The first [Startup Weekend Buffalo](http://buffalo.startupweekend.org) happened this past weekend November 16-18, 2012. Here's the experience I had. # The Start ## Day 1 _Started at 6:30pm_ We listened to some speakers talk about how the Startup Weekends started and some inspiring words from Eric Reich and Tom McManus. Then we went into pitches. I pitched an idea for a mobile app. I was super nervous for those 60 seconds, despite that, I said what I said. We wrote our ideas on large sheets of paper and posted them up on the surrounding walls. We were given 3 sticky notes to place on the ideas we liked. Several groups wrote their idea name and a few paragraphs about what they were about. They even stood by their poster to pitch to anyone with a sticky note. I wasn't sure if that was something that was allowed. I probably should have written more on my poster and stood by it, but I wanted to mingle. I was pretty bummed about not having my idea voted, but as luck would have it, I found an idea that clicked with me. We formed our group, made up of Devin, [Elizabeth](https://twitter.com/beth_weinberg), [myself](https://twitter.com/jhsu), and [Nicholas](https://twitter.com/nb3004), discussed the idea further and worked out our next steps. Elizabeth Weinberg, the idea-pitcher, walked us through her experience and what she believed the solution would be.  The problem we are trying to solve is that public relation professionals need to distribute their releases, but the current methods are inefficient and painful. The accepted way is to blast it to journalists and writers or send it directly in hopes that it will not be missed. This process is very inefficient. We want to help get valuable information to interested parties. We had 2 developers (including myself), 1 front-end dev / designer, 2 non-technical people (taking care of validation, research and formalizing our idea). _Day ended for our group at about 1am, though I continued to work through to about 3-4am at home._ ## Day 2 _I got in a little before 9am_ Group met, found a table near an outlet and had breakfast. We had a discussion about which language to go with, since one was a php developer and myself a ruby dev. We discovered that the night before (well, more like morning 1am-3am) we both had separately already started. We decided to go with rails =). I got the team set up for development. Installing dependencies was an adventure. We were able to merge in the front-end design work being done into our application with relative ease. We settled on the name PRessConnect and we got cracking on building the platform.  Groups of mentors were introduced to our groups and ideas and were able to ask some quick questions. As they day went on, the mentors walked around and were able to spend time individually with groups. We had some great mentors to speak to and showed genuine interest and also were able to give us harsh feedback, which is super useful in pointing out questions we need to have answers for. The questions that seemed important for our solution seemed to be about rollout and competition. We got some good food.  Fat Bob's We continued to do research on competition and got feedback from journalists, PR professionals and small companies that might need to issue their own press releases. _Headed home at about 2am._ ## Day 3 _Somehow, I was able to get in before 10 am._ We continued working on the platform, getting the UI looking decent and functioning. I fixed up user registrations, made sure a user could sign up as either a journalist or publicist. Several parts of the ui needed to be tweaked. The front page, press release creation and dashboards were essential and wanted to make sure those were solid.  We had a lot of questions we had to make sure we had answers to. Definitely had my head in code and needed to pull back and make sure we worked on what was most important, our presentation and pitch. A lot of the time was spent just thinking and discussing. Presentations started at about 5 pm. We were lined up at number 12. I wasn't nervous. We were solving a visible problem and were one of the few teams with working demos and it felt good. Plus, I didn't have to speak. Presentation went well. We got some tough questions about existing competitors. I feel like we provide more as not being that blast out and allows journalists and writers to be part of the communication. The winners of the event were Do Something. A mobile app similar to Draw Something, except words were acted out in video instead of drawn.  ## The Aftermath **We didn't win.** That's ok. We still believed in our idea. Getting customer validation over a weekend before a national holiday is hard. We got mentioned in the Startup Weekend article in [Buffalo News](http://www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20121118/CITYANDREGION/121119172/1003) and I even got quoted! Hopefully you'll hear more about PRessConnect soon =). ## The Tech For those of you that are interested: * Ruby 1.9.3 * Rails 3.2.8 * [puma](http://puma.io/) app server * postgres database * hosted on Heroku * devise for authentication * [cancan](https://github.com/ryanb/cancan) for authorization * bootstrap for base styles and grid layout
