Lessons Learned from a 46 Hour Handshake

My Experience of Breaking a Guinness World Record:

The existing record was a 42.5 hour handshake. Wow. That’s a long time.

I had never shaken someone’s hand for more than the 4 hours while training two weeks prior. I created a landing page for volunteers and started calling venues.

First, Why?

To celebrate and bring exposure to the Colorado startup scene that has given us a ton of free help on our startups. We wore t-shirts of our favorite startups (like Galvanize, GoSpotCheck, Parkifi, Bowtie, Cloud Elements, and more) in hopes of giving them free press.

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A little closer to the date of the attempt, I ran into some bad news…

Two days before Friday, my partner wanted to push the event back and I wasn’t willing to cancel or reschedule it. I posted this post/video to try to find another friend to shake my hand for 42.5+ hours. Juan Diaz de Leon, who I met from speaking at Ignite Denver, stepped up to the challenge.

That wasn’t the last hardship, though. ​We already had Zephyr Brewing (One of the Founders Rich Wisniewski pictured with us) providing beer for volunteers, had dozens of volunteers/witnesses lined up, and thought we had University of Denver as venue. After all, they are my alma-mater, and I donate to them each year.

WHEN SUDDENLY, the venue fell through the day before.

And my plan B also fell through…

Guinness World Records requires it to be a public venue, and that in combination with the attempt lasting through two nights means it’s not easy to just find just any venue. Plan B was my company’s office, Handshakin Video Series, (where I pay rent!) and the property manager notified me of a major maintenance issue. Are you f*cking kidding me?

I told myself that maybe it wasn’t meant to happen… there were so many moving parts and right when I got one planned, it would either fall through or something else would come up. I was hours away from cancelling the entire attempt.

But that all changed when I walked into Redford’s Tavern to give one last effort to finish planning the attempt when ran into my friend Stephanie Short who saved the day and found a way for us to use their unopened upstairs bar. Like their Facebook page if you like the University of Denver area because they allowed this to happen.

Finally, the day of, we had a late start from our planned start time of 10:00AM on Friday, 1/29. We started shaking hands with the cameras rolling at 11:20AM MST.

After we shook hands for 8 hours, it was very hard to swallow the fact that we wanted to go for 40 more hours. We had already eaten meals, had several volunteers come in and out, and also tweeted individual reporters and emailed news channels. Whew, what the heck were we going to do to get through the next dozens and dozens of hours? Especially after we start suffering from fatigue?

When suddenly, 9NEWS showed up during our celebration party Friday evening! They brought in huge cameras and interviewed us, my intern Annie, and many of our volunteers/witnesses.

Check out 9NEWS Video Interview

That changed the entire energy level for us and all the volunteers and the entire night went by pretty quickly. Big shout out to our volunteers that stayed up the first night with us!

Around 6 or 7am the second day (Saturday, 1/30), we started seeing a few of our witnesses and volunteers showing back up to entertain us, see if we needed anything, and cheer us on. In fact the second day we had significantly more people around than the first day now that word had spread. It was going by pretty fast and we were actually having a fun time despite the cramps our hands were having. Heck, my hand hurts a little right now typing this blog post.

We got into Periscoping to livestream what was happening and probably had 20–30 online fans that were super engaged each time we’d turn it on. One of my friends even purchased the domain name handshake.party and created a landing page when he wasn’t hosting the livestream. It’s amazing to see what just a few people can do when they’re dedicated to fighting towards a single cause. Also, here’s a video 8 hours into it:

Article on NameTalent.com

I could go on to tell you way more about the entire 46 hours before the timer stopped, but will keep this post short. Tweet me if you want to hear more or interview me about it.

PS we didn’t have time to plan donations due to the venue change, so if you want to support the Colorado startup scene please donate $20 here. Money collected before Tuesday will be rewarded to startups that win Startup Denver’s Pitch Battles each month.

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