A Kansas City trio is embarking this weekend on an adventure that might best be described as Startup Weekend meets The Real World.
Find out what happens … when people stop being polite … and start building a business.
Sam Bao (from left), Adam Coomes and Joshua Eithun begin a 54-hour hackfest tonight at 7 aiming to lay the foundation for a new business. They’re streaming the whole thing live, interacting with viewers throughout and incorporating audience suggestions into the process of building their business.
Thanks to our sponsor
As an organizer of Startup Weekend Kansas City the past couple years, Coomes hasn’t been part of a Startup Weekend team on his home soil in quite some time. So this weekend he’ll be scratching an itch that’s been building for awhile.
“This is just kind of a way to … get into the startup mode again,” Coomes said in a phone call this afternoon. “This’ll be kind of an interesting experiment, just to see how people interact with us and see if they can help us build a really awesome product.”
The product they’re embarking on building is called Backly, which Coomes described as a way for businesses to connect with consumers by incorporating incentives and “not just trying to pretend they’re your best friend.”
Of course, that product is likely to change over the course of the weekend. And Coomes hopes some of those changes will come on account of viewers’ suggestions. “Our goal is to really kind of create a sort of community behind the project,” he said. “We figure if we live stream it, we can have people contributing advice.”
Beyond the UStream (which you can watch all weekend via the embed above) starting tonight at 7 and wrapping at about 5 p.m. Sunday, Coomes said he’s not entirely certain what to expect from the weekend. He figures “it’s going to be kind of hectic,” but also “maybe boring at times, because we’ll do a lot of coding and working.”
But Coomes and company hope people will tune in, interact and, just maybe, find the inspiration to pursue their own weekend project. “You can get a lot done in a weekend,” Coomes said, “if you really put your mind to it.”
Credits: Photo of Bao from twitter.com. Photo of Coomes from twitter.com. Photo of Photo of Eithun from linkedin.com.
