Tampa's First StartupWeekend A Huge Success

Tampa's First StartupWeekend A Huge Success

Over 100 attendees participated in the the first ever StartupWeekend Tampa this past weekend. Tampa has always been an entrepreneurial city so it was no surprise that interest in something like StartupWeekend would be so intense. Susie Steiner, Ryan Sullivan and Kim Randall did a phenomenal job organizing and coordinating everything and the end result was a raging success.

How it worked

After some explanation of the goals and structure of the weekend it was time for people to pitch ideas. 25 ideas were pitched after which the attendees were given three votes to pick the best pitches to turn into teams. Once the votes were tallied, these teams got straight to work.

Checkoutmyurl (@checkoutmyurl): CheckOutMyURL is a fast, cheap way to get real user feedback on your website, prototype or mockup. Just enter your URL and three questions and get back answers and opinions from real people in as little as 15 minutes.

CityQuest (@city_quest):CityQuest is a city scavenger hunt that brings new customers to local businesses. We use the idea of the quests to reward customers for exploring and experiencing new things in their cities.

Driip (@driipapp):An open platform that allows for unified, real-time communication and sharing on peer-to-peer level

NeverMissARace (@nevermissone): is an iPhone and Android App designed to help track parents and coaches better organize their athletes and time better by providing real time calls for starts of field events and races. For meet directors, they are able to have a more organized meet which means less stress for volunteers. These provide a better track experience for both spectators and meet organizers.

Drop Post It (@dropostit): Dropost.it is a location based mobile application that sends messages and reminders tagged with GPS coordinates. The consumer side of this application is focused on the social functionality and benefits of Droposting information and reminders publicly or privately among your connections.

Boatingconnect.com (@boatingconnect): We connect boat owners that want their gas costs subsidized with want to be owners that have extra capital to pitch in for gas. This way both parties can get back to enjoying the water.

Locaster (@searchlocaster) Locaster is a real time location-based search engine. Locaster will allow a user to search for a certain category of place within a radius of their location and rank the places based on the number of people at those locations now. Locaster will further be able to predict the number people at a place at a future date and time based on historical data.

VentureCheck.me:  This team started out as a a micro financing system that turned out to be illegal so they quickly pivoted to become a company that can help young ventures avoid exactly that mistake

Bread.ly (@bebreadly):Tired of spending way too much money on good food and products for you and your family? Bread.ly delivers to you massive savings of 20-70%
off products you use and love based on how awesome of a life you are living. “Do Good. Get Good. Bread.ly”

Judgement

Sunday night the judges listened to the teams pitch and rated them on the quality of their concept, the execution and the quality of their pitch.  They selected 3 winners:

1. CheckoutMyURL (@checkoutmyurl):  www.checkoutmyurl.com
2. CityQuest www.cityquests.us
3. Driip (@DriipApp)

Get Involved

StartupWeekend Tampa was a great event with great people and interesting new projects created. If this sounds like something you’d like to be a part of, there are Startup Weekends happening all over the world so there’s probably one near you.  Check out http://startupweekend.org/ to find out.  If there isn’t one near you, you can always start your own, just like the Tampa organizers did.