Students Startup winning business

With just 54 hours to turn a website idea into a reality, UCF students Alexander Meng and Samuel Toriel spent virtually every hour in front of their computer screens.

They worked at the Microsoft Corporation office in Tampa until being forced to leave and return to their hotel. Once there, they still kept at it.

"Sam and I basically didn't sleep, we worked through the whole weekend," said Meng, a junior computer science major. "Just sat in front of our laptops."

On July 10, the hard work paid off as their team was awarded first place at the Startup Weekend competition.

Startup Weekend brings together people from all backgrounds of business — entrepreneurs, startup enthusiasts, developers, designers and marketing gurus.

Teams came together after hearing initial 60-second pitches. The duo met with Scott Kurland, a usability and technical consultant from Tampa, after hearing his ideas for checkoutmyurl.com, a website where web developers can get affordable feedback on their sites from average users.

Kurland developed the thought from his personal frustration with finding feedback.

"I just had the idea a few days before when I was a little bit frustrated with a project I was working on where I couldn't get good, immediate feedback and I wasn't having any success going out and asking friends to check it out," Kurland said. "So I thought, ‘There has got to be a better way to get some non-biased immediate feedback.'"

When Kurland arrived to the competition, he hoped that his idea would be picked up and advanced.

"The first couple of hours of competition were pitching the ideas, then you stood in front of your idea on a poster board and people came around. They were given three Post-it notes each, and if they liked your idea, they would give you a note," Kurland said. "Ideas with the most Post-it notes were the ideas that continued on to the next round."

After his idea advanced to the next round, Kurland began forming a team to make his vision a reality.

"We got a plan together, and then Saturday, we worked all day," Kurland said. "The business team worked on the business side, checking out the competition. The tech team worked on starting to examine the APIs [Application Programming Interface] and the low-level stuff that they were going to need to do for the product, and then Sunday we tied it all together."

Toriel and Meng acted as the developers for the site, spending hours on end programming the website.

"I worked with one other developer, Alexander Meng. We both handled the whole server side programming and basically we built the website," said Toriel, a senior information technology major. "We didn't actually do any of the design; we did all of the programming and all of the server side setup."

While their team did take home first place in the end, the road to victory was not without its setbacks.

According to Toriel, checkoutmyurl.com was created using a combination of programs — Amazon's feedback program Mechanical Turk, the online payment software PayPal, a programming language called Python and a framework called Django. Neither developer had ever used Mechanical Turk and PayPal together, and initial integration proved to be difficult for the duo.

"We were a little bit nervous that we wouldn't be able to make it in the time allotted, but it all came together," Toriel said.

Once their team arrived on the final day to present their idea, Meng and Toriel expected to place relatively high. But neither expected to win.

"We were exceptionally surprised," Toriel said. "We knew we were a top-three contender just because all of the other teams didn't have a working demo of the product, and we had a completely finished business idea and website so people could make orders right there."

According to Kurland, first place did not come with a cash prize, but it did come with numerous packages from sponsors such as a year of free web hosting, free logo design and consultation from a media company.

Despite both being full-time students with jobs, Meng and Toriel intend to continue working with checkoutmyurl.com.

"We're taking advantage of all of those packages," Meng said. "There is definitely a chance for expansion and trying to turn it into a business."