Update for October 2022
The big news from October was the first fixathon we did with 42 Lisboa which went really well. This is a good 3min video I put together that shows what the event was like:
I took 6 pages of journal notes following that event and did a long recap post here. I had one epiphany in particular on a tweak I’m intending to make with our December event that I think will be the game-changer here. I’ll post more about that after that next event.
Other Wins
I didn’t make a ton of progress on the platform other than solving UX issues on mobile for the /projects page.
The tweak I’m most excited to test is this idea of creating a mini economy in the room that will mimic a startup ecosystem and make it more fun/efficient for teams to get what they need. This will allow team sizes to be smaller (and therefore more participation from members) as well as give a self-regulating mechanism for apportioning expertise more effectively.
The other thing I’m excited to test out is this idea of spinning up a DAO post-event where we snapshot the team-allocated tokens proportionate to the final breakdown at the close of the event. We should be able replicate the concept of a “cap table” for each project and let the experts who amass all the chips during the event “buy stock” in the projects they most believe in. That will recirculate the tokens back into the economy and allow teams to buy more services as well as increase alignment by giving the experts the chance to participate in “project equity.” This is all one big experiment but it should make this more of a collaborative game feel than a Startup Weekend feel which I think will ultimately make it more fun (not to mention instructive for people unfamiliar with cap tables, equity, investing, etc.
Challenges
As usual my biggest constraint as a solo founder is time and where to prioritize focus. I sacrificed technical progress on the platform last month for trying to throw a compelling first event with 42 Lisboa and I believe that will pay off long-term. Do watch that video above to see how that all came together.
Next Month’s Focus
Platform
I’m going to focus on moving from using Google Sheets for tracking participant onboarding for this next event and try to move that into Bubble and do a remedial set of automations for babysitting that process with ActiveCampaign instead. I’m also going to try and build out the minimal set of functionality to support representing the teams in Bubble and logging “transactions” (both poker chips and pseudo stock allocations) to support this idea of being able to spin up a DAO for each winning project and do an airdrop that mimics the stock allocation after the event.
Project Success
I’m deferring any focus on supporting individual projects until I implement this tweak for the December event and have all the platform functionality in place to support that.
Events
December 3rd-4th - giddyup.
Going to do another one at 42 Lisboa and make this a 2-day event where Sunday is an optional build day for the winning projects. I’ve got Pronocoders onboard to donate some of her Bubble experts as volunteers who will help those teams build. And I’m looking at these services as potential options to quickly spin up DAO’s:
https://daohaus.club/
https://daostack.io/
Content
All content production deferred until I nail this next event.
The technical roadmap as always can be found here. As always super grateful for our sponsors Pagely and 42 Lisboa for ongoing support in this effort.