We are planning to run a startup contest for SXSW and need help and suggestions. We plan to ask startup participants to post a short video clip explaining their technology or a visual demo, then have an internet audience vote on their favorite entry. The top 5 startups would be flown out to SXSW, put up in a hotel, given free passes, and will be able to present to a panel of judges at a large...
Thought the article made it clear, but we specifically went out and got designers we thought were good, especially from competing platforms. In total I believe that it ended up being around 10-15 messages that we sent out. I thought the auto-text completer was a useful tool for things I would be repeating anyway.
Also in the post you will note that we tried to stress giving feedback, if you don't like something you don't waste a designers time and you move on or they will come back with something else.
I understand designer's frustration with crowdsourcing, but this post was for other startup folks who don't/can't spend a great deal on a designer.
Finally, this wasn't a minimal time process. I spent a few hours every day for a few weeks responding, giving feedback, and iterating. It would have been much more simple to offload this to a designer who took care of everything, but at the end of the day I was happy with the result.
Well I guess that is more job security depending on what you want. You can always go back to doing startups, plus you will know a bunch of other engineers who may hop on board with you.
If you know the type of work you want to do, have a list of some of the stuff you have coded/what languages you know, and/or are interested in a specific company we have feel free to shoot me an email and I will try to help out (info is on Nathan's blog).
Would like to hear the things you found most helpful from your Angels and VCs, the more specific the better. With the amount of funding going into YC and other early stage companies, rather than just writing a check and getting out of your way what set certain investors apart? Can be behaviors, scenarios, etc.
Appreciate the feedback, new to hacker news and I titled it that way because of the sentence "What amazes me is how poorly crafted many of these presentations are." Apologize if it wasn't best practice.
Agree that the number 4 bullet seemed vague. The way I read "value" was "cheapness" rather than creating value-add, but I might be reading it wrong.