Over the weekend I participated in San Diego’s Social Impact Startup Weekend. I joined a team of strangers to develop a startup idea and prototype in 54 hours against 11 other teams. We created Represent Me - an online and mobile tool that will help people review legislation and evaluate how their representatives are actually representing them.

In this series of articles I will write about our process for developing Represent Me, how we made decisions in such a tight deadline, lessons I’ll apply to the next startup weekend I compete in, and the dev stack that makes our prototype run.

For the devs reading this, the Represent Me app was built in Ionic with a WordPress back end using the JSON REST API. This was my first time making an app prototype like this so I’ll cover a lot of the basics of these tools and what tripped me up trying to get set up.

Although my team didn’t win any awards, it was an incredibly fun and inspiring event. I hope the lessons I learned will not only convince you to attend a startup weekend event, but help push you forward to avoid the mistakes I made and help you pitch an awesome idea.

Articles:

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