Startup Weekend Sofia event experience

While following our typical work routine in the office (we are always full of tasks to do!), Peter received an honorable invitation. Vivacom – a big telecommunications company decided to invite him to join the Startup Weekend Sofia event. A quick chat in Twitter supplied him with a free pass for the weekend. The rest of the Microweber team didn’t want to stay behind, besides Peter had to gather a team for the event, so in the end all three of us visited it!

There were loads of IT guys, some of them with truly spectacular skills and abstract thought process, all of them – loaded with inspiration and energy to present their ideas and projects. We felt awesome as a part of this fantastic event, but let’s be honest – we got the feeling we were like wolves among sheep.

Anyways, we were disqualified. Not because we are not awesome. As you might already know we are in fact a bunch of cool guys. The problem was that the judges said we are a finished product which is going live and it cannot be defined as a “startup”. Since we’ve been working on the project for more than a year this was also seen as a problem.

But hey, we don’t want any awards! We were there to spend some quality time with awesome people, HI-TECH energy and refreshing ideas. Luckily we got the chance to present Microweber to a lot of people. Among them were even some guys working for Firefox and Google, who were coaches in the competition. We made a good impression with our CMS’s powerful functions and easy usage. We want to heartily thank them for their interest and for the great advice they gave us.

A bonus was that they compared us with Wordpress and SiteInfinity, two very solid players in the CMS game! As you might guess, this left us with a feeling of accomplishment and inspired us to aim towards an even better final product.

We got the chance to meet with the founders of SuperHosting.bg – the biggest and coolest hosting company in our country, Bulgaria. It was unexpected, but certainly very valuable, as we got to present Microweber version 0.911 to Lyubomir Rusanov who was also a coach during the event. He liked our CMS so much that we agreed to start discussing the possibility of integrating Microweber to Superhosting plans. This means a direct offering of Microweber to Superhosting’s clients! Obviously this was like a hidden award despite our disqualification.

So we had great fun, promoted our project, got to talk with many interesting people…this is a very happy blog post overall. Our dreams just got bigger and we are starving for more events of this type – both local and global. Feeling like conquerors-to-be we have set our eyes on the WebIt seminar and plan to dominate it.

We hope that you are experiencing something valuable and joyous too. Stay tuned for new updates!