From March 30-Apr 1, over 70 eager and budding entrepreneurs gathered at HubAustin for the 3rd Austin Startup Weekend, our city’s installment of the global Startup Weekend movement.

The premise of the event is to come together and pitch ideas for startup companies that can be built in a single weekend (~48-54hrs depending on how you count the clock!). Once ideas are pitched, the best ideas have teams formed around them (3-10 people on average), and then the real fun begins!

These teams, fueled by passion, competition, coffee, and good food, embark on a weekend-long journey from scratch to fully launched company. It’s like compressing all the typical lessons that startups learn over a 6-18 month period into a single weekend. There are pivots, customer validations, prototype builds, arguments, team splits and dissolutions, and even (sometimes!) paid customer signups!

Teams are encouraged to focus on a MVP (Minimum Viable Product), for presentation in a 5-min demo pitch and judge Q&A on Sunday evening. The three criteria are: Customer Validation, Business Model, and Execution.

This third “atxSW” event featured some truly amazing talent, which brought ambitious ideas to impressive reality! In all, 10 teams presented their final pitches, though even more ideas and teams were worked on throughout the weekend.

First Place winning team TrainerLink really blew the judges away. They created TrainerLink as “The match.com for personal trainers”. Their team of 8-10 produced in this short weekend a working website prototype, mobile app prototypes, and a great pitch slide deck. Read more about this team’s journey from their leader Melanie Weinberger: Taking First Place. Also, check out this team’s winning final demo pitch.

Second Place (and “Crowd Favorite”) went to HostFamily.com, headed by Wade Floyd. HostFamily is “like AirBnB for exchange students, etc”. Wade really impressed the judges by already owning “hostfamily.com”, and he shrugged off getting such a quality domain with the casual “I have a skill [in getting domain names].” Check out their final demo pitch.

Third Place (and “Most Impressive Tech”) went to TrailerQ (@TrailerQ), headed by Eric Brynsvold. This team built a working prototype (!) of a “Shazaam for movie trailers” app, and impressed everyone, including a spontaneous office-wide clapping and cheers somewhere late on Saturday when their prototype first worked. Watch their final demo pitch.

HubAustin was thrilled to have been the hosting venue for this fantastic event. In addition to all the creativity and actual built companies, we enjoyed the finest cuisine that south Austin has to offer, including Torchy’s, Rudy’s, HomeSlice, and P Terry’s, to name a few! We also had fantastic local sponsors like Hulsey IP Law firm, as well as the always generous “Do Things” company Twilio, and tech hosting/application platform Heroku.

We see HubAustin as a way to bring the community together, and when great people gather together, greater things will happen. We’re building a “Opportunity Community” here, and we hope you’ll come join us, either as a coworker or at one of our many community events!