I participated in Bloomington Startup Weekend this past weekend. And, yes, I survived.

There were 100 people signed up for the weekend — the largest startup weekend turnout yet.  That’s 1.5 person-years being spent in a weekend. For people, like me, with mild agoraphobia, this was a bit daunting. I imagine it was for others as well. The flow of ideas is fast and loud, and missing one word could mean being two steps behind.

I floated between groups. Business Development, User Experience, Marketing…. In each, everything that needed to be said was already being said, and extra voices would only add to the din. So I contributed where it was needed, but stepped back for the most part.

By Friday night, there was a plan — though it was really, and continued to be, an amalgamation of two plans, for the most part incompatible.

Saturday morning, I sat in with the Developers. The product was to be developed in PHP, but most of that part of the weekend was concentrated on setting up servers, and version control software. As one who has always worked with hosted sites and as a department of one, I was familiar with the concepts but playing catchup on the specifics, and the acronyms were flying fast and furious, leaving me generally two steps behind. I gathered a list of things to get more current on for working in that sort of environment — note to self, set up a box with a current version of Linux — but decided I would likely be more of a drag than an aid from getting caught up to that specific setup.

After that, I ended up with Marketing, writing copy. They had lost some of the people from the first part of the weekend, partly, I’m sure, from frustration over not knowing exactly what they were marketing. But as the weekend went on, the product came into focus, and marketing’s job became more defined.  Finally, a place where adding more people would help, rather than hurt.

Sunday, I continued with marketing, hammering out copy for various pages for the site.  By late afternoon, we had everything but the home page.  With everyone tired, a bit punchy, and perhaps a bit grouchy, we bounced between good copy and bad copy, between serving some needs of the business, and serving almost no needs of the business, and probably had something worse at 10PM than we did at 5PM.

The product did not launch, for a number of reasons — and I am interested to see what future is attempted for it.  For myself, I learned, met, and had fun.  So my ROI is met.