After listening to a great podcast with Martin Eberhard of Tesla Motors Inc. from the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture, I thought more about the statement “Build your company while building your product.” He mentioned it twice and really pronounced its importance. It is a really helpful advice, especially for young entrepreneurs working on their first startup.
You and your co-founders had an interesting idea and developed a full-fledged concept around it. You know how to market it, how to generate revenues, how to get investments for the product development, how to convince your customers and how to optimize the many little details. Everything fine by default? It is normal to focus only on the product because this is what you sell and what makes you stand out but let’s consider the basic needs for a sustainable company.
What about the company that stands behind the product? How fast can you scale up? Integrate new team members? Coordinate work with freelancers or external agencies? How complicated is it for you to change the roadmap and diversify your product which is often necessary if your competitors launch 3 months ahead of you with a very similar product? Is the organization of your team a big mess or does everyone know what his or her duties are and where help is demanded? Do you spend a lot of time figuring out the next steps on the roadmap or discussing too many things without making progress? Communication is king but the corporate meeting culture is counter-productive. Everyone has a feeling if something works well or not, and every startup means working with many persons from various fields. Think about effectiveness, doing the right things, versus efficiency, doing things right. Optimizing processes that are wrong from minute one is useless.
A lot of these points can be improved with a well thought-out company structure and organization that suits YOUR needs. Let’s consider some points our early stage startup focused on. To make it clear in advance, this does not mean we spent too many hours on improving our organization and have no time to build a sweet product. After discussing the pro and contra of many applications and tools in the first days we found out that it is already better than in many other projects. We are a distributed team of three persons but have to work together with a designer and additional developers in the next months. Especially for virtual teams it is important to have a good organization and a communication. Nothing worse than seeing no progress in a project.
Our Tools:
- Twiki. An open-source wiki that is very powerful and used in many fairly big enterprises. You can create spaces and assign permissions in a very flexible way. We have a main page with the sections business, organization, product development and it/technology. You have to regularly rethink the structure because it is evolving with the company. The e-mail notification and the powerful plugin system are other big advantages of twiki. It is also feasible to create a nice competitors matrix, in case you have some.
- Redmine. A flexible project management software that integrates with our source code repository. You can create tickets to define the development roadmap, assign tasks for the business stuff and track the time you spent on all these issues. Redmine supports subprojects, a calendar, gant charts and offers an activity stream to track what is happening. The interface is simple to use and very clear. You have to do some customizations with regards to the categories and projects. We disabled the wiki, the forum and the blog.
- Google Calendar. A shared calendar for the team to show everyone what is happening and to make appointments. It has a nice, fast and intuitive interface.
- Campfire. A group chat that also allows you to upload files for discussion. No one is missing important points that are discussed between team members.
- Skype. Free VoIP conferencing. A weekly telephone conference with an agenda set up in the wiki can make the organization structured and convenient.
- Git. A version control system for our source code files. Excellent for distributed software development in teams. Integrates well with Redmine where you can take a look at the repository from the web interface.
- Google Notebook. Hmm, not really. It is fast to collect a lot of links and categorize them but to stay up-to-date, some notification system is missing.
By the way, they are all free to use. Campfire is just free in the basic version which is fine for now. For us, nearly all the information that belongs to the project is documented in any way
Any further recommendations or tips? Which tools do you use in your startup?
P.S.
The blog post is also part of our think about your internal organization & processes time.
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