It’s been 2 years since the first Atlanta Startup Weekend, which I view as a landmark moment in the growth of Atlanta’s technology startup community, and certainly a pivotal moment for me personally.  It grew both my ambition of what startups could accomplish in Atlanta, and my network of like-minded startupy people.

We launched Skribit in 3 days, and it remains one of the most successful Startup Weekend companies anywhere.  Last year, I spent time on the Seed Stage Records and Giving Time teams.  I left Seed Stage after Friday night, before it proceeded to implode on Saturday, and spent the rest of the time on Giving Time, which may be viable but hasn’t launched yet.

I pitched an idea at Startup Weekend, didn’t last year, and decided to pitch an idea this year.  Whether or not my idea was picked, my main goal was to launch whatever app I did work on by Sunday night.

Imagine my surprise when I presented an idea to build a social game for Facebook centered around Football, which I initially called Football Nation (the actual name is TBD), and I ended up with a team to build it!  The idea is that football is super popular, and Facebook apps are super popular, but nobody has effectively combined the two – instead, people are busy building farms, restaurants, and mafias on Facebook.  Not only could a football app be successful as a standalone app, it could provide a foundation to build a niche in social sports games and eventually a way to dethrone EA as the king of sports games.  (Frustration with NCAA Football 10 was actually the pain point that generated this idea.)

Our team is pretty enthusiastic about football.  We’ll be streaming Georgia Tech v. Duke on a projector tomorrow, and probably some other games.  Our team was not as well versed in Facebook social games.  In perhaps an odd move, we spent the first 30 minutes or so of our team meeting playing  the currently popular Facebook games in teams of two.  Mafia Wars, Restaurant City, Farmville, YoVille, and I even assigned Sorority Life to a guy I knew could take it. Hopefully they can detach from these new-found addictions enough to work on our app tomorrow. 🙂

I think we’ve got a good concept, and great thoughts from the team helped solidify answers to some key product decisions.  I am immensely grateful to have a strong development team which I can trust implicitly because I have worked with most of them.  I’m excited about the non-developer elements of our team too because they had great input and we need strong design, marketing, biz dev, etc. to make this thing work, and we have all of those skills.

If you’re a creative type and interested in helping, please find us.  We have a great start, but I believe that with this app, we have  a nearly unlimited need for UI input and asset production to make this game really rock.

If you’re planning to come to a startup weekend, prepare an idea to pitch.  The process of running  a team that has chosen your idea is amazingly different from being a part of a tea built around someone else’s idea.

Tomorrow is going to rock.