October 22, 2009

Launch48 - The Build

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So now onto part three of my review of the Launch48 conference – “The Build”. You can read the first two parts here and here.

Before I do anything I am going to detail the lessons learnt from my perspective. Some of these are personal things that you might want to think about if you are going to join in next time, some are things the organisers might want to think about. Some of these were certainly "knowns" in our groups case.

1. Project Plan / Task List - there really was a diverse range of people in the groups. I doubt few people have ever had any experience at trying to put together such a complex project in 48 hours, and few involved have probably never tried to manage an entire project of any sort. I think in the future if the organisers could provide a task template that covered all the standard things it would be very useful. I don’t think we missed anything, but we definitely duplicated a lot of work.

2. Each team should appoint a project manager. This is not a "CEO", this person reports to the "CEO". Experience helps but it is plausible someone organised could learn the role - Launch48 is not about doing your day job, but about learning something. Obviously the whole thing is at the mercy of time available, but keeping track of what everyone is upto, get estimates of completion time, setting targets is good. This role (and all roles) should be decided Friday night.

3. If you are presenting an idea have a name and some direction for it - maybe even the domain name. We were a bit lucky in that I owned the domain www.given.org and it perfectly fitted our purpose when we started the discussion on Saturday morning, but I would hazard a guess some teams spent ages thinking and changing names. I think wraply was the only name set in stone. A one page summary pre event on the idea would have helped too - it also may have reduced the number of pitches. Once you get going it is hard to get a word in edgeways so if you have something written down it would be great.

4. Printer(s) - access to a printer would have been great. I don't know if Paypal can provide, they do a lot already. I don't think anyone needs to print reams of paper but the ability to print a few pages at times would have been useful. Next time I might buy and bring a £30 inkjet for my team at least. A cheap laser on a bench in the middle that we could have taken turns plugging into would have been fine (setting up a print server might be going a bit far).

5. Technology - in all fairness this is a bit hard to control as you don't know which skills will be in a team, but if possible avoid introducing new tech. Websites are easy, if done in something you know. IPhone and Facebook on Amazon AWS not so easy. It was 6pm Saturday before we had our first line of code written. We had a great team and maybe got a bit lucky - it would have been easy to have been in a position of having nothing to present. This is not the event to extend your ASP.NET knowledge to MVC, not the weekend to learn PHP, Rails etc. I mean it is a free country, you can do what you like, but where as I think someone can try and be a marketer or a project manager over the weekend it would be a rare individual that could learn to program.

6. You don’t have to love the idea – this is a learning weekend. I can’t say I 100% fully supported our idea, in fact I was more like 60%, but I doubt anyone would debate I put a huge amount of energy into getting it done. I may have spread a bit of negativity at times, that is something I have to work on. What was really disappointing was the people that didn’t turn up on Saturday, just because your idea didn’t get accepted on Friday I don’t think that means you quit then. Also a word of advice, if you have a bright hair colour or an unusual hair cut people are going to particularly notice you skipped out early – if you turn up next time with the next Twitter don’t expect to have many team members.

7. Know yourself and gauge your team. I’m pretty good at standing up for myself and my ideas. My team had 5 or 6 people who also had strong ideas and were willing to express them. Some teams seemed more placid. Don’t choose to go into the team with the loudest person in the room if you are quiet- you won’t get heard. At the same time if you are a more forceful personality you need to try and work on stepping back and listening to others sometimes. We had a couple of people in our team that I have since found out are VERY successful in the real world. I wish I had managed to get more out of them because I am sure they had more to offer, but I no doubt talked over them.

8. Developers – if you are a developer and want to develop at Launch48 don’t expect to do too much else. It appears there was a lack of developers (and designers) and whilst I managed to avoid it the others in our team didn’t move all weekend – I’m not even sure they went to the toilet (at times they seemed superhuman, maybe they don’t need a toilet). If you don’t wish to develop I’d tell people you do something else for a living.

The Build

So building a product for Launch48 is not just about tech. You need to do a presentation, and in that you need to present the product, a marketing plan, a PR strategy, financials and how you are going to make your first billion. We split into various teams to achieve this. I’m not going to write loads here because this post is getting very long, and most of what we did was fairly obvious.

Because of our product it took a long time to get to a point of writing real code and that gave the rest of the team time to start thinking about what the product needed to do, how it needed to be marketed etc. Unfortunately because a lot of people don’t come from a technical background I think it is hard to gauge where things need to go without seeing things on the screen. If possible I would suggest getting something up on the screen that can be modified in an agile way as quickly as possible. Developers don’t want to rewrite every line of code though, so careful with that one.

It was a very long day, we started about 9.30, had an hour lunch at 2 and left paypal at about 9.30 (and then went to pub until 11.30). But boy did we get some work done. We basically had all of the material for the presentation, an Amazon AWS server setup, the basics of a Facebook app, the domain configured to point to our website (beware that Paypals DNS updates overnight – try and avoid going to your domain until it points to the right place). We’d had a million small arguments about a million small things, but I think generally we were at a consensus. There was loads to do still but there was a light at the end of the tunnel.

Sunday we all got in fairly early and work continued. We pretty much had the content for the presentation so some of the team started putting that together. The “sales” website went forward in leaps and bounds, and the guys made amazing progress on the Facebook app. A few of us tried to work on some copy – I tried to capture what people wanted. It was a slightly more frustrating day, as we got closer to the deadline people got more stressed, tempers got a bit more frayed, a couple of people got a bit disenchanted for while. It was difficult to drag people away from what they were doing, and whilst we had Lucian with the ideas and Paul and William doing a lot of the management of where people were going, we had never truly appointed a CEO. We probably could have done with dragging everyone into our room every two hours or so and had a bit of a “rah rah” session, kept everyone excited and made sure everyone was aware of how well things were going.

We had more than enough strong personalities in our group so it was certainly an interesting afternoon, but come 4pm (ish) we had a cracking presentation and a great prototype to present.

I could keep on typing but I’m at 1,500 words and most of you probably aren’t still reading. Stay tuned for the final part “The Final Presentations” which I hope to post at lunchtime tomorrow.