Starting Work on Wraply - Launch48 Day 1, Morning
This is part of a series of posts about the Launch48 weekend at the Paypal HQ in London, in which six web businesses developed a prototype of their idea in one weekend.
On the Friday evening we had selected which six projects would be developed, and my idea for Wraply was chosen (hurray!).
On Saturday morning we all gathered back at Paypal's offices for our first team meetings. I'd put together a plan the night before for how I wanted to organise the team, and started putting it into action.
Organising the Team
I believe that 15 people, particularly strangers, can't work effectively in one big group - as things would descend into endless debate. We only had two days, so we needed to focus on execution rather than discussion.
So the first thing I did was create small sub-teams, with someone clearly in charge of each. Those team leaders would then meet regularly to share information and make key decisions before going back to their teams to 'trickle-down' key info. I also tasked one team member with enabling communications between groups. He would float around all groups learning what they were up to, and then sharing what the other teams were up to. He would also monitor our overall progress against plan.
Setting the Vision, then Letting Go
I started by setting out the vision for Wraply, what we would achieve by Sunday afternoon, and how we would work to get there. Then we split into our four sub-teams and began work.
I then had to make sure I wasn't tempted to get too involved in the work of each team (because I love getting stuck in to design, coding etc), enabling the team leaders to take charge and make the decisions.
Here's what the teams began work on:
- The product team started designing the site in terms of the featureset, and the journey the users would take through the site.
- The development team started with a discussion about available resource (see below), and then key decisions about the language and framework we would develop on. They then started working out the data model based on an initial feed of info from the Product team.
- The marketing team began by setting up a blog, twitter, flickr and all sorts of accounts at other social sites, ready to start building buzz.
- The business team did some competitor research, set up relationships with one or two key partners (thanks to Reshma from Seedcamp for helping that to happen via her contacts on a Saturday morning!), and made decisions on the business model.
Finding Resources
On Saturday morning our lead developer, Ram, was worried that we didn't have enough people on the team with PHP experience. So one of my first tasks was to try to bring extra people onto the team to help.
I began asking around, and was pointed towards Iman Samizadeh, who had arrived on that Saturday and was looking to join a team.
When it comes to getting what the team needs, I have no shame - so I ended up actually begging on my knees for Iman to join our team. Thankfully he did, and turned out to be a fantastic developer - really smart, with a lot of experience of the Paypal APIs that we really needed.
Lunch
The teams made great progress, and as we were all so deep in work one of the team members (Brij) and I popped out to get pizzas for everyone from Strada. Brij used his negotiation skills to get a 50% discount and we marched back triumphant with 10 pizzas, and other snacks.
Startups are all about begging and blagging!