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Comment by failquicker | Hacker News Reader

I had my own idea for dealing with this phenomenon. After reading your post I decided to try and make it a reality instead of an idea.

MiniLeap: A pickup game for startups

www.MiniLeap.com

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I think minileap has some merit in a slightly different arena so to speak. I'm presuming the winners go on to polish off what they started while the "community at large" follows? I think this would be a fun way for hackers who are already friends to kill a weekend--kind of like Apple's insomnia contests for film students but for coders. My two suggestions would be 1) to think about incorporating some sort of money pot where you require users to submit like $10-20 to make things interesting, and 2) I wouldn't rule out there being two programmers per team.

Best of all, developers get to indulge all those little ideas floating around in their heads, so even if they didn't win the pot they still come away with a feeling of release. Basically, the equivalent of the one-night stand for startuppers :)

HN please review minileap!!!

That's a great idea and I'll definitely follow your progress on it (unfortunately I'm going to be traveling / out of the country that weekend). It addresses some of the problem space I'm thinking about, and I really like the short duration nature of it.

You might want to wait for the first competition to give some time for people to learn about it. This upcoming weekend is kind of short notice, but I guess if it's a regular competition you can see how it goes.

The random idea and random co-founder thing is an interesting way to mix things up but you might encounter some resistance with that approach. The distributed online nature of it doesn't address the community aspect I'm hoping to build, but I like the idea of a regular ongoing competition.

I also like your byline, a "pickup game" is a great way to frame it.

I just tweeted about this and someone reminded me about Startup Weekend. I assumed you knew about it already, but just in case: http://startupweekend.org/. Same time frame, but for SW people have to be physically present (unlike minileap) and the ideas are group sourced by the participants.

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