In our first “news from the startup front” of 2013, our code commandos have a lot of great stories to share with you – and more coming! We’ve done interviews with 3 great lean startups (Twilio, LaunchBit, and Change.org), so please join us while we learn from their experiences in these blog posts. We’ve also started writing about our experiences in Tamarindo Costa Rica a few weeks ago at our DareToBeLean workshop. We’ll be writing about that more over the coming weeks. This Startup News is all about learning, not sales pitches, so check it out!
- A #leanstartup and #agile tour of @Twilio
- Video of “Just Deploy It!” from the #LeanStartup Conference
- How Change.org fit Agile Engineering in with Lean Startups
- Lean Entrepreneurs, Surfing, and Costa Rica
- Lean Sales and Marketing tips from 6 DC Lean Startups
- A #LeanStartup interview with LaunchBit’s Elizabeth Yin
- 3 ways marketing can speed up software development
The AgilityFeat team on the beach in Tamarindo, Costa Rica
A #leanstartup and #agile tour of @Twilio
While in San Francisco for the Lean Startup Conference, I had a chance to tour Twilio, the very cool internet telecom company of the future. I met developer evangelist Joel Franusic and engineer Kyle Conroy, who told our group all about how they apply lean startup principles, agile engineering techniques, and the right kind of metrics to measure. Plus, they build their own desks.
Video of “Just Deploy It!” from the #LeanStartup Conference
The good folks behind the Lean Startup Conference have posted video from all the speakers up on youtube. If you missed my talk about why you should deploy software more frequently, then you should go watch this video and learn about what makes me cry.
How Change.org fit Agile Engineering in with Lean Startups
Sam McAfee is director of web engineering at Change.org, and was kind enough to talk with me about the challenges of matching up agile engineering techniques with lean startups. In this interview, he talks about how you get rigorous Agile Test Driven Developers to think like Lean Startup developers. There is a time and a place for both, as Sam shares with us.
Lean Entrepreneurs, Surfing, and Costa Rica
There’s nothing like sitting on the beach in Costa Rica to clear your mind, and create the open space necessary to innovate. We gathered our whole team together in Tamarindo Costa Rica recently at a workshop we called DareToBeLean. We brought down Patrick Vlaskovits to talk to us about customer development and lean startups, and we learned all about customer segmentation and how to create passionate customers. This knowledge will help us serve our own customers better, as well as help us make our side projects a success. I also learned how to surf while I was there. Read more about how lean startups are a lot like surfing.
Lean Sales and Marketing tips from 6 DC Lean Startups
Washington DC sure felt cold after Costa Rica! But I managed to stop shivering long enough to attend another great meetup of Lean DC. Six DC area startups talked about how they do sales and marketing. Are sales and marketing important to your business? Then you’ll enjoy these insights about lean sales and marketing.
A #LeanStartup interview with LaunchBit’s Elizabeth Yin
Speaking of lean startup marketing, have you ever tried email newsletter marketing for your business? LaunchBit is a cool tool that helps you target the right email newsletters for your customer segment. Co-founder Elizabeth Yin did an interview with me about how LaunchBit got their start, how they apply Lean Startup principles, and how you can get the most out of email newsletter marketing.
3 ways marketing can speed up software development
What’s with all this talk about marketing in this “News from the Startup Front”? Isn’t AgilityFeat a software development company? Sure we are, but in a startup everyone wears a lot of hats, and development and marketing need to live together happily. I wrote a blog post over at LaunchBit on 3 ways your marketing team can help speed up your software development.
Coming soon…
There’s so much more to say about what we learned in Tamarindo at DareToBeLean, and all the exciting places that AgilityFeat is going in the future. Soon we’ll be blogging about how we are learning and improving our project kick off process, more interviews with great startups, and more posts about nearshoring in Latin America.
Hasta el proximo “Startup News” mis amigos … Viva la Startup!
