From left to right: James Williams, Alex King and Ken Hanson hear the news that our team, WalkIN, will be going to the StartupBus finals.

Fear and Coding on the StartupBus: Wired.com reporter Keith Axline was embedded on a StartupBus bound for the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. It was one of six such buses filled with coders competing to turn bright ideas into startup prototypes during the 48-hour road trip. The buses have arrived at SXSW, but the journey continues.

My team, WalkIN, narrowly beat out SpeakerMeter in the semifinals of the StartupBus competition Sunday evening. We will now represent our bus, one of six business incubators that arrived at South by Southwest last week, during the judges’ panel Monday night.

“That’s one of the most satisfying things that’s ever happened to me,” says my teammate, Jesse Ditson, who developed our iPad and mobile web app. “I don’t enter contests because I know I’m going to lose. I just fucking won something.”

At the finals we will be going up against six other teams: one from each of the competition’s buses, plus a wild card. The wild card winner, FlyByMiles, is from our StartupBus, as well. In addition to prizes (as yet undetermined) and the fame that comes with winning the second annual competition, the 2011 StartupBus winner likely will get introductions to angel investors if not actual seed money.

Ex-Googler Pamela Fox gives the pitch for SpeakerMeter. The app allows audiences to rate public speakers in real time and gives speakers insightful feedback about how they did. For the pitch, Fox's team rated each of the preceding pitches at the StartupBus event, then showed a graph of how everyone fared.

For the semifinals, two teams from each bus were selected to do battle in a five-minute pitch-off. There were some upsets early on, with favorite Lemonade Stand from New York losing to medical tourism service TripMedi.

We presented first for our bus. Our demo ran long, which cut into our biz dev guru Bhavin Shah’s time for our company details, but we still covered more business strategy than most groups. Then SpeakerMeter came up and delivered a killer pitch. I was nervous. I didn’t expect to lose, but I didn’t expect to win, either.

The judges deliberated and finally said it was one of the hardest decisions they had to make all evening, but that WalkIN would be moving forward to the finals.

“I’m going to get fucking shitfaced,” said one of our designers, Ken Hanson, as we all left to celebrate. The only thing that can improve Austin’s surreally pleasant, faux-summer air is the buzz of victory.

It had been an intense two-day climb to this point, beginning Friday night when we were out at the bars and got an e-mail from the StartupBus organizers saying we might be presenting at the semifinals. We had a lot to do.

The next day we crashed the Vast.com offices and worked into the night. Our devs (James Williams, Keith Hanson, Jesse and Jared Hanson, no relation) scrambled to finalize our iPhone, iPad, Android and mobile web apps.

Ken and Alex King had scoped another team’s website that they thought was better than ours, so they set about redesigning the WalkIN website from scratch. Hedge-fund founder Josh Best, Bhavin and I hunkered down to hammer out our presentation and get extremely detailed about our business goals.

“That’s what’s cool about our team: Nobody micromanaged,” Keith would later say after our semifinal win. “Everyone just took care of their shit.”

Business plan and pitch notes written in dry-erase marker fill the interior windows of the Vast offices. Behind them, Bhavin Shah and Josh Best work on WalkIN's focus and pitch.

Unfortunately, that Saturday, identical twins Ken and Keith Hanson (given the collective nickname “Twin Peaks” by James) were out of commission for most of the night. They run their own startup-bootstrapping business back in Louisiana called Twin Engine Labs, and had to put out fires for their client. This meant a lot of work was pushed to the next day.

When we came back to the offices Sunday, it dawned on everyone what a mountain we were under. Twin Peaks were back, however, and attacked their code with a vengeance. The entire site redesign came together in a matter of hours. It was now inviting, straightforward and slick. Ken and Alex had nailed it.

“I did its hair and makeup,” said Alex. “[Ken] made it good in bed.”

After countless dry runs of our live demo (all our apps except Android were up and running), and shaving minutes off Bhavin’s pitch, it was show time. Suddenly, palpable nerves descended on the group. Cigarettes were smoked.

I’ve played dozens of shows with my band so I’m used to stage fright, but this performance was different. I realized that although we don’t know each other very well in a lot of ways, I loved these guys. And we could no longer pretend that this was some short-term commitment. We had bonded, thanks to extreme stress and proximity and now we were going to show our work to the world as a true team.

"This is bullshit" becomes the refrain when StartupBus participants can't get past the bouncer at the packed bar where the semifinal pitch presentations will be made.

As we walked down Sixth Street toward the pitch event, my shortsighted focus on all our tasks lifted and allowed me to consider seriously, for the first time, what if we win? What if WalkIN becomes what we do with our lives? I could feel a similar profundity, mixed with worry, on everyone’s mind.

So it is this weight, this emotional ante, that turns a mundane, five-minute startup pitch into a spinning coin of fate, that leaves us holding our breath to see which way it falls. And as the pitches start, I realize it is at least partially this way for all the teams.

The WalkIN team is comprised of individuals who are relatively successful outside of this competition, so it’s strange to realize we all kind of need this. We need to prove that we can do it. This competition is unlike any other challenge we’ve ever faced and it has awoken a fight in us we didn’t know we had.

So when I see Jesse showing off the iPad app — which he developed without having seen any iOS code before (a little fact he didn’t tell us until he had already built it) — and Bhavin giving the best version of his speech yet, and Keith demoing when a few days ago he was rocking back and forth in bed with a stomach flu thinking about buying a plane ticket home, I mainly just feel pride. My team’s level of effort may not be unique in this dedicated group of buspreneuers, but that makes it no less meaningful to me.

Whatever happens at the finals, no one can take this away from us, and that feels pretty great.

Jesse Ditson demos his iPad app for StartupBus semifinals judges (and Polaris Ventures investors) Mike Hirshland and Peter Flint.
Photos: Keith Axline/Wired.com