How we did over $1K in profit during Startup Weekend

There are lots of cool wins here. Putting together a "rockstar team", as the OP says (i.e. building relationships), hustling, and just plain going out on a limb and trying something halfway crazy. Those are all good ways to spend a weekend, young or old.

But making $1000 for 26 hours of work, with most of that money coming from the seller's personal network? That's not a headline-worthy achievement, nor is it a real measure of success. 44 hours between 8 people is a lot of work-hours, nevermind the opportunity cost of the recovery period the next day. The main problem, of course, is that the sales came primarily from the personal network, which is not a real indicator of anything when the time period is just a few days of sprinting.

So while I again commend the OP for taking the time to write down thoughts and reflections...I think there should've been more reflection on how reliable these conclusions are. "Acquiring customers is ALL that matters"? Matters for what? Making a nominal amount that matches a number (1,000) that looks good in a headline? I agree that people can obsess with things like website domain and styles too much...but that's different than concluding that customers don't really care. I've seen unremarkable Kickstarters become huge because of well-written pitches and a lot of time invested into the pitch video. You can't really say that user/customer experience doesn't really matter...especially if your sample size is your personal network in a period of days.

Another thing to consider...what about the ongoing costs? It's one thing to ramp up to get customers...it's another to service these customers who, presumably, have to be managed during the lifetime of their subscription...That's another potential opportunity cost.

OK, one more complaint. I think this bullet point is really specious:

> Determine what works and focus on it… this takes discipline. We started off with low hanging fruit — close friends and family.

The OP describes a telemarketing type situation...which, I have to say, is something I regret not doing enough of because my friends who've spent summers/years doing telemarketing as a temp job are some of the most easy-going, well-balanced people I know, due to their ability to take rejection. However, they've been doing it long periods of time...doing a weekend of cold calls is not quite the same thing for building that tough skin. And you don't get discipline in a sprint, but continuing to do the work after the euphoria is over.

OK that was more complainy than necessary...Again, great writeup by the OP (putting yourself out there is never trivial) and hope to see a follow up in 2-4 weeks

The amount made in the time period should not be viewed as a victory in this situation. There may have been an educational or other victory for team members, but the author seems to be celebrating a monetary milestone which would of been greatly exceeded by working minimum wage jobs doing telemarketing for an existing business.

Who's to say that Startup Weekend is only for the "next Facebook"?

But you didn't do better than minimum wage. You could have just done a bunch of TaskRabbit or Odesk or Elance gigs and for the same 26 hours ended up much farther ahead.

What does that mean? Perhaps not much because it's comparing apples and oranges (contract / service work vs. product sales). Or perhaps it does mean that you need to understand the value of income (not just revenue) with relation to time cost. That might actually be the biggest lesson here: yes, you can build something you can sell. And perhaps you learned how hard sales is, but how possible making a profit is. But most importantly, you learned that not all businesses are worth it. And this one most certainly is not worth it.