How I Went to Disrupt for $5 and Created A Start-Up In A Day #TCdisrupt #HackDisrupt
Chapter 1 : Make Stupid Decisions.
On September 20th, I am leaving Seattle to go live in Europe for a year. This past few weeks have been CRAZY busy. For some reason, I made the (insane) decision to take a quick trip to San Francisco before heading out. I had completely no time to go on this trip but I’m glad I did.
Wait, what? Why San Francisco?
So it started like this : Random conversion at lunch one day with @NateWhitehill of Highlighter.
Nate : Something about how the place we went for lunch didn’t have a menu online.
Me : A few minutes later *light bulb moment* : “Wait, I don’t know why no one has made About.Me for business.”
Nate : “I don’t know, but that’s a good idea.”
A few days later….
Sitting in bed thinking (This is me talking to myself — Yeah, I know I’m crazy)
This is a super good idea.
Wait, why don’t I make this?
But I’m not a developer.
Maybe I can figure out how to build this.
Oh wait, I hate coding.
Oh I can hire one.
No… Wait, Ludo. He’s the best dev ever.
Let’s see what he thinks about this. *Goes on Facebook and messages Ludo*
Ludo the next morning :
Turns out, with my airline miles I had enough points to get a $5 flight to SF. *Tickets booked* #winning!
……until we then remembered we’d need to stay somewhere in SF. So I did what I always do when I’m in a crunch…. Twitter!
I then tweeted out “Yay. Flight booked! Going to Disrupt Hackaton with @Ludo_Antonov. Any generous SF people wanna let us crash on your couch/floor?” I shortly received
I’ve been tweeting at James for a long time on Twitter but it was so nice of him to let two strangers he didn’t know to come crash at his place. James is a founder of a company called Envolve that enables websites to be able to put real time chats on their own site. Envolve is a really spiffy idea and James is a great person to get to know. Great sense of humor and super awesome! Check him out.
Chapter 2 What’s up SFO?!
Ater reaching our destination, we met up with one of our good friends whom we had previously worked together on a start-up with. After a day of hanging out, sightseeing, and eating, we headed to Jame’s place. We got there, chatted a bit, and immediately crashed.
Chapter 3 And It Begins!
The next day after flying in, we made our way to the TC Disrupt hackathon. We quickly got to work building our project, JustAbout.co During the hackathon, I did things like put up a landing page, made social channels, and craft text for the website. Ludo is a freaking boss and coded away on the project (without sleeping once)! During the event, I wandered around and made some new friends! I met a ton of wonderful people who were hard at work on their own great ideas.
Shoutout to the CloudFlare guys! For a portion of the night I hung out with their team and played around with stickers at their booth.
Chapter 4 Zombies
After the 24 hours of the hackathon, it was time for the presentions. We had one minute to pitch and made our way to the stage. After no sleep my brain was fried. (Prior to getting on stage I chugged a Red Bull.)
Though not my finest presentation, I was thrilled that we had something working (and beautiful) to present. And so http://justabout.co was seen by the public for the first time.
JustAbout.Co is a dead simple way for businesses to create a fast easy website and social media hub. Though we didn’t win one of the prizes, we won the prize of now having a foundation for our new business. Another bonus is that we got written up in Tech Crunch under staff favorites!
#winning!
Chapter 5 Disrupt
Turns out, if you attend the Hackathon, you get a free ticket to the $3000 Disrupt Confrence. w00t w00t. So here I am, sitting in the hall listening to Paul Graham give start-up advice. How cool is that? Great things happen when you get up, take spontaneous trips, and just do it! See ya tomorrow, Seattle!
To sign up for our project go to JustAbout.co. We still have some bugs, but would love your initial feedback.
About The Author
Arianna
...like a boss!
Other posts byArianna
Author his web sitehttp://www.ariannaodell.com
Awesome post! You can really feel the energy as you tell the story and I love how you use the graphic snippets of conversation.
Thanks so much.
So…the big question everyone wants to know: is it built on Azure?
Hehe
Arianna: This is perhaps your most badass post ever. As always, super proud of you. I think if you added a section about educating business owners on how to USE your tool, you’ll also gain wider adoption. I see this as something you suggest to Mom and Pop shops that have been using online technologies to market themselves, so you got to figure out how to make that barrier and make it as logical to them as putting their ad on the yellow pages (which was logical about 20 years ago).
Thanks so much Camilo! That’s a good suggestion. We still have a lot to work to do and there are still some bugs. Going to be working on the marketing biz dev side over the next few months. We’ll see!
congrats & keep hustling! there are several about.me for small businesses. check out http://central.ly. just differentiate.
Yeah, we met the founder of Central.ly at the event! Seems like they are doing a great job. There’s a lot of opportunity to be niche focused which is what we plan to do.
Arianna you erratic superhero!
This post made me chuckle, major props for following through with a spontaneous idea.
You make the rest of us hard at work jealous. Now I wait for justabout progress…
Thanks Luca! Hope you are doing well!
Hey, Arianna. Love the spontaneity in how you ended up at Disrupt this week. I was back from school for my sole week of summer vacation, and hadn’t really thought about attending Disrupt at all. No way was I going to pay for a ticket at that price, so my only option was volunteering…which had already closed for new applicants. By the time the Monday arrived, I still didn’t know if I wanted to go, but I went anyways. Showed up, offered my help, got my badge, my golden ticket to the technology utopia.