StartupCamp Australia is on this weekend in Sydney and the team are charged with the ambitious task of getting 20-30 people together to create a web startup over a weekend.

With that in mind, I was blown away by Melbourne-based Jason Brownlee and the Mayhem team when I heard that they are well along the path to creating 4 web startups in 4 months with only 4 people. (am i missing something about the importance of 4 here, guys?)

I had a quick chat with Jason to ask him the how and why of the process

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Tell us a bit about you guys. 

We call our team “mayhem” (after the reference in the film Fight Club to project mayhem) and are comprised of 3 developers and a UI guy (myself, Craig Baker, Cameron Taylor, and Matt Milosavljevic respectively). Our strategy is pretty damn aggressive; we are taking on four micro web startups consecutively over four months (for now). We are treating the process like a one-team incubator (ycombinator style), mitigating some of the startup risk and hopefully increasing our chances and/or opportunities. And we’re having a blast!

Where are you getting your money/time from?

We are all self-funded, with some of us switching out to contract work if and when it is needed to address personal financial situations. At any one time, there has been two or three of us full time on Mayhem.

OK, so talk us through what you’ve done so far.

Spicy Elephant (July) is a self-study webapp with flashcards that uses a sophisticated scheduling system (called supermemo) such that you only need to study at the point of forgetting. The market was filled with arcane offline software and lightweight web solutions, a space we felt we could dominate. The site has been live for a month now and doing well by our measures of success. The numbers are low, although we use a freemium/premium model and are covering server costs. This blog post describes the formation of the team and development of spicy, and this post recounts the crazy time we had after its launch. We got some good tech press (including making the front page of Reddit), and a few offers for partnerships and third party involvement, which we are still considering.

Screen Sponge (August) is a tv show and movie management webapp that connects you with the shows you want. Right now the focus is tracking your shows and requesting/sharing shows between friends, although the grander vision expands this to all channels of consumption (cinema, tv, dvd, rental, etc). We felt this need was not being met in the market, apart from standard players such as guides, imdb, flickster. The app is monetized with amazon adds on the show pages, given what we feel is a clear intent to purchase. The Launch was the 31st of August, and was soft, so the interest and user base have not ramped up yet as they have for spicy. This blog post recounts the process of arriving at screensponge in its current form, quite a roller coaster!

And what are the plans for September?

We are currently focusing our efforts for September on the enterprise web rather than the consumer web, inspired by DHH’s talk at startup school this year (which we have all watched many times on youtube), and his so-called “fortune 5 million” - the long tail of small to micro businesses.

OK, I better let you guys get back to work…thanks for your time.

Thanks. Hope we can help inspire others to get out there and do it.

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Wow - Mayhem is the right name for the team. I’ll update you after the September launch and also to let you know what the plans are for October.