After winning Columbia’s third annual Startup Weekend competition, the team behind Nudge is ready to further develop the reminder app, which enables users to distill key points and notes from events and send concise messages via email.
Inspired after attending speaking event upon speaking event, Jamie Stephens got the idea to create a tool that would help speakers, churches and teachers of large lectures to send out notes to subscribers.
Following a big weekend, the team behind Nudge is working on the app’s next steps.
The team of Stephens, Tim Worstell, Ian Graves, Chad Godsey, Gerik Parmele and Kevin Keith—three developers, two marketers and one designer—came pre-assembled. Unlike many of the on-the-spot teams formed at Startup Weekend Columbia, Stephens knew all but one of the team members before the event.
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“I think it’s super effective to do it that way,” Stephens (right) said. “You can get started earlier and don’t have to worry as much about getting to know one another.”
Nudge was started from scratch the first night of the event, since there was close to no development of the idea beforehand.
When asked about any changes that may have occurred to the original idea, Stephens acknowledged, “We realized that we had to keep it super simple for anyone to want to use it.”
During the competition, the biggest change was the simplification of the interface to accommodate the needs of a greater population of users.
Although the Nudge team powered through the frenzy of the event and finished on top, they encountered a few roadblocks on the way. According to Stevens, most were in social media integration and external API. But the team powered through and made enough progress to develop a prototype for the final presentation Sunday night.
“The pressure is what you make it and we really wanted to do something great,” Stephens said.
Sticking with its original marketing plans, Nudge will first look to public speakers as its main target. Part of the strategy piggybacks on the fact public speakers will further help to grow the product’s usage by spreading the word, according to Stephens.
Having contributed as a judge during Columbia’s first Startup Weekend, Stephens acknowledge both sides have their merits.
“Being a mentor, you get to talk to everyone and meet very smart people,” Stephens said. But on the participant side of things, he said, it’s a lot of “heads down” and less of the social element due to the focus on the task at hand.
Now a veteran of both positions, he encourages others to give the event a whirl.
“Startup Weekend is so awesome because it gives people an opportunity to test an idea that they’ve had,” Stephens said. “I’m sure some of the ideas developed will go on and some won’t.”
Credits: Jamie Stephens headshot from Twitter.
