Startup Weekend: Business cram session

An app to alert motorists when their car is illegally parked or another one that lets a lecture audience participate in real time with the speaker may sound like cool ideas, but also are filled with dilemmas when it comes to actual application.

Well, that’s OK. Because both ideas — and a few others — were massaged this past weekend during an intense 54-hour brainstorming and business development workshop known as Startup Weekend. The event unfolded as one of the opening events of Baton Rouge Entrepreneurship Week.

Startup Weekend is not unique to Baton Rouge; it is somewhat of an international movement headquartered in Seattle and championed largely by tech-minded millennials looking to become entrepreneurs. Baton Rouge’s event this weekend, with 36 registered participants, was the second event here in less than a year.

The point of the weekend is not necessarily intended to have its participants walk out with the keys to a new business, say organizers, but a platform to work in collaboration and creatively with others during a couple of highly focused days.

“This weekend is really about idea validation. It’s about experience,” said Wendy Overton, assistant executive director in the Department of Continuing Education at LSU.

“It’s purposefully messy. It’s purposefully ambiguous,” said Maris McEdward, a community manager for Startup Weekend who is based in Seattle. McEdward was in Baton Rouge for the weekend event.

The Startup Weekend event at the Lyceum ballroom in downtown Baton Rouge began Friday evening as 23 Startup Weekend events occurred around the globe over the weekend. Nine of those were in the U.S.

Seven participants pitched business ideas here Friday night. Each person was then asked to vote on which of the ideas seemed to have the most merit or possibility. The next two days were spent fleshing out five ideas with teams of four or five people.

“It forces you to work on an idea for a specific period of time and really forces you to focus,” said John Snow, a public relations and community outreach coordinator with SSA Consultants in Baton Rouge, describing the Startup Weekend experience. Snow was part of the notiphy.ME team, aimed at developing an Internet notification system to deliver messages to motorists who may be illegally parked, among other bits of parking-related information. The notiphy.ME project was awarded second place, which included one year of internet server and other services at Venyu, a technology and Information technology services provider in Baton Rouge. Four other ideas were developed over the weekend.

AudienceAmp, a mobile platform for real-time audience participation with post-event analysis and reporting, took first place and will participate in the Global Startup Battle.

It is a competition that throws together all of the Startup Weekend winners from the 2011 Global Entrepreneur Week events.

“We believe we can have a working prototype in a few days,” said Crawford Comeaux, 29, the leader behind AudienceAmp.

Comeaux is a project manager with FiberCorps, a Lafayette nonprofit aimed at growing digital economic development in Acadiana. Comeaux and his team also will be given a spot in TechParkU, an entree of business mentoring, education and other services from the Louisiana Technology Park on Florida Boulevard.

Another interactive idea was reStyling.com, an interactive web platform to put stylists in touch with consumers and the items in their closets. The team was awarded co-working space at Launch Pad in New Orleans.

Valve Boss, a company that makes a power-tool-like device to open and shut municipal water valves, was the only company already in operation, but was in need of a business and marketing plan. Valve Boss was awarded three free months at Springboard, a new co-working space soon to open in downtown Baton Rouge.

Fan54, a mobile app idea that puts sporting event and other fan-based attractions in touch with attendees and some of the information they will require, such as parking space locations, bathrooms and other “concierge” services, was the fifth team.

Both organizers and participants of Startup Weekend agree that one of the event’s best outcomes is it exposes budding entrepreneurs to a process of collaborative teamwork, a network of other entrepreneurially minded thinkers and a sense of how to nurture and grow an idea from mere concept to an actual business.

“It’s a way for entrepreneurs to get a sense of what comes next,” McEdward said Friday evening after eight participants offered their ideas in 60-second pitches to the room.

By Sunday afternoon the Lyceum ballroom held all the detritus of an all-night cram session: empty cans of Full Throttle energy drinks, box lunches from Jimmy Johns and, of course, coffee cups. Those who had spent the weekend there scribbling on Post-it notes or hovering over laptops praised the creative setting the weekend seemed to naturally nourish.

“It’s kind of like kindergarten for business people,” remarked Laura Sells, who teaches public speaking and communication at Baton Rouge Community College. “It’s like, ‘Here’s some Legos, now go build something.’ ”

“For most people, Startup is only an excuse to work with other people. It doesn’t really matter what the idea is,” McEdward added.

In Baton Rouge, Startup Weekend is part of a long list of events planned for this week’s inaugural Baton Rouge Entrepreneurship Week. For more information, go to http://www.brewingupideas.com.