In November of last year, more than 50 people came together for Startup Weekend Los Angeles. They pitched 45 different entrepreneurial ideas, eventually narrowing them into seven teams. They spent Saturday and Sunday working around the clock to create working prototypes of these ideas with help from an expert panel of mentors, speakers and even lawyers.
Then they voted, and the top vote-getter – Mingly – was born, and has since been invited to Twiistup, a showcase for hot upcoming startups in Los Angeles at the end of January.
Mingly, a self-proclaimed “social CRM,” is a universal address book for your various networks of contacts the helps your prioritize and follow up on important relationships. It works with Facebook, Twitter, Google Contacts, and LinkedIn and allows you to create groups and set up alerts.
The idea was the side project of founder Tyler Koblasa before he decided to pitch the idea to the crowd of entrepreneurs and coders at Startup Weekend.
Their response? “I need that, I love it, let’s build it,” says Koblasa.
“I had no expectations,” Koblasa tells ReadWriteWeb. “I did think that in a perfect world, we would end up with a working, more advanced product – which we did.” After the event, he not only had a product, he had a company name and a team of developers to go with it.
Now, two months later, the small company forged in 48 hours has been chosen to participate in the upcoming Twiistup event, a much coveted invitation to startups because of the event’s exposure to media and investors.
Twiistup organizer Francisco Dao was one of the guest judges at Startup Weekend Los Angeles and rewarded Mingly with a free application to his event, and he’s not surprised the judges accepted it.
“It blew me away! I just love that these guys built a prototype in two days,” Dao tells ReadWriteWeb. “And now they’ll be on stage with these larger groups that have funding.”
Mingly is a great example for entrepreneurs-to-be that starting a business doesn’t always mean quitting your job and spending lots of money. In this case, the Mingly founders spent $75 to attend the Startup Weekend event, and soon they will be “in front of a lot of media and a lot of money,” as Dao puts it.
