This is our team mascot, Juicer.
This weekend I spent 54 hours at TechNexus building an unbeetable application for Startup Weekend Chicago. DebtBeet is a debt collection service that eliminates awkward IOU situations among friends. It’s fun, it’s simple, we have a badass beet for our mascot, and we’re chock full of stupid puns about beets.
It was Dave’s brilliant idea and it was hilarious. But my objective for the weekend wasn’t to start a company that (among other things) sends LOLcat-style beet pics to college room mates who suck at paying their shared bills. Although that would be pretty awesome, my main goals were to meet great people, have fun, and learn something new. I accomplished all of those goals.
Joining this team gave me a great excuse to play around with Raphaël, a sweet JavaScript library for manipulating vector graphics on the web. Working with my code partner in crime, Japhy, we made a pie chart that updates the relative size of the pie slices based on the amount that each person owes. Think of it as a simple way to visualize group bill-splitting.
In the end, the DebtBeet team won the “Early to Rise” award. We didn’t know what that meant (I think most of us arrived late on both days), so we’re just calling it 5th Place. Then we realized that we won all of the leftover breakfast items, including toasters.
Yes, I won a box of Froot Loops at Startup Weekend. And for that, it was all worth it.
I also walked away with a five pound bag of Intelligentsia beans, so I should be quite caffeinated for the rest of the summer.
The DebtBeet Team at Startup Weekend Chicago
Pingback: Start Up Weekend: What Can Happen In 54 Hours | Technori