the email addresses you set up for your project, as well as your Twitter and Facebook accounts, is a useful tool to for managing these communication streams. Startup Weekend participants are typically offered a deal for free usage. Check with your organiser for details of your weekends deal.
We set all of these up on the first night of our Startup Weekend to ensure the work we put in was being managed most efficiently. There are many more tools that you may want to consider as essential for your team, you can find a more extensive list here.
And when thinking of essential tools - don't forget the humble cellphone. Swap cellphone numbers (for when one team member fails to return from lunch!)
Ursula Hoult is PR Manager at Unified Inbox in her day job and is about to attend her second Startup Weekend. Her AKLSW project Startup-Platform received honourable mention. The team use Unified Inbox for managing their incoming communication streams.
