So, without further ado, that’s a proven basic infrastructure to “startup your startup”. It will add up just a few dollars to the above mentioned $2000, but you won’t regret that.

Domain

Yes, you will need one or more domains. I can’t suggest any particular registrar, just pick one.

Email and collaboration

Do yourself a favour and sign up at Google Apps for Business; for small businesses it’s free, and gives you a lot. The Email service is top-notch (you all know GMail?), and you will use it to create email accounts for all the employees, as well as the usual email alias (sales@.., support@…, feedback@…); also the Calendar service will be useful to share events and meetings.

On the downside, Google Doc is pretty limited, and Google Site (the kind-of-wiki) is definitely bad. But I’ll give you alternatives!

Document creation and sharing

The reason I dislike Google Docs is that it’s quite difficult to create nice documents with it; the font choice is limited and the functionalities pretty basic. You don’t want to present your startup to potential investors using a boring template and Arial font, do you? My suggestion is to use a real word-processor (meaning iWork if you are a Mac user) and use the great Dropbox to share documents among the organization. Dropbox is also free up to 2GB of storage

VPS

In an ideal world,  you could use all online services (a-la-Google-Apps) for your business. However, it gives you a bit more flexibility to have your own Virtual Private Server; not to mention that it is also very cheap. I have good experiences with Linode and Slicehost, and I’d recommend both.

For setting up and running some basic services (let’s say version control, website, collaboration tool, crm) you won’t need more than a VPS with 512MB of ram.

Collaboration tool/Issue tracking

If you produce software, you cannot work without a good issue tracker. A free, online solution is Pivotal Tracker. It works reasonably well for small projects and teams, but I find the interface very confusing, especially when the number of issues grows.

My tool of choice at the moment is Redmine; it assumes you are willing and happy to go through an unreasonably complicated setup, but after that it pays off with many features. It also has a wiki: nothing exceptional, but usable (differently from Google Sites, who was clearly designed *without* considering usability).

CRM

So, first of all, do you need a CRM? Ideally, if your company employees just you, and you are a very organised person, no. In all other cases, yes.

When you talk to customers or potential investors, you want to remember all the conversations you had. And you want to avoid one of your cofounder to inadvertently contact somebody you have already talked to. Salesforce is the obvious choice here, but an expensive one. My suggestion is to use your new VPS to install SugarCRM; it’s free, open source, and it has a nice one-click installer.

On the downside, it’s not a simple product, especially if you are not a full-time salesman; but spending some time to learn it can give some more structure to your sales effort.

Blog/Website

My suggestion here is to install WordPress on your VPS, and stick with it. There’s nothing you can’t do with WordPress, and it’s so popular you will be able to find many professional designer who can customise the template for a few hundred dollars/euros.

What about you? What’s your list of fundamental tools for your business?

Photo of Nimbu

Lately I’ve been talking and reading a lot about startups and product development, and two independent discussions have caught my attention. First, talking with an analyst working for a VC, he told me they don’t “usually invest in Java company”, because they feel Ruby, Python, C++ or (even!) .Net are more interesting for seed-stage startups. You can understand I wasn’t that happy about his words, since we are fundamentally a Java company… but anybody is entitled of his own opinion.

The second interesting discussion started around “Why your startup should be using MongoDB“, on the merits of NoSQL database used in startups.

So I went back to our technology choices. Our stack is currently composed by

• HTML/JSP + JS (mainly JQuery) for the frontend
• Java Web Application (our own REST framework + Guice + Hibernate)
• Jetty Web Server
• Apache Solr
• MySQL
• some minor scripting in Python

That’s a pretty typical enterprise Java application architecture, derived by our multi-year experience in consulting and contracting for banks, telcos and IT companies.

Now I don’t think I have to prove our stacks works, scales and performs well; there are plenty of enterprises out there running with similar systems, plenty of success stories, and I have seen my share of good and bad projects. The real question is: is it the right stack for a startup? To avoid the usual “it depends” answer, let’s talk about the requirements of a startup (Pareto law apply here)

1. Release early and often.
2. Keep pumping out features
3. Do customer development from day 1
4. Refactor the business model as often you refactor the code (ok, a bit less frequently)

In other words, it seems like the startup scenario is quite different from the usual enterprise software scenario. At least, that’s what I discovered in my experience.

So how our stack copes with this situations?

The good

Having a REST framework really is the best choice we did. It draws a clean and definite line between the frontend and the backend, and give us the possibility, if we want, to migrate the backend to a different implementation or technology, one URL at a time.

The good-ish

I’ve been developing Java application for the past ten years. I know I’m very productive with it, especially when I keep it simple (KISS) and don’t overindulge with frameworks and overdesigned solutions. I know it would take a long time to be equally productive with another language.

However, I also recognize that sometimes dynamic languages can be, guess what, …more dynamic. More compact code, faster to write and to maintain when the domain is small. I’m learning more of Python every day, and I’m not blind to its potential when it comes to rapid development.

I definitely don’t see us migrating to it (or to Ruby, for what that matters) anytime soon, but I can foresee we might want to write some parts of the application with it soon. The REST approach will make this transition easy.

The ugly ugly ugly

As Paul Graham suggests, we try to pump out features and bugfixes as fast as we can. That means changing the DB schema. That means migrations. Ugh

We cannot honestly do otherwise. The times of startups raising 5M$, developing in-house the product and finally releasing after 18 months are gone for good; besides that, the last time I checked nobody had given us 5M$, so we don’t have this opportunity! We deployed a production version after less then 3 months of part time development (it was ugly, thanks for asking!). We went to customers and investors, we got feedback, we added features. And then again, and again.

Our data layer is what slows us down. We try to concentrate all the changes in the data model (and therefore in the DB schema) in a unique release, so that we don’t migrate so often. And we postpone big data layer refactorings because they will cost us a lot.

In this case, using a schema-less database (like mongodb, but that’s not the only option) would save us a lot of time. I’m currently prototyping with mongodb and redis, and the flexibility they give to developers is huge. (And notice I’m not talking about performances because it wouldn’t be fair to relational database which offer many more functionalities).

Summary

My impression so far is that there’re some fundamental differences between enterprise technology stacks and startup technology stacks. The former are targeted to build applications whose scope and mission are somewhat clear (of course there are a lot of change requests also in enterprise software development, but the final goal is clear); the latter are targeted to build applications that  ”explore” new features, new concepts and new business models.

The former are targeted to write code that will last 3-5 years; the latter to write code what will most probably not survive more than a year (because the company will fail, will pivot, or will rewrite it once successful).

Broadly, a Startup Technology Stack (tailored to my needs and skill) is currently composed by

• HTML + JS in the fronted
• Java Web Application (and/or Python) in the backend, using a REST architecture
• Document-based, schema less database

What’s your take on this? Do you have a Startup Technology Stack?

For them, the good news is that our beta is live (since more than a month now, actually); the (less good) news is that we are sending out invitations at a slower pace we would like to. It turned out that there are so many activities in running the company (paperwork, marketing, sales, product design, user interface, customer support and plain-old development) that we are constantly overwhelmed by the things to do. We have a plan to improve that anyway! more on that later

So, talking about updates.

Photo by Alex Dunne

The first, long due update, is about our participation in the Enteprise 2.0 Launchpad; as good ol’ Ceasar said “we came, we saw, and… we came second” (or something like that). Daniel went on stage on July 16th to present Mindquilt and, as you can guess from the diabolic grin, he was great. We had good feedbacks and a lot of interest, and 38% of the votes. So close to win.
Of course it hurts a bit to loose for a handful of votes, but we were by far the youngest company in the lot.
That’s the thing I like of my team mates: we are so excited to present our product and compete in startup competitions that we often forget we are competing against companies with 2-3 years of hard work behind, and hundreds or thousands of customers.

Photo by StewieD

Back to Europe, back to coding. We got together in Dusseldorf for a final hackathon before releasing a new beta version.  Despite the crazy world cup german days, we were able to release a lot of bug fixes and new features in the new version, mostly driven by the early feedbacks of our beta and potential customers.
We also set up a blog where you can gain more insights on Mindquilt.

Shortly after, we participated in the Techcrunch Pitch Battle in London, hosted by the new TechHub. Again a great experience, we made it to the final 8 but not in the top 3. Anton was on stage this time, and he did a great job.

What’s next? Again, so many things I don’t even know where to start.

First thing, we have been selected for the Mini Seedcamp London. It will be again Anton turn to present Mindquilt in this 20-startup-20 competition, with most of the European VCs and angels as judges. The Mini Seedcamp is next tuesday so check my twitter account for almost-real-time updates.

Code wise, besides the omnipresent bug fixes, the payment integration (via Paypal) is almost ready; I also worked on the back office part to allow us to gather more usage statistics on the product.
The next big topic is enterprise system integration… huge topic, we will as usual go back to our users and potential customers to understand what are the priorities.

Finally, we all realised that Mindquilt is taking us every day more time, and we decided to progressively close our consultancy contracts to work full time on it. Daniel is already 100% on Mindquilt, and flying back to Austin, TX to take care of business in the USA. I’ll also end my long-lasting collaboration with ITHR and Vodafone in 3 weeks to dedicate 1(5)0% of my time to this new venture. Pretty exciting eh?

I’m not sure where I’ll be based at the moment. Getting a Visa for the USA seems to be very complicated, so I’ll probably be based still in Dusseldorf, with frequent flights to Austin.

It really feels so good to be in the final, especially considered that we were one of the few (the only?) participant who still hasn’t publicly released its product. So how could we get there? Here is our recipe: feel free to add your suggestions to improve this short “marketing-on-a-shoestring” checklist!`

Networking
That’s arguably one of the most important factor. While we have been running in stealth mode for a few months now, we have never been shy to share our project with a number of people. We have showed our presentation to our investors, colleagues, friends, possible partners… a sort of Mindquilt extended family. Investment: a lot of time, but it doesn’t seem like work

Video
We did the marketing video with Screenflow. It’s a bit pricey (99$), but very nice tool that gives you both screen capture and basic video editing. We just recorded the audio with a cheap microphone and Audacity and yes, we (ehmm… I) messed up a bit, and the audio has a bit too much echo. Oh well, I think it is good enough. Investment: about 2 days + 99$

Twitter
Simply, we twitted (tweetted?) quite a lot. We tried to keep the promotional tweets to an acceptable level, and to have conversations with people. Converse, tweet, retweet. Two weeks ago we had around 40 followers (mostly friends), now are at 120. Investment: a few minutes a day

Facebook
Creating a simple promotional Facebook application takes literally minutes, and there are plenty of tutorials online. I created ours using the standard template, plus a little javascript function to add the Mindquilt badge on the user Wall. Have a look at it at http://apps.facebook.com/votemindquilt/ (as you can see, it’s now a bit broken, but it was working!). Investment: 1 hour

Promotional Website
Facebook and Twitter promotions link to Vote for Mindquilt, a very simple website I created in an hour. You can see there’s no designer hand behind it (she’s busy working on the real app), just a white website, font-family: Helvetica Neue, font-weight: 200; these are my designer skills! Investment: 1hour

Funny Badges
On Vote for Mindquilt you can see our four “funny badges”. Of course, you will need a real designer to do them. We used the badges as a reminder to our twitter and facebook followers to vote for us, posting one badge per day in the last few days of the poll. Investment: about 2 days of a designer.

Blog
We actually didn’t blog that much. The reason is I was the only one with a blog before joining Mindquilt, and a pretty abandoned one. Creating a blog just to promote a company (even a cool one ) doesn’t seem fair to me. I’d rather call it spam. So the only blog post we launched was in my blog.

That’s all folks. That’s not rocket science, but it actually seemed to work. We’ve got plenty of emails of people asking for more details or a demo, and most importantly we’ve got our ticket to Boston.

Looking back, there’re many little details I’d like to change the next time (topic for another blog) but hey, I think it was good enough!

So now that “little guy” (we couldn’t find a better name for him) is out, with his shiny new badge, it is probably the right moment to introduce Mindquilt.
Mindquilt is the attempt of a few of us to propose an “enterprise” system to make the knowledge flow in an organization agile. The tools we usually use for that can be grouped in two categories:

• documentation based (wiki, word documents): structured documentation, often difficult to find and almost always outdated
• real time (chat, phone): very effective, but intrusive and almost impossible to “capture” in a durable format

What we are trying to build is a system taking the best of the two worlds. Any user can enter questions into the application; these questions are routed, using an intelligent algorithm, to the company experts in the related topics, that can answer them. And all the information flow is recorded and categorized, so that it can be extracted in what we call “Just in Time documentation”.

Sound interesting? I hope so. For sure it will sound a bit fuzzy right now.

You can have a look at our promotional video for a few more details, or just wait a few more weeks for entering in our private beta.

And of course, the best way to know more about Mindquilt is to vote us in the Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad, so that we can show it on stage in Boston.

And you can even use our Facebook app to add the coolest badge you’ve ever seen!

A new year is a good excuse for a new post, even if meaningless. Let me tell you the truth: just an excuse to try wptogo, the blogging tool for Android.

Yesterday I did my “OSGi in the Enteprise” presentation, and it is already available on Slideshare.

A lot to things to figure out yet: how to organize my time, without strict deadlines and clear requirements, and avoid to waste time surfing the net (and playing Farmville ). And how to market my ideas, demos and company.

A lot of new stuff, interesting stuff though.

In my (copious) free time I started developing an OSGi Rest console. Not sure the news deserve a line in my end-of-summer updates, but it has already been used by Toni and Sahoo.


No, I still haven’t learnt German. But I enrolled in my fourth language course at the end of August.


Went regularly to the gym. One every two weeks.


Spent my 5 days summer vacation in Cagliari. A lot of achievements there:
– ate snails for the first time in my life
– ate oysters (with lemon) for the first time, and thought that they taste of lemon too much (go figure)
– presented Spring DM: where OSGi meets the Spring Framework at the Spring Framework Italian User Group
– wandered through the city with magomarcelo

You can find my review on the OSGi Look. ]]> http://diotalevi.com/2009/08/13/modular-java/feed/ 0