Shouting out to the internets.
We love to talk about business, Ruby on Rails, design and startups, so what better place to store it all than a blog. Feel free to re-post or share with your friends.
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Jan26
Posted by koombea
Fresh new website from the clouds!
Hey there, thanks for visiting, feel free to browse around and check out our redesigned website. We feel like its more an iteration from our last one, rather than a complete new concept, but truly shows what koombea is right now.
There are nifty improvements all around with an easier-to-browse work page, straight to the point stuff all around, and an easier way to contact us.
The thing we’re most excited about with our new website: it’s running on the clouds. Basically, we moved our old wordpress blog to tumblr, and made a small Sinatra app that runs on heroku.
Hope you like it!
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Jan11
Posted by koombea
2009 Report Card, 2010 Goals
Last year, we launched the Koombea blog, and with it our first post, where we clearly defined our identity for the year:
Our goal is to develop in advanced frameworks like Ruby on Rails, CakePHP and Cocoa whenever possible.
Here’s how we did:
Clients
First on the list was finding and focusing on the customers that aligned with our goals. We were lucky enough to work with several startups on some of their projects like Advebs’Flowlett.com, Rhomobile’s Rhohub.com, MonaLisaStyle and several other who’s focus was to build SAAS web application companies. We can’t thank them enough for their trust, and hard work to get these out the door. While working with us, clients are simply part of the Koombea team and we look forward to the ones that we’ll work with in 2010.
Team
We invested a lot of time and resources into our internal process, training and client interactions in order to offer the best experience possible for both our clients and team. Our team grew to 14 people from 7 early last year. This year we plan to increase our internal training, become Scrum certified and move into other development platforms such as Cocoa(which we didn’t do much of in ‘09) and hopefully Android.
Process
The simple goal of becoming a great development shop influenced a lot our decisions thought-out the year like going full BDD (Behavior driven development), and implementing Outside-in and pair development.
Throughout the year we had our ups and downs in different projects, mostly when we forgot about our own processes. The key thing is that we learned and iterated to fix our mistakes quickly, and used our successes to solidify our process.
Rails Rumble
We participated in our first RailsRumble this year, and were lucky enough to come out ahead. Here was our entry: Hi, I’m
Blogging and Community
As mentioned above, we started our company blog in 2009, but really didn’t post that often. This year we plan to post more often in a couple of themes: Ruby on Rails, Startups, Design, and social media. Also, we plan to reactivate our initiative to promote Rails in Barranquilla and Colombia.
2010
We have some pretty cool products planned(internal) and working with some awesome clients. Will be posting more info soon.
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Oct27
Posted by koombea
Thinking About Minimum Viable Product
One of the core concepts of a lean startup is the idea of Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The idea behind Minimum Viable Product is to build just enough of the core of your product that you can get it to users to begin getting feedback—maybe even get some of them to pay you for it.
But a lot of startups have a hard time wrapping their heads around MVP. They come to the table with a great idea and lots of thoughts on all of the features it needs to be AWESOME and they want to build everything. As a result, it takes forever to launch. And if it takes forever to launch, it becomes increasingly difficult to get feedback from users on what they really need from your product.
Another difficulty is deciding what features to cut. Thinking about your MVP challenges entrepreneurs to boil their product down to the very essence of what it needs to do and then do that, and no more. In fact, sometimes your minimum viable product won’t be a product at all.
I was at a startup dinner one night and at our table was the CEO of an enterprise software company*. He told the story about a feature they were thinking about launching. Instead of building it and then launching it, they simply added a link to the proposed feature in the existing product that took users to a form that asked users what they’d like to see in the feature. It took them about 10 minutes to set up and they collected some great feedback about how to build the feature. They launched a MVP that wasn’t even a product and got invaluable feedback that informed their product decisions moving forward.
It can be very difficult to look at a feature and determine whether it’s core. To do this, you need to be talking to your customers, trying things out, and moving forward in small incremental steps.
There’s a great list of 10 Examples of Minimum Viable Product up over on Venture Hacks that provides some real world case studies about how real companies have developed MVPs. Hopefully it will give you a sense of how to really cut your product down to the core features, even if that core isn’t a feature at all.
Have you built a MVP? What was your experience? What was the hardest part about defining what your MVP would be? Share your thoughts in the comments.
*One of the rules of the dinner was that everything was off the record, so I’m being intentionally vague about the who and what. But it’s a true story. Trust me on this.
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Mar23
Posted by koombea
What Is Scrum?
Here’s a good, concise, description of Scrum.
At Koombea, we use Scrum to help our clients focus on the features that will add the most value to their business. It allows us to launch early and iterate to get your business up and running. It also provides our clients with the flexibility to make changes to their products based on the changing needs of their business. It’s very different than development engagements that most people are used to where they write up a big detailed spec, throw it over the wall, and hope that what comes back is what they were looking for.
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Mar12
Posted by koombea
Put Your Name Through The Pizza Test
Pizza is a key part of the startup life, no matter what entrepreneur you talk to (anywhere in the world). Jeff Bezos says that innovation must occur in “two-pizza teams”:
Small, fast-moving groups of five to eight Amazon employees now could go hog wild with new ideas, such as customer discussion boards on each product page and software to play music and videos on the site. Since then these “two-pizza teams,” which Bezos calls them because each team can be fed with two large pies, have become Amazon’s prime innovation engines. “There’s a huge value in this small, nimble team approach,” says tech consultant and author John Hagel III. “But you can’t do that without this kind of computer architecture.”
Next time you are working on a two-pizza team and coding all through the night, use that opportunity to test your new company or product name. Call the pizza place during the dinner rush and tell them your domain name. Then ask them to spell it for you. If they don’t get it on the first try, go to your favorite who is, and keep trying.
Domains names should always be short, snappy and easy to pass on through word of mouth. Unless your product doesn’t depend on viral marketing, in which case please contact us because we’d love to talk to you. This is no easy feat in 2009 where almost all good domains have been taken by legitimate users or domain squatters.
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Feb13
Posted by koombea
Magic Max and Expose
Max has some kind of strange connection to his Mac…
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Feb9
Posted by koombea
Must See TV for Entrepreneurs
I was talking today with my friend Aaron who is starting a great little company called Zealog. Zealog let’s you track whatever you want with your friends in fun and super cool graphs and charts. People are tracking everything…water drank (drunk? drunken?), miles ran, pounds lost, even somebody’s fights with her mother.
We got to talking about starting businesses and he reminded me of this great presentation from David Heinemeir Hansson from Startup School 08. If you’re an entrepreneur and you haven’t watched it, you must. If you have watched it before, watch it again. The lessons are timeless.
Share and annotate your videos with Omnisio! -
Jan29
Posted by koombea
Koombea Wallpapers!
Can’t get enough of Koombea? No prob! You can now have the ultra-awesome Koombea wallpapers! Get ‘em while they’re hot!
1680x1050 (Widescreen)
1280x1024
iPhone
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Jan21
Posted by koombea
Steve, Get Well. Soon.
The team here at Koombea are huge Mac fans. There’s not a PC in our shop (ok, there’s a few in QA). We’ve taken inspiration from Steve Jobs’ vision, his design, and his creativity. Now, he’s sick and has taken leave from his job at Apple. There’s been a lot of news about what his illness means for Apple and for the stock price and pundits have been weighing in all over the place. And while we’re concerned for Apple and what happens to it, we think that a lot of people have really missed the bigger issue—Steve getting well. And we know we’re not alone when we say we wish Steve a speedy recovery.
Today, we launched Steve, Get Well so Apple fans and friends of Steve can leave him a little get well note. Please take a minute and let him know that there’s a lot of people out there who wish him the best and have his back while he’s on the mend.
Steve, get well.
The Koombea Team
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Jan19
Posted by koombea
Half A Million Dollars? Puh-leeze.
Clicking around on FriendFeed today, I ran across this blog post from Peter, a startup founder with a dream. And an apparent lack of $500,000. They’d done some asking around and had come up with an estimate of $150,000 to build the site they were thinking about. They’d hired some consultants and the consultants said 12 weeks * 2 people = $150k. Plus other startup costs and I’m assuming some small salaries for the founders and they figured they’d need a total of $500k just to get started.
What?! $500k just to get started? The insanity! The best way to get started is…wait for it…just get started!
And start small. You don’t need to build a huge product with all the bells and whistles to know if it’s going to work. And it’s probably best not too. Because what if you’re wrong? One of the advantages that startups have is that they can be quick and change direction and experiment without huge overhead. The more you build before you launch, the more it’s going to cost you to change direction.
One of the things we’ve been doing with our clients at Koombea is helping them figure out how to break their idea down into bite sized pieces. Once you know what your pieces are, prioritize them. There’s always going to be one thing that is the MOST IMPORTANT THING. Ask yourself, “What is the very core of my service?” It should be small. Maybe one feature. Maybe two. Then build it and launch it. Then see how people use it. Then go back to your list of bite sized pieces and ask, “What’s the next most important thing for my business?” Then build it and launch it. Repeat. Collect feedback along the way. Talk to your users. Reprioritize. Then repeat again.
So my advice for Peter Spook is to start small and iterate. The worst thing you could do is build a Taj Mahal and then find out that what your users really wanted was something just a bit more cozy. By building incrementally, you can better manage your cash. And for startups in this environment, cash is very very important.
Reid Hoffman summed it up perfectly when he said, “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” He’s right on the money.
P.S. Peter, whoever quoted you $150k was off their rocker. Drop me a note. We can help ;)
