anders.tyckr.com

The answer is quite simply: A lot!

Yesterday at 12 noon the first 24 hour business camp ended. I participated with my Getting Things Done service rmindr.com that I first wrote about a while back.

My 24 hours consisted of everything between 4-hour-dig-downs in weird php errors (later saved by a Hjalmar php hack), and taking a soothing bath outside in 40 degrees water overlooking the snowcovered rocks in the Stockholm archipelago spa Hasseludden Yasuragi.

The event itself was without a doubt one of the best and most productive entrepreneurial events I've been to. The location certainly added to the excitement, but mostly it was the people's attitude towards entrepreneurship that made an impact on me. When the event ended, the participants were asked if they would want venture capital for their idea, and only about 3 out of 90 put their hands up.

I don't want to put too much into that because it is normally not 24 hour ideas that get funded anyways, but it shows that starting a service or product on the internet has never been easier or cheaper. These services will not likely be the next Google's or Amazon's, but it can easily be services that bring in some revenue for their creators. This type of "minipreneurship" is really starting to boom, and events like 24hbc is proof of that. You can easily start something in 24 hours if you put your mind to it and make sure to focus your idea.

Learning from my Seedcamp experience "focus" and "metrics" are the two most important words I've brought with me. So based on that this is how I focused by 24 hours at 24hbc:

• Step 1: Make my development setup work on the production server. (to enable fast deploy during the development)
• Step 2: Define basic functionality for the site to be valuable. For rmindr.com those features were:
  • Create actions with tags and notes
  • Access context lists through a private rss feed
  • Move actions to different focuses (inbox, next, someday/maybe, scheduled)
  • Collect ideas by sms from a cellphone
• Step 3: Define advanced features that can be included if there is time left
• Step 4: implement

I managed to get all of step 1 and 2 done to a level where they could be released in an alpha version. I never managed to get into the very necessary but quite advanced feature of organizing actions into projects in an infinite number of levels. That will come in the beta release. Maybe in another 24 hours... or not.

I've had this idea for almost a year now and I did the interface design this summer. So an event like 24hbc was exactly the push I needed to get it out there.

Thanks for any input regarding rmindr.com and feel free to vote for my project at http://www.24hourbusinesscamp.com.