developing a webdevelopment company

developing a web-development company

Adam ZygadlewiczWiktor Schmidt

netguru.pl/en

1niedziela, 19 października 2008

Presentation goals

• tips and tricks

• from our point-of-view / experience

• on how to develop a start-up

• PR, Marketing

• Team-building

• IT


netguru is...

• web development and consulting company based in Poland

• focused on (enterprise) web 2.0

• focused on developing usable, intuitive, engaging applications

• focused on supporting (local) community


Timeline

• June 2007 - coworking (3 freelancers)

• September 2007 - barcamp (11 local barcamps till date, national barcamp)

• April 2008 - LLC (Gmbh) / team of 12 people


Overall "philosophy"

• bootstrapping (reinvesting profits)

• no long-term planning

• agile in every possible aspect

• specialization - knowing core business and sticking to it (as far as its possible :)

= "getting real" (PR/IT/........)


Team building• hire young passionate people and let them

use your knowledge and resources

• flexibility (can be quite important for students)

• teach, teach, teach and learn from your team

• let people evolve with the company - try to see their future in company

• let your people promote themselves (blogs, conferences, own projects)


“Corporate” Culture

• encourage knowledge sharing

• web development blog(s) - devguru.pl

• barcamp presentations and workshops

• "friday/omni talks"

• pair programming

• time for experiments

• no strict work times


Marketing / PR (I)

• find a niche (or communicate it that way)

• get to know people in your industry (barcamps, IT confs)

• blog, blog, blog - journalists read blogs :)

• constantly evangelize (it sells AND teaches better than selling)

• don't be afraid to repeat yourself, repeat yourself...


Marketing / PR (II)

• be transparent - communicate about (almost) every step you take (be proud of what you're doing!)

• monitor new ideas, trends and try to seed it on your environment - we promoted

• co-working

• pecha-kucha

• unconference

• life-streaming (lifestreamingday)


"Customer Relations Management"

• sell solutions not your programmers time

• engage clients to develop projects

• workshops instead of sales presentations

• give clients access to yours PM application

• programming is just the programming (post-sales cooperation is important)


Become an pop-idol

• find people passionate about what YOU do

• support them (attention is the key)

• let them introduce you to others

• it's good if some of them are your employees ;-)


Bootstraping

• DON'T PUT THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE,buy when you REALLY, REALLY need it

• outsource / rent don't buy

• commodity hardware (Linux / Apache / Mysql)

• free/open source software

• buy services instead of hiring employees (legal, monitoring, administration, PR, etc)

• notebooks not desktops

• paperless office is a mobile office14niedziela, 19 października 2008

Technology

• try to concentrate on one technology and master it (it is easier to do evangelism :)

• free / open source (look for communities)

• release early, release often

• automated tests or let your users be a guinea pig

• diversify but standardize

• don't put "popular" open source software together with your apps (Wordpress H4ck3d)

• make a "system"


The "system"

• version control (SVN)

• bug tracker (lighthouse, TRAC)

• internal communication (gtalk)

• coding standards (2-space indents ;-)

• design patterns (REST, unobtrusive, DRY, "fat model")

• coder / designer issues (HTML, HAML)


The "system"(II)

• development / staging / production environments

• database names, db table and field names

• testing, Testing, TESTING (unit and integration)

• continuous integration (cruisecontrol)

• automatic deployment (capistrano)

• multibrowser testing (browsershots.org)

• "write your code like a serial killer has to maintain it and they know where you sleep"


What can go wrong?

• burn-out - over-engagement (rm -rf privatelife*)hobbies? supportive family?

• "5 reasons why all web software projects fails"learn to deal with failures, read a bit aboutemergency PR, stay transparent, be honest

• h4x0r5see above ;-)

• wrong hires, decisions, experimentscut your loses fast, don't be afraid to

say you were wrong, life goes on


Your comments / ideas?


Thank you, Q&Anetguru.pl/en

[email protected]
