Startup Weekend is a great kick in the pants that pushes you to your limits regardless of skill set. Want to see what you’re made of, try creating a startup in 54 hours. Here’s my tips for success.

1. Prepare yourself: You don’t have to spend sleepless nights before Startup Weekend, but make sure you are ready for the event. If you want to design graphics all weekend make sure you’ve got Photoshop installed and ready to go. The clock may start Friday night, but you don’t want to waste it with stupid stuff you could have figured out earlier.
2. Shop around: After the pitches Friday night you’ll have a big choice of which team to join. If you pitched yourself, you might even have to make the tough choice of abandoning your idea and joining forces with others. Either way take the time and walk the room and talk to the presenters. Once you dig deeper and hear the details of the “how” and “why” of their idea you may change your mind.
3. Surround yourself with a solid team: You’ll be spending the next few days with these people. Make sure they’ve got the chops you need, are going to be easy to work with and don’t smell too bad.
4. Find your core idea: With such a limited time to work you’ve got to have lazer focus on what your core idea is. Whatever your idea is, take as many layers off of it as possible and find the simplest concept and work on that. If you’re trying to solve a problem (you should be) make sure you are solving the problem itself, not the symptoms.
5. Delegate / Teamwork: No matter how big or small your team you’ve got to work together. Split up your project into tasks delegate the work. The quiet guy may be an all-star coder, but he’s not going to pull a rabbit out of his hat without your help (at least an uglier rabbit).
6. Get to a MVP ASAP: You may have all weekend, but most of it will be spend stressing out over your death by 1000 bugs unless you get your widget working early. You can always iterate (in a few hours or a few days), but make sure you’ll have something that works by the end of the weekend.
7. Validate your assumptions: Get customers using your product or service immediately. Yes that means during the weekend. Some of the most successful teams I’ve seen put their work in the hands of others right way and learn from it. At demo time having the numbers of people using your project is very impressive. (more on testing your assumptions)
8. Rock the demo: After a weekend of hell you may be tempted to share the pains of X or the trouble getting Y to run. No one cares. You’ve got 5 minutes and they go fast, make them count. Identify the problem, convince everyone your idea is the solution and finish them off with a killer live demo. They’ll never know what hit em.
9. Make friends: If you’re attending Startup Weekend that means you’ve intentionally put yourself in a position of high stress and crazy deadlines. You fool. However you’ll look back when the weekend is over, be exhausted, but regret nothing. Make sure you take the time and enjoy the ride. Meet your team and make friends you can connect with later.
10. Learn something new: Although it’s counterintuitive to getting something done fast, most people like to play with new toys or tricks. I’m not going to say don’t do that, because you’ll probably do it anyway, but there’s plenty of other opportunities to learn from too. Pitches, demos, developing, delegating and working with a team are all great experiences to pickup more tricks you can use later. Embrase it all. And don’t forget to talk to the mentors and the Startup Weekend vetrans, they’ve got wisdom of their own.