For a conference that started as a grass-roots effort by two co-founders to bring more startup education and connection to early-stage entrepreneurs, Triangle Entrepreneurship Week is making a name for itself in a short amount of time.

TEW 2013 kicked off Monday with pitches, panels, and a party in Underground @Main in Durham. The conference continues today with more pitches, panels, and a party in Chapel Hill. Wednesday, they’ll do more pitches then host a joint event with Innovate Raleigh in downtown Raleigh.

They’ve got the Triangle covered, it seems. [For photos from TEW, read this post online.]

This is the third Triangle Entrepreneurship Week, and like the first iteration back in 2011, the organization works with partners to make an all-inclusive, education-meets-networking event that they’ve grown every year. This year, they brought aboard Brasco Marketing, BDO, American Airlines, Innovate Raleigh, DataPalooza, Cherokee Challenge and American Underground.

All in all, about 50 people work together to put the conference on, including interns, partners, volunteers, and co-founders Jon Leonardo and Sarah Wechsberg.

Jon based the inaugural Triangle Entrepreneurship Week on an event he had held before up in Washington, DC. In the Triangle, he found a partner in Sarah and the two of them hosted the first TEW in scattered venues around Raleigh the week of Internet Summit, which became a learning moment about scheduling.

This year’s TEW is part of a month-long series of cultural and business events that Innovate Raleigh is calling the MAIN Event. It includes the recently concluded Hopscotch music festival, TEW, SparkCon, the CED Tech Venture conference, a total of 18 events in all.

The schedule allowed them to incorporate other events into their registration. Thus, the Raleigh Innovation Summit is an a la carte part of the TEW program on Wednesday afternoon, and the NC DataPalooza and Cherokee Challenge are the same on Thursday.

In fact, you can register for the whole week, or pick and choose single days or even single events.

“We’ve broken over 700 registrants throughout the week,” said Leonardo Monday about halfway through the day’s events. “We also have hundreds of people attending the partner events like Innovate Raleigh and DataPalooza. Of course you always worry about people signing up and showing up, but at the end of it all, we want business owners to connect around content and resources provided at the sessions. So with an average of 45 people signed up at each event, we are right where we expected.”

Added Wechsberg, “So far, all events have been packed.”

Packed is good, but the number their most proud of is that of repeat attendees. I’ve said it before, you can get people out to talk about startups once. Getting them to keep coming back is the real challenge.

“A very important part of a growing business is customer retention,” Leonardo said. “I’ve been seeing people coming out for their third year now and its great to see that. A big goal of ours is to continue to get their feedback and use it to shape and grow our events.”

One of the ways they plan to evolve the event is to host quarterly spinoff TEW events with help from their partners. The first one should come around in November, and it will involve some fun and some charity fundraising. It should also help keep TEW in mind, a tough task when you host a once-a-year event.

At the official kickoff party Monday night,  Leonardo was all smiles as attendees mixed with other invited entrepreneurs, listening to music provided by a Reverb Nation artist and drinking Fullsteam drafts. Panelists and attendees were still chatting a couple hours into it.

All in all, it’s the connections and support of the community that fuel this event.

“When we went through our first pitch session this morning,” said Leonard, “having the companies approach Sarah and me to express gratitude is fantastic. Now we need to continue to track them in hopes that they close a round with a connection made at TEW.”

Editor’s note: Joe Procopio is a serial entrepreneur, writer, and speaker. He is VP of Product at Automated Insights and the founder of startup network and news resource ExitEvent. Follow him at @jproco or read him at http://joeprocopio.com