Memphis Startup Weekend

In a fully-booked event the weekend of May 30th, a hundred Memphis entrepreneurs, many of whom had never met before, got together in a marathon session to create the foundation of a startup company from scratch.

Startup Weekend, a national entrepreneurship program headaquartered in Boulder, CO selected Memphis, TN as one of its latest cities to host the event designed to build community and a company in a weekend. Locally organized by LaunchMemphis (www.launchmemphis.com), Memphis Startup Weekend succeeded in invigorating the Memphis entrepreneurial community.

As Gwin Scott, the President of EmergeMemphis and a participant indicated, “The weekend turned out to be a fantastic opportunity to meet others who were interested in entrepreneurship. By the end of the weekend, not only did we have one company moving forward, but also we had a community of individuals collectively thinking about multiple business opportunities that they are working on right now – a great outcome.”

The idea focused on during Memphis Startup Weekend was “Spynnr” (pronounced ‘Spinner’), a social networking application for Facebook to support the needs of the individual who wishes to find and organize pick-up sporting events such as Ultimate Frisbee, basketball, football, or even Wiffleball! The weekend focused on the immediate task of developing the vision, conducting market research, creating business plans, building the online application, and launching a first version of the core application. It worked; within 54 hours the concept had turned into a startup company. On June 1^st at 9pm, the business and all of the materials were passed over to a management team for further work and growth.

Although Spynnr was the focus during the weekend roughly 14 different groups are continuing to develop other business ideas discussed during the event. These ideas range from promoting green technology to software applications. Many of these ideas will take time to develop and the Startup Weekend was a means of bringing like-minded individuals together. There will be an August 7^th reunion for Startup Weekend participants to reconnect and report on their activities to build Spynnr and these other business concepts.

As Douglas Scarboro of LaunchMemphis points out, Startup Weekend was an inaugural event for enhancing the entrepreneurial community in Memphis. While the success of Spynnr and the other ideas stemming from the weekend have yet to unfold, the community building benefits of Memphis Startup Weekend will last for a long time.