AwesomeBox.Party

This past weekend I attended Startup Weekend, an event where engineers, designers, entrepreneurs and the like spend 48 hours together to not only create a prototype of a new product, but to also define a sound business model to support the idea. For many of us, the business side of things was brand new territory. As grads from Hack Reactor, we were expecting to spend our time this weekend coding away like a usual hackathon, but this event provided a different kind of challenge, and we were eager to get cracking.

The Pitch

Our group pitched and created AwesomeBox.Party. ABP allows users to have shared control over the music playlist at social events. By visiting the site and joining your event’s room, anyone can view the playlist, add to the song queue, and even bump up song priority using AwesomeBucks (in-app currency). ABP allows party goers and party throwers control over the musical atmosphere, so everyone can do their part to keep the party rockin.

Planning Stages

After we formed our team Friday night, we got started by white boarding our general plan for the weekend. We established what our MVP looked like, as well as stretch goals that we thought would be fun and challenged to work on before presenting the final product. We also discussed what kind of technologies would be best suited for our project, and much to my delight, the team was very excited about using React.js for the front-end. I was also excited to see that we’d be using Socket.io for the real-time communication between client/server, as I've yet to use sockets.

Hackers => Entrepreneurs?

As mentioned before, this event was a bit different from what most of our group expected. As the title implies, there is an obvious emphasis on the idea of building a startup, but even knowing that, we still couldn’t anticipate just how much business foresight we needed for ABP. We were told to build a business plan for monetization, determine the demographic, consider any legal issues, get real feedback from the public (if they would actually use our product, what should change, would they pay for X, etc). As an engineer, I definitely have more appreciation for the teams who take care of all these things- it’s tricky stuff!

Final Thoughts

Hands-down the best part of the weekend meeting and working with this awesome group. I can say with confidence that we all learned something new, and had a lot of fun in the process. Even when thrown into something completely new, everyone’s great attitudes and communication skills made the entire process much more streamlined and easier to move through each feature efficiently. I’d definitely be up for working with any of them again in the future! #TeamAwesomeBox