The MicroConf Europe 2013 Hub Page with all the information can be found here
Speaker: Peldi Guilizzoni (@peldi)
Intro
- 2008 – Solo founder, bootstrapped
- Goal: Feed myself, my wife & my son
- …little by little, as slowly as possible…. (totally not what happened)
- revenue about $6,000,000 / year, 35% profit margins
- probably a one-hit-wonder, and totally fine with it
Lots and Lots of Tools
- CEO’s job is to optimize, choose tools quickly
- Diversify and look behind the curtain (make sure that tools are staying in business)
Tools for Design & Development
- Pivotal Tracker (easy, one step above a text file)
- Confluence
- Github
- IntelliJ IDEA
- Jenkins
- Selenium / PhantomJS
- AWS (extensively! S3, EC2, SQS…)
- Balsamiq Mockups / myBalsamiq
- Adobe Creative Suite tools
- Charles – proxy software
- Chrome Dev Console
- ….
Branching Strategy
- One branch per developer
- Merges to Revision branches only from MASTER
- one staging server per developer + one main staging server
Do a Gamma (after your Beta)
- Launch your software, but with a hidden signup page
- Ask people to pay (“need to test payment processing”)
- set expectation to possible errors (test that you don’t loose data, fix biggest errors)
- Stress-free launching
- At launch you can easily say “200 people are already paying for this”
Tools for Communicating internally
- Google Apps (email)
- Hipchat (was Skype / Yammer)
- Confluence
- Dropbox
- Google Hangout / GoToMeeting
- Zapier
- Spotify
Tools for Communicating externally
- Desk.com (was “Reply All” in Google Apps)
- GMail (with Undo Send)
- DashExpander / Typinator (storing all rules in dropbox – common style across the company)
- Skype (SkypeIn phone)
- Google Hangouts
- GetSatisfaction
- Social Media (for tech support – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn)
- WordPress + S3
- Google Forms
- AdWords (managed by Dave Collins)
- pinboard.in (was delicious)
- Youtube (was BrightCove)
- Skitch
- Screenflow
- Screenr
- Desk chats / Olark
How we host our Website
- A little history:
- Drupal
- Self-hosted WordPress (got hacked)
- WPEngine (moved the hack along… got hacked again, but WPEngine mitigated this quickly)
- Static websites hosted on S3 (build with Hammer, automatically uploaded by s3sync
- Cloudfront? Not yet, but on the roadmap
Tools for running the company smoothy
- Macbook Pros + Big monitors
- Google Apps (shared Cal, Docs, ….)
- Confluence
- Dropbox
- Hipchat
- Google Hangout
- Desk.com
- QuickBooks online
- Balsamiq Olio (was spreadsheet + Freshbooks)
- Stripe (was e-junkie + PayPal + Google Wallet + Spreedly)
A little bit about how we work
- Not flat, fluid (no managers)
- Project-based work
- Pace over deadlines (good quality is more important than speed)
- Handbook and Wiki (“How we do things”)
- to bring new employees up to speed
- common acronyms page
- weekly agenda pages for every employee
- Macro Company Areas (“Departments”)
- emerge over time
- Right now:
- Mockups
- myBalsamiq
- Plugins
- Next Gen
- Testing
- Kaizen
- Admin
- Sales
- UX / Websites / Support / Marketing
- Docs & Tutorials
- Ops
- each area with Projects Backlog
- Projects:
- one lead
- people (pigs vs chickens – pigs are active, chickens only listen)
- Every area has own Hipchat room
- Monthly “all hands meeting” via video conference (includes 5 minutes presentations from everyone)
About Christoph
Christoph lives in Munich, Germany and is bootstrapping his own SaaS application as a part-time entrepreneur.
Nice list of tools! I would also add the dashboard tool Cyfe to the list. Our startup uses it to track all our business data.
Hi Jennifer,
I would love to add your tool, but this post is a recollection of a conference talk and adding your tool to the list seems wrong to me.
Cheers,
Christoph