Before I read Seth Godin post about opportunities during an economic downturn, I was running the some pretty similar thoughts through my head.While the natural (and maybe correct) tendency during bad economic times like we are in now to is to tighten the purse strings, it’s important to remember that your customers are probably doing the same thing as well. They might be looking for alternatives to things they normally pay a lot for when times were better. And when things do get better, will they find that they really missed what they were previously paying for?For small startups, this is a great time – if you can provide lower cost alternatives to existing offerings, right now you have an active audience. The companies that can figure out how to exploit that will be the ones that lead us out of this recession.

Here are some of my thoughts on Startup Weekend and in particular, Atlanta’s Startup Weekend.  I suggest everyone read Micah’s accounts of ASW as well.  He wasn’t there when we were finally able to turn it around Sat. night, but his account was pretty accurate up to that point.

 So here goes:

• StartupWeekend is not your traditional startup.  Most Startups usually start with an idea before building the team, which means the team would have already bought into the idea.  Traditional Startups also have a core group from which the idea originates from.  In SW, there is no initial idea to begin with, and everyone has an input on what the ultimate idea should be.  It’s now a week later and I’m still surprise that we actually chose an idea.  It’s very hard to run a company as a democracy.  We probably should have elected a person in each of the subgroups to help come to a final decision.
• Unless your normal job involves delivering a product from conception to production in 2 1/2 days, don’t expect any ‘This is the way I’ve always done it’ to fly.  It didn’t seem like many of us were working in a mindset of having to finish something in 2 days.  I admit I was guilty of that as well.
• The whole team was split up into separate sub-groups (dev, marketing, biz-dev, etc.), and I didn’t get an opportunity to work with them as much as I would have liked to.  There were a lot of interesting, heated discussions going on everywhere, but there was no realistic scenario where I can participate in them and get the development that needed to be done finished by the Sunday.  There really should be a ‘MockupWeekend’, where people get together just to find, build, and mock up the idea in a weekend.
• From a development standpoint, we got ourselves into trouble by often classifying things as ‘easy’.  Our gauge of what ‘easy’ is is normally in the context of no less than a week.  In a weekend, nothing is really ‘easy’.  So what problems did this cause?  For one, we were constantly pushing the easy things til the end, which is smart in the traditional development sense, but when you have an overabundance of developers, it makes sense to identify those easy tasks and get people started working on them.  Calling things out as easy too often also opened up the flood gates to additional features that weren’t necessarily vital to the launch of the product.
• ASW would have benefitted if Andrew brought more structure into group, but I think ultimately Startup Weekend would suffer if was ran that way.  This was Atlanta’s opportunity to show what we could do, and from a self-organizing standpoint, we did pretty poorly.  Ultimately though, we did learned how to work together, and no doubt if we did this again we would be much better at it.  If there was one thing we did do well, and that was when it came down to crunchtime, we rocked it.

Keys to Success

Like Micah said, at some point on Saturday night, the momentum started to turn in our favor.  As always, there were probably many things working together that helped turn the ship, but I felt there were a few things that were key. This is from development side — I had to shut myself from the other groups otherwise I couldn’t have focused on doing actual development.

• Jason and Alan was finally able to get on top of the situation and make themselves gate keeper of what development was supposed to be building.  Before then, we were getting conflicting requirements left and right.
• Jeff, Amro, and Andrew from Appcelerator jumped in a took the task of the developing the widget using appcelerator, while the rest of us worked on the website with traditional Rails.  I was one of those that was originally wary of using Appcelerator, but in the end it looked like appcelerator was a very good fit — at least on the widget side.  More importantly, it put together a team that was already used to with working with one another hammering away at probably our most complex task.
• There were a lot of devs that really came through and filled in the gaps where help was needed. I can’t stress how important this was, to have people filling in doing sysadmin, CSS/layouts, and other small but definitely-not-insignificant details that really helped. I see these things as the 20% that always takes 80% of the time, and having people fill in where ever they can really helped a lot.

In later posts, I’m going to a recap of the events.  I’d also like to talk a little more about Skribit, which I have high hopes for.

Jeff’s follow up answers for Thursday’s Web Entrepreneurs meetup was good idea, so I’d thought I lay out some of my answers from a Java perspective. I think Jeff is spot on when he talks about how someone should choose a web framework for their business — rely on your technology team to chose the right one. There isn’t one great framework out there that, by itself, will give you any significant business advantage (however, having a great technology team with a framework that’s right for them will).

What kind of websites is your technology best suited for? Which is it not so well suited for?

Java is best suited for enterprise-level websites, which includes websites that are highly transactional and requires integration to legacy systems or multiple data sources. That isn’t to say that you can’t built small websites with it (although its rather uncommon). One of Java’s advantages to building a website is that there is a Java library for just about everything you can ever imagine doing on a website, and a you’ll find that a good number of them are free.

I don’t think that there’s any kind of websites Java is not well suited for (hold on… let me finish), but I do think there are other web frameworks that are much better suited for simple, database-driven websites. The reason is that Java is traditionally used to serve a diverse set of enterprise needs, its can be very cumbersome to setup and maintain, as there are lots of pieces to put together and configuration that has to take place.

What famous web2.0 sites are using your technology?

This was a tricky one. The only one I found was Zillow. eBay is another website that uses Java, and has web2.0-ish features.

What does it cost to use your technology (e.g. hardware, software and support)?

The Java platform is (just recently) open source and free. There are production-ready, free versions of server software as well as commercial versions if you need support. As for people cost, the Java talent pool is probably the largest of any of the other technologies, especially in Atlanta. Having said that, traditional Java setups can run you quite a bit of money, and you would be competing with enterprises for top Java talent. There is also more overhead when dealing with Java as oppose to more streamlined alternatives like the other technologies.

How steep is the learning curve for newcomers?

In retrospect, and after some discussion with the panelists, I’ll concede that Java has a steeper learning curve than many of the other platforms on the panel, especially when you include the server setup, configuration and other aspects of putting together a Java website.

How easy have you found it to find skilled people? How about in Atlanta?

Since Atlanta is the home of so many large enterprises, the demand for Java talent (as shown here) is great, therefore there is large pool of Java talent of varying skill ranges to pull from. Of course, the demand also means that the best Java talents get top dollar salaries.

How much support is there for your technology? Who have you found to be reliable?

Support is great for Java — you have options that are free (in forums, blogs), as well as commercial server products with support. Also, you’ll often find that you can buy support for a good number of open sourced Java products.What issues (if any) did you encounter being an evangelist for your technology in your organization? How did you overcome them?

Since Java is often considered a standard in the enterprise, I’ve never had a problem evangelizing Java in organizations.

What add-ons, plug-ins, tools, etc. would you recommend using?

• Ant
• Tomcat
• Lucene
• DWR

With the recent popularity of Ruby on Rails, there’s been many efforts in the Java community in adopting the parts of that framework into Java. Here are a couple of those frameworks.

• Trails
• Grails

What are some sites you’d recommend?

• Javadocs: http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/
• Java.Net: http://www.java.net/
• Java Ranch: http://www.javaranch.com/

During the Q&A session, Alan asked which language I felt learning would make a better programmer. My answer was Ruby, and in fact, while I do work on Java during the day, I work with Ruby on Rails on nights and weekends. IMO, the speed of development trumps all other concerns during the early stages of the game. And while performance concerns with RoR are valid ones, having to scale is usually a good problem to have, and I’m confident on my ability to work them out.