This weekend was a blast! At the encouragement of my family and the awesome folks at 1 Million Cups Asheville, I signed up to attend Asheville Startup Weekend, and showed up with no real idea what to expect.
The first night many of us pitched startup ideas, and as they had to be new ideas not ones we were already working on, I pitched a task management app that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit the past few weeks. Once the votes were tallied, mine only had 3 votes, so it didn’t make it to the final 9 teams. So I joined up with a group called WeDJ that is building a cool mobile app – it will allow users to combine their personal music on their phones into a group playlist at parties – and up/downvote songs a la Reddit so the most popular music among each specific crowd is what gets played.
I helped with general brainstorming and business planning stuff, and created the logo above with the assistance of one of the weekend’s mentors that stopped by. Since this was the sort of idea that needed to be visually explained, it gave me an opportunity to do some explainer work, see below.
This presentation is designed to be advanced by keypresses – click the box to focus it, then press any key on your keyboard to advance to the next scene. Warning: sound!
I also got to help out another group – creating a product called the Bag Bag – a beanbag chair designed to be stuffed with over 1000 plastic grocery bags instead of beans.
I made them a couple product samples (with the help of a free 3D scene from Chocofur):
And I also turned one of their team’s designs into a logo they’re using on their Facebook page now – a logo which is also fully rigged, and I’ll be animating it for them for their Indiegogo!
All in all, the weekend was a blast – I am thoroughly exhausted, but had a great time, and made a lot of new connections. 😀