When I started at Pop Labs, one of the first things I heard about was Startup Weekend. After a little bit of digging, I found out about the Startup Weekend that happened here in Houston. From then on, I knew I wanted to participate in a Startup Weekend. Being from San Antonio, I jumped at the idea of building a startup in my own hometown.

SWSA took place May 16th-18th, and if you ask anyone who participated all three days, you’ll know the fire is still burning. By the first day, everyone had split into three teams: ForceXchange, which is an auction site to allow soldier, patrols, etc. to exchange, buy, and sell their own gear; Rentescapes, a network for owners and renters of vacation property; and finally, idre.am, where I almost exclusively was, a site that lets you share your dreams and opinions with the Internet. By the end of Startup Weekend, idre.am and ForceXchange launched, while Rentescapes pushed back their launch date.

idre.am originally began one morning last month when I forgot a dream I had before waking up to get ready for work. The night before, I had been reading up on dreams that inspired artists such as Yasunori Mitsuda, who attributes the music of the video game Chrono Trigger to his dreams. I wanted to build a site that could post dreams and give a community creative inspiration. By the time the idea made it to Startup Weekend, it had turned into a social site where users could anonymously post dreams and receive feedback on their dreams. Three all-nighters later, at least one dream became reality.

The idre.am team consisted of nine enthusiastic people with noticeably different skill-sets working cooperatively to produce this site. My personal role (other than the idea itself) included front-end development, assisting with backend development, and providing as much sarcasm and quick quips as possible. We started out with simple features: we wanted idre.am to not only allow users to post to our site from our site, we also wanted users to submit their dreams via Twitter (to @idreamed) and Facebook.

If you talk to the idre.am Team, you’ll find out this was all but simple. Building idre.am within one weekend required daily all-nighters, careful planning, good communication, and an effective team who knew how to tackle this project and present it in a way that it looked like an easy site to create. This enthusiasm and effectiveness has already stirred up some great press and an excited user base, which includes Startup Weekend representative Erica O’Grady and SWSA Organizer Jennifer Navarrete. By Monday, we had also set up our corporate structure and began to spread the word about idre.am.

Even though SWSA has ended, the dedication of our team is still prevalent as our main developer, Jess Martin of Raleigh, NC, continues to work diligently to add more features and I, obviously back in Houston, am not only working on idre.am, but also calling all with the enthusiasm and interest in web design and development to make their dreams a reality by participating in the Startup Weekends to come. but also writing entries about it at work and telling all who want to tell their dreams.