Sacramento Startup Spotlight: GoHalfway

A chat with GoHalfway, the winning team from Startup Weekend Sacramento

On the opening night of Startup Weekend Sacramento last month, Sean Barry stood before a packed house and described the long distance relationship challenge of visiting his girlfriend living in Dallas. He wanted to find an easier way to book flights for he and his girlfriend to meet halfway between Sacramento and Dallas to save money as well as see new places. Not finding an existing solution, he pitched the idea to the crowd and convinced a few others in attendance to join him in creating a solution which would become known as GoHalfway. The team ended up winning first place that weekend and a subset of that winning team has continued developing the idea. I sat down with Sean and team members Donte Morris and Drew Peterson to chat about the experience of Startup Weekend and the challenges and rewards they’re seeing as the continue to pursue the project on a part time basis.

Don’t have time to watch the entire video? Check out the highlights below.

Highlights and key lessons learned from Startup Weekend

“The food was good. You guys were on point with the food.” … ” It was cool just to be in that environment where you have different groups working on the same goal.” ~ Donte

“The mentorship was really awesome. We had three or four mentors come and talk to us and help to evolve our idea beyond just… originally we were just going to make a travel site to… maybe we can offer this to some other businesses.” ~ Drew

On Sacramento

“There’s some really interesting things happening here in Sacramento. I/O Labs coming to town. I think there’s a pretty well-known accelerator that’s attached to them. I think the biggest thing for us is Sacramento is a great place to live and there’s a lot of tech talent out here.”

In response to question about being tempted to relocate to the Bay Area.

“We have our roots here. The community has been good to us. Why would you mess around with that?”

On the rewards of entrepreneurship

All three mentioned the great learning attached to both Startup Weekend and in developing their startup as well as the chance to meet their fellow teammates.

“The community has been amazing. Everyone I’ve met around here, they’re always interested. I don’t feel like anyone’s trying to steal our idea or be cutthroat at all, which I hear is different in the Bay Area startup community. I really enjoy it. Meeting people is great.” ~ Drew

“We have like our own kid in away. We’re trying to grow him. It’s fun.” ~ Sean

Asked what they hope or dream they can be six months from now

“We can redeploy our MVP but in a production setting. So it will be what you saw at Startup Weekend but it won’t crash if you type in websites that have too many flights or something. It would be launchable in some sort of beta setting where we would invite a few people to try it out. We think that can probably happen in six months.” ~ Drew

“My idea is I’m sitting back on the computer looking at Google Analytics and I’m seeing how many people see our site per day, per hour. So six months I see us already being launched, already having consumers come on our site and booking. I think that can be feasible.” ~ Donte

“My dream would be, again, just to mention both of theirs, having the site live and a bunch of people going on there. Dream come true would be it gets viral somehow and you have people using it and spreading it around. ” ~ Sean

If you’d like to see the team’s pitch at Startup Weekend, check out the video below.

GoHalfway’s Startup Weekend Pitch