Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By Danielle Morrill
Can you build a startup in 6 hours?
Rob Eickmann, Chairman of the Board for
Six Hour Startup, knows you can because he’s done it – more than once. Six Hour Startup is a wildly successful event that brings together entrepreneurial individuals interested in learning something new through the building of a prototype in just six hours. Rob was kind enough to talk to Seattle 2.0 about what the organization is now and what it will be in the future, as well as how you can get involved. The
next Six Hour Startup is being held this weekend, at the Microsoft campus in Redmond and we have
all the details.
What is Six Hour Startup?
Six Hour Startup is an organization that was founded by Brian Dorsey (of
Giraffe Labs) and Justin Martenstein (of
Meet At the Pig) after Brian had an idea for a project, announced it on some mailing lists, had 12 people come over to his house, and successfully built the product over the course of six hours. Since then we have been holding monthly events where we have 20-30 people show and build interesting applications. We also held a conference at the end of May on the basics of founding a company.
Who participates? How technical do I need to be to contribute?
We try to have a solid mix of people with the skills to make a successful technology based startup. This includes programmers, designers and business people. Anyone is more than welcome to join in the fun. You don’t have to be very technical to contribute to one of the projects. If your reading the
Seattle 2.0 blog you pass the technical participation hurdle.
Tell us about one successful project that was built? What was the process?
The lunchluck.com project was very successful to us in non-obvious ways. If you look at the site its very basic. A simple search field and a go button, and then it scrapes Yelp for a single restaurant review in that zip code.
The main body of the application was written by two people who didn’t have much experience with writing a python application, and were assisted by two gurus. Another programmer got a lot of hands-on experience working with the Google Maps API while working with a more experienced programmer. A full marketing campaign and business model were designed for when the site is launched, and a lot of people had a good fun evening.
Can you tell us about Timelope?
Timelope is amazing. It was the brainchild of Aviel Ginzburg who had an idea: let’s track every page that I follow via a browser extension. The team on a Sunday afternoon created a fairly simple Firefox plug-in that uploaded the URL of every site as it was visited in Firefox to the Timelope server.
Since then, Aviel and Anders Conbere have taken the skeleton created at Six Hour Startup and built a full featured application that has been written up in
Lifehacker,
PC Magazine, and
CNET. The two of them have presented Timelope at several events and if they chose to, they could probably make it their full time jobs.
What do you have coming up for Six Hour Startup in the next 6 months?
We plan on having regular monthly events and ideally we would like to be the Seattle version of the Homebrew Computer Club, which helped build a vibrant culture of people tinkering with stuff and spinning out companies in Silicon Valley.
I’d also like to see us put on another low cost conference on very early stage entrepreneurship and freelancing in late spring. If you know of any amazing speakers on those topics send me an email.
How can potential sponsors for future events reach you?
The events aren’t sponsored. We haven’t taken money from anyone for our projects, although we did have two sponsors for the conference in May, Bitpusher and Npost.
We run the events very cheaply, the only out of pocket expenses are the cost of a server hosting package (about $20 a month) and the cost to order a few pizzas. At this point for the creation of an interesting product, you’re really limited only by your creativity. We have free tools that enable us to do astounding things limited only by our time and imagination.
We make our technical decisions based on what gets people excited. If someone rolls out a new system XYZ and it’s getting geek hearts racing and we can find an expert on XYZ who can help us, we will do our best to have a project based on XYZ.
About Rob Eickmann: I am part of the group that runs the monthly Six Hour Startup events in Seattle. I organized the first Six Hour Startup Conference in May 2008. The Saturday House collective is where I can be found most weekends. I am currently working on my first startup. Find me on twitter, I’m roberte3
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