de-Hao! [ How it's done! ]

A few of my fellow developers and I are entertaining the idea of putting together an entrepreneur-developer camp in the Milwaukee WI area, sometime in March of this year. This initiative is geared towards encouraging and empowering developers (primarily .NET folks) who have relatively limited free time but yet have some mind-blowing entrepreneurial startup projects in mind, to tap into a pool of well-oiled and like-minded coders — in an effort to collaboratively kick-off a web startup.

The modalities for profit sharing and associated agreements are in the works.

First, Who?

If you are a (.NET) Developer/Architect or you personify the term “jQuery Guru” or perhaps you are a “knock-down” Design junkie or maybe a sharp-witted Strategist or Agile Evangelist, this might be for you. If you are just interested in networking with other developers and learning how other developers collaborate on projects in an “Agile” way, you are more than welcome to peep in.

Think iPhone Apps, Facebook Apps., “Software as a Service” (SaaS) Apps., Games for the Xbox, Wii, etc.

Supposing you are not good at this coding stuff, but you can pull off the marketing side of things and maybe you have a “Killer-App” in mind, you are more than welcome to come pitch your ideas to the team.

Then, How?

• Members of the elite team who have great entrepreneurial ideas will pitch their dream projects in a collaborative “think tank” environment to the rest of the squad.
• The squad will, in turn, pick the most interesting project in the boiling pot of ideas and prepare to crack it at the scheduled meeting date.
• A member of the team will be responsible for architecting the solution and creating a clear and granular project plan for accomplishing the core part of the project, prior to the camp meeting.
• The squad will meet on the scheduled camp date – an all-day Saturday and Sunday affair, and make it happen!
• Thereafter, the solution will find its way through the various phases of testing and eventually our marketing savvy folks will go to town with pushing the product through to market. If it makes money, the team members stand to reap the benefits.
• Then on to the next “iteration” or phase of the project (where it makes sense) or on to the next project idea in the boiling pot.

Support

So far, we have garnered support for camp location/development space. Ideally you will walk in with your own development tools (preferably a laptop), maybe a pillow and a blanket (where need be). If you are like me, you are probably thinking free “lite” beer (I mean, it is MKE for goodness sake), good pizza and some BW3 wings or sushi to keep you going. We will do what we can to make it fun for you! J

If this tickles your fancy or you have further questions, drop me a note here on my blog or via my email (idehao@gmail.com).