developing a web-
development company
Adam Zygadlewicz
Wiktor Schmidt
netguru.pl/en
niedziela, 19 października 2008 1

Presentation goals
• tips and tricks
• from our point-of-view / experience
• on how to develop a start-up
• PR, Marketing
• Team-building
• IT
niedziela, 19 października 2008 2

netguru is...
• web development and consulting company
based in Poland
• focused on (enterprise) web 2.0
• focused on developing usable, intuitive,
engaging applications
• focused on supporting (local) community
niedziela, 19 października 2008 3

niedziela, 19 października 2008 4

Timeline
• June 2007 - coworking (3 freelancers)
• September 2007 - barcamp (11 local
barcamps till date, national barcamp)
• April 2008 - LLC (Gmbh) / team of 12
people
niedziela, 19 października 2008 5

Overall \"philosophy\"
• bootstrapping (reinvesting profits)
• no long-term planning
• agile in every possible aspect
• specialization - knowing core business and
sticking to it (as far as its possible :)
= \"getting real\" (PR/IT/........)
niedziela, 19 października 2008 6

niedziela, 19 października 2008 7

Team building
• hire young passionate people and let them
use your knowledge and resources
• flexibility (can be quite important for
students)
• teach, teach, teach and learn from your team
• let people evolve with the company - try to
see their future in company
• let your people promote themselves (blogs,
conferences, own projects)
niedziela, 19 października 2008 8

“Corporate” Culture
• encourage knowledge sharing
• web development blog(s) - devguru.pl
• barcamp presentations and workshops
• \"friday/omni talks\"
• pair programming
• time for experiments
• no strict work times
niedziela, 19 października 2008 9

Marketing / PR (I)
• find a niche (or communicate it that way)
• get to know people in your industry (barcamps, IT
confs)
• blog, blog, blog - journalists read blogs :)
• constantly evangelize (it sells AND teaches better
than selling)
• don't be afraid to repeat yourself, repeat yourself...
niedziela, 19 października 2008 10

Marketing / PR (II)
• be transparent - communicate about (almost) every
step you take (be proud of what you're doing!)
• monitor new ideas, trends and try to seed it on your
environment - we promoted
• co-working
• pecha-kucha
• unconference
• life-streaming (lifestreamingday)
niedziela, 19 października 2008 11

\"Customer Relations
Management\"
• sell solutions not your programmers time
• engage clients to develop projects
• workshops instead of sales presentations
• give clients access to yours PM application
• programming is just the programming (post-
sales cooperation is important)
niedziela, 19 października 2008 12

Become an pop-idol
• find people passionate about what YOU do
• support them (attention is the key)
• let them introduce you to others
• it's good if some of them are your employees ;-)
niedziela, 19 października 2008 13

Bootstraping
• DON'T PUT THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE,
buy when you REALLY, REALLY need it
• outsource / rent don't buy
• commodity hardware (Linux / Apache / Mysql)
• free/open source software
• buy services instead of hiring employees (legal,
monitoring, administration, PR, etc)
• notebooks not desktops
• paperless office is a mobile office
niedziela, 19 października 2008 14

Technology
• try to concentrate on one technology and master it
(it is easier to do evangelism :)
• free / open source (look for communities)
• release early, release often
• automated tests or let your users be a guinea pig
• diversify but standardize
• don't put \"popular\" open source software together
with your apps (Wordpress H4ck3d)
• make a \"system\"
niedziela, 19 października 2008 15

The \"system\"
• version control (SVN)
• bug tracker (lighthouse, TRAC)
• internal communication (gtalk)
• coding standards (2-space indents ;-)
• design patterns (REST, unobtrusive, DRY, \"fat
model\")
• coder / designer issues (HTML, HAML)
niedziela, 19 października 2008 16

The \"system\"(II)
• development / staging / production environments
• database names, db table and field names
• testing, Testing, TESTING (unit and integration)
• continuous integration (cruisecontrol)
• automatic deployment (capistrano)
• multibrowser testing (browsershots.org)
• \"write your code like a serial killer has to maintain
it and they know where you sleep\"
niedziela, 19 października 2008 17

What can go wrong?
• burn-out - over-engagement (rm -rf privatelife*)
hobbies? supportive family?
• \"5 reasons why all web software projects fails\"
learn to deal with failures, read a bit about
emergency PR, stay transparent, be honest
• h4x0r5
see above ;-)
• wrong hires, decisions, experiments
cut your loses fast, don't be afraid to
say you were wrong, life goes on
niedziela, 19 października 2008 18

Your comments / ideas?
niedziela, 19 października 2008 19

Thank you, Q&A
netguru.pl/en
netguru@netguru.pl
niedziela, 19 października 2008 20