My friend and colleague John Phillips attended Startup Weekend in Detroit a few years ago. Startup Weekend is a fast-paced event where hackers and hustlers get together to build companies.

John co-founded a business called NudgeThem — a product for professional service providers like doctors. Nudge’s big idea was to send appointment reminders to customers and patients as a preventative measure for no-shows. I say was and not is because NudgeThem doesn’t exist anymore. The founders didn’t have time after Startup Weekend to keep the project growing.

A few weeks ago, I wrote this:

Entrepreneurship is attractive to anyone who seeks an alternative to an 8-to-5 office job. Besides setting your own schedule, you get to control what your business does. That means you don’t ever have to have a job you hate.

I don’t hate my job. Actually, I love it. But I don’t have the freedom to build anything I want. So, three months ago, I attended Startup Weekend Lansing. I pitched an idea — socially-ranked questions and answers for the classroom. The pitch attracted two interested co-founders, John Pytel and Eduardo Serrano, and two days later the prototype we built won the judge’s prize.

SoapBox almost never came to be. As I mentioned, Startup Weekend opens with attendees pitching ideas. I didn’t intend to present mine. After hearing others and realizing that none screamed I need to be a part of this, I worked up the courage to speak. Eric Jorgenson, the event’s organizer, gave attendees three balloons to distribute to pitches they liked. Social Q&A (the interim name) received the minimum number of balloons necessary to continue. And then, the bare minimum number of people joined to help build it.

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We re-launched SoapBox last week, transforming a raw product into something refined.

SoapBox is a lightweight digital backchannel for the classroom. Instead of marginalizing student use of mobile devices, educators can use SoapBox to facilitate constructive interaction. In other words, SoapBox enhances lecture without disrupting student attention.

I’m thrilled with SoapBox’s trajectory. And why wouldn’t I be? It’s my product and I have had the freedom to make nearly every design decision on our journey. SoapBox isn’t perfect today and it won’t be perfect tomorrow. It is work in progress. As we add users and receive feedback, we’ll tune the feature set and performance.

There is a bigger picture I’ve been thinking about. Mobile is a maturing mass media at the same time educational technology investment is taking off. We want to be at the intersection of these trends, building educational technology products that offer an experience tailored to mobile context. SoapBox is our initial foray into the field, and with time we believe we’ll be successful.