Advance and Be Mechanized

I attended last November the Toronto Startup Weekend. I won a free ticket by proposing an "Email Analytics" idea to the great people at Context.io. Sarah-Jane (who also attended) was most supportive, here's her recap of the event.

Awesome developer HG and myself developed the backend of an email analytics MVP using one of my Linux cloud servers, Context.io, MongoDB, Python and Django. We even built a simple REST-like API that accepted a command (like "number of emails sent between two dates" or "most frequent sender addresses") and returned JSON data. This JSON was consumed by the no-less-awesome front-end team to do their JavaScript magic and create some cool graphics, including one that was hand-made and built specifically for this project by one of the team members.

Out of about 23 teams we won 2nd place at this Toronto Startup Weekend event with a jury that included VCs so we were pretty happy and all in all it was a great experience.

In January this year about half of the people from the original team including myself attended The Lean Startup Machine in Toronto, the first in Canada.

You get from these events what you put in. My ideal startup event would be a modification of the Startup Weekend were there's an extra day or half a day, someone from the Lean camp comes in to stress the importance of validating your business model hypothesis and the ideas are submitted some time before so participants can review them and make comments online so that we all better understand them and the best ideas (not the loudest pitch) are selected.