We’re a tiny startup, and yet we’re able to compete with some heavy weight companies. For instance, our main competitor Rypple launched two years ahead of us, received millions in funding, was led by a team of experienced entrepreneurs and staff, and got acquired by Salesforce last year. We have: No funding, no entrepreneurs, mostly junior developers, and self-taught marketing staff, and we’re not in the Silicon Valley either. But rather than get worried we thrive on this challenge, our customers love us, and we’re profitable too.
We’ll share our secrets at the Berlin Expert Days “BED-Con” Conference in early April 2013. Here’s a quick appetizer of that presentation:
- We use few but powerful tools: Google App Engine, Apache Wicket, IntelliJ IDEA, Objectify, jQuery and LESS. That’s about it. We avoid any magic ingredients that cause unexpected massive delays when something breaks (Maven and Spring, JDO and Hibernate, I’m looking at you guys)
- We only build features that clients actually demand. Nonfunctional is required too (although few people ask for those), and design is rarely asked for but always appreciated, so we make sure to cover those too. But our core focus is on feature work that clients actually need.
- We minimize communication overhead by being extremely picky in our hiring process
But that’s just the big picture. Join us on April 4th/5th in Berlin for a rollercoaster ride of how we do stuff, and how your company (not necessarily a startup) can learn from what we learned, and how to apply this to your development process.
Tickets are merely €90 for two days (it’s a non-profit conference) so get involved: http://bed-con.org/