WeekendApps is about getting together in a weekend to do some serious coding in a group environment. Connect with other developers and learn from each other.

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Our first event, in Feb 2008, was a huge success in which we had 11 Facebook applications launched. Here is the description we used for the last event:

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WeekendApps is a full weekend event to get developers and entrepreneurs together to build and release Facebook applications in one weekend. We want to help you build hugely successful Facebook applications that grow virally and reach millions of users. Our goal is to assist entrepreneurs to reach their potential, launch their startups, and achieve massive success. We will do that by (also, check our Schedule & Activities):

• Brining in entrepreneurs and developers who have built hugely successful applications to share their secrets.
• We will have a team of awesome designers, marketers, usability experts, and lawyers available to you to help you and answer your questions.
• We’re partnering with the great folks at The Enterprise Network to lend their guidance and support to you for free during the weekend.
• We’re planning an ad-exchange network to get applications to promote each other and overcome the initial challenge of reaching the first 10,000 users.
• We’ll have all teams share their experiences so we can learn from each others successes and mistakes.

Think of it as a weekend incubator on steroids. We’ll bring the energy and drive of talented people together to create an unstoppable force. But this is only the start. We except that the partnerships and friendships that form during this weekend will result in future ventures and successes that we’ll continue to hear about for a long time to come.

Two types of tickets: full weekend if you want to build apps, or Sunday Night only if you want to watch and learn.

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How it started

In 2007, Stanford offered a class that explored the world of designing applications for user acquisition and engagement. Due to Facebook’s extremely powerful application platform, they decided that all the students would build public applications to explore and test the theory they learned in the classroom. This 10 week course resulted in many applications, spanning a user base of 15 million users (and still growing). As we see it, the class owes it success to many types of learning: experts were brought in to talk to the students for short times, great application designers were available full time to the students who had questions, and there was a layer of oversight that was able to spread to the entire class a lesson learned by one group.

If you look at it, that kind of openness is pretty rare in application development. Having a slew of experts come give talks usually costs you hundreds of dollars to attend a conference. Having competent help around full-time means paying a salary. And just try to get your possible competitors to share the secrets to their success, it’s pretty difficult.

The biggest problem with the class, is that not many people attend Stanford. This awesome teaching method wasn’t really available to others who wanted to use it. So, the four of us (edit: now 5 including Peter Min), decided to design a program that addressed these faults. We all met at another event, Startup Weekend, which taught us that a hectically scheduled weekend offers the right amount of time for people to learn as much as they can in what effectively is a cram session. We know everyone is busy, very few have 10 weeks to dedicate full time to a class - so we’re going to pack as much into one weekend as we can.

I want to be perfectly clear, we are not affiliated with Stanford, or “The Facebook Class,” we certainly have studied their successes and failures very closely to improve our event, but we’ve changed the scope of the class and the end goal. We want you to leave the weekend with a great app of your own, the knowledge of how to effectively succeed on Facebook, and a big network of friends and business partners. This is not an exercise in theory, you might not be able to port all these lessons to other types of app development. This is a practical exercise to get yourself up to speed and briefed on application development for Facebook, and the viral aspects for success.

We will do that by having “hub” groups of awesome designers, businesspeople, marketers, usability experts, and lawyers available to each and every developer team, to answer any questions they may have. These hub groups will also be giving talks to the entire event about the biggest questions they’ve run into and document the big picture issues for everyone’s benefit. There will also be experts in the field that come in to give fast, informative talks, each explaining one tool they use that’s helped them be successful. Each team is expected to share information with the group, so we can all see how the most successful group of the weekend did it.

Please contact us at: info at weekendapps.com if you have any questions or would like to sponsor the event.

We’ll see you there, February 22nd!

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