I’m excited about what the Reserve Chute team accomplished and look forward to staying enagaged with the project. And regardless of what comes of it, the learning experience was phenomenal.

Re: the reason there is no shippable product for ReserveChute yet- we decided to refine it before releasing so it’s something people like rather than scrambling to have a half-assed product released by the end of the weekend. Having a beta signup form on the site to collect emails from interested visitors in the interim is a common practice. Maybe you guys should stop being trolls on TC and go build something real yourselves…

As far as “whatthe’s” comment on “none of these applications have any value” – you don’t think having a local backup all the remote data stored in your online applications has value?? Gimme an f’in break. We’ll be giving this capability away free at first and I guarantee you there will be people willing to pay for this when it’s a refined product. Man there are some acidic characters on this forum… Thanks Brandon and others for the encouragement.

And thanks again Mark Hendricksen and Jason Kincaid – we’ll keep you guys posted as these projects evolve.
sean

When Yahoo is laying off 10% and John Calacanis or Le Meur is in the news about firing people, when experts fear that many companies that are already successful are about to go to the deadpool because they have not yet found a way to monetize, when Wall Street analysts are expecting big M&A from now on as the only way for big companies to survive, I wonder what chances do such weekend projects stand.

I like the idea of promoting innovation and surely such seminars could be a good opportunity for brilliant minds to find each other and start a start-up, but that’s it. 54 hours are ok to build a quick “prototype” (without much thinking or paying attention to any detail) but it takes a whole lot more to create a company (which makes the title of this article quite funny).

All this time, new entrepreneurs kept finding out that there are thousands of business plans submitted to VCs every year, but only a few dozen or so are getting to be funded. And then, almost 1 out of 10 of them are about to succeed. If the web scene changed that drastically overnight and all this is not true anymore, I bet I missed it. But if this is still the way things work, and the economic crisis indeed makes things worse, then I think that it takes more than an agile web framework, a bunch of developers and a poor idea to make a company that indeed has chances to succeed.

I personally love the idea of the open discussion coming from programmers and non-programmers too. Theres nothing like someone who knows nothing about your industry to challenge the limits of your industry without even thinking.

I’m proud to be a part of a group that is trying to do something good (pro-bono) during our free time. Thank you for taking notice.

You might have meant, 54 hours to build a feature…not a company…It takes years to build a company…

Miller

Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

-animal shelters are part of the group of organizations that still dont have websites. They are listed in shitty directories that are outdated and mostly “click arbitrage” operations

-animal shelter’s won’t be a revenue boon, but this site will help.

-there is no reason My Shelter Helper can’t stay small and keep costs low, they can slowly and continually add fewatures like slideshows and videos, and make the CMS very easy for animal shelter workers t use.

Startup weekend attracts some real retards that wouldn’t know an opportunity from a revenue suck hole. I know, I’ve been there, done that.

So If you get these ideas and work them to see real market potential after the fact you will eventually get one that sticks. Sure a lot of site ideas have been tested and failed, but if no one is trying we would all still be living in the world of big corporate machines.

I hope these events are not just us tech geeks and have real people with no code experience in them. Real users that can bring ideas that challenge us to create. Our techy minds tend to take us down rabbit holes into no where and we always need real world people to help keep realilty in check when it comes to web development.

Widgets on sites are cool, but simplicity to the user is the answer. No matter how complex your code, it must be simple to use. Google’s home page is an example of the simplicity to complexity I am talking about. Would not we all loved to have come up with that web site portal to dollars combo!

Setting the framework to protect these ideas is a good thing even if they are never used or fail in short order. But they must keep in mind when they do these events not to treat them like sweat shops or get rich quick schemes. It is important to remember that the dream is usally short lived and reality is the wall we must get over to succeed.