The introductions thread

[Tekin Suleyman]

Hi all,

I thought it would be useful to start a thread where everyone could briefly introduce  themselves (explain who you are, what you do, what you're working on, etc) as a way to get to know each other, especially as we've had a few new members to the group recently. I might as well get the ball rolling!

My name is Tekin Suleyman, founder and developer of crowd.fm, a web service that helps event promoters maximise exposure for their events online. We launched in May last year and I've since been improving the product whilst working on ways to increase our user base. We've just had a video produced that explains what it's about - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ1r16y1Lu8

I'm also a Ruby/Rails developer, and contract part-time to pay the bills.

Tekin Suleyman
Founder | http://crowd.fm | @crowdfm | The easy way to list your events online

120/122 Grosvenor St, Manchester, M1 7HL, UK

[Ben Aldred]

Hi,

My name is Ben Aldred. I am currently working on bootstrapping a site called Chefnote.com (ignore the homepage, it needs reworking  I am aware it does not really make much sense ;) ). The aim is to automate as much of the food buying/kitchen management tasks as possible. At the moment you can add recipes to your own collection and create shopping lists to take to the supermarket. The dream is to get seamless 'one click' integration between a recipe collections and buying ingredients online.

I have been working on this for over 2 years now on a part-time basis. Like Tekin I am a Ruby on Rails developer however I have been contracting on a full-time basis. This, coupled with me re-writing the code a couple of times has meant I have not got as far as I would have liked.

Hopefully I will get to do a show and tell soon (not this week as I am busy)

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[Mark van Harmelen]

Hi everyone

I'm Mark van Harmelen of Hedtek, a five person software house based in the NQ. You can find a picture of me here.

We've been bootstrapping our way to an e-assessment system on the web, supporting the entire assessment process from setting, through taking, marking and student feedback. My role in this is agile manager, product owner and user interface designer.

Our assessment system is very interactive and highly usable, at least according to our test users, who have been using it in real student assessment settings. These initial users validate two of our major claims [i] to save time for instructors in the assessment process (when did you last meet someone in the teaching trade who said "I can't wait to get home and do four hours of marking"), and [ii] to provide markedly improved feedback to students.

For curious techies the system is implemented in Rails and CoffeeScript.

Hedtek do work for clients to fund our bootstrap activities. Mostly we like Rails and CoffeeScript in a test-first stylee, but we also work in a variety of ways and technologies, as appropriate for the job in hand.

Do please say hi at a meeting

Mark

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Dr Mark van Harmelen
Director, Hedtek Ltd

cell/mobile            +44 7830 212 464 / 07830 212 464
skype                     markvanharmelen
web                        http://hedtek.com

developer blog     http://devblog.hedtek.com 

Gradient Assessment 

                             http://gradientassessment.com  

                             http://markitquickly.com

Hedtek is a limited company registered in England and Wales, Co Reg No 6300001

[Rob Gough]

Hi all.

I'm Rob Gough, and when I can I'm building a "hyper-local" gig listing site that I'm calling Giglr (http://giglr.co.uk) that target's the interesting "little" gigs, rather than the MEN/Apollo/Academy style gigs. Basically all the gigs Ticketmaster doesn't care about.

I'm building it in Ruby-on-Rails, but by day I'm a C#/.Net dev who builds hospital systems for a large american corporate. Unfortunately this job has been sucking up a large amount of time recently, and I've not managed to make much progress. With the new year, it seems like a good a time as ever to refocus - and I'm hoping to launch by the middle of this year.

It's very early days, and I'm not expecting it to be my ticket to the big-money, but I think it's a good starter project that should be able to pay for itself, and eventually maybe a few people to run it.

Rob

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Rob Gough

@robgough http://robgough.net

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[Graham Ashton]

Afternoon all.

Just over a year ago, I'd almost accidentally saved up a few grand (by working as freelancer/contractor) and decided to see if I could turn my small (less than 20k) pot of cash into a SaaS product.

I'd been half heartedly trying to build a product part time for the previous couple of years, but had found the temptation to do "just one more paid job" too great. I was allowing my subconscious fear of running out of money to distract me from my real goal (building my own product).

I've learnt over the years that I find it far more difficult to work on my product whilst simultaneously working for a client. The client gets all my energy, and I haven't got enough drive left to work on my own projects. Maybe I'm getting old - I had energy to spare when I was 25.

So anyway. I realised that I was never going to free myself from the "money for hours" cycle unless I buckled down and focussed on my own thing. If I didn't go full time on my own product I should go full time on the freelancing; the half way house was costing me a lot in lost freelancing revenue, with nothing to show for my product-related efforts.

I looked at the pot of cash in my company bank account and realised it would support me for at least six months, and that in six months I should be able to knock up something fairly useful. I was in London at the time (where life is expensive) and twigged that by moving home to Manchester I'd be able to stretch that 6 months to 9 months. It would also provide a useful break from my existing clients - it would be easy to turn the work down.

I started working on The Agile Planner in January 2012. For the first time, I truly felt like my own boss. Working on it full time was superb, and forced me to address my fears ("am I nuts?", "will I run out of money?", "will anybody want it?" - none of these questions are easy to answer, but once you've addressed them it's easier to crack on at full speed).

I dabbled with Lean Startup, and learnt the hard way (I wasted 6 weeks obsessed with making a swanky video) that it's not always about building *cheap* MVPs (nobody tells you that some MVPs can't be that minimal). That said, I do like Lean. The rapid iteration techniques will become more useful to me once I've proved the concept and am honing the feature set.

The product is now at a stage where I've got a few companies who have been using it to manage their day to day software development for, well, ages (including some on this list). I haven't added all the features I think it needs, but it's time to see whether or not anybody will pay for what I've got. There's enough there for people to get a feel for it.

Development has been paused for the last couple of months while I've been dealing with the empty bank account problem (I'm doing a more freelancing, on a part time basis).

The next steps will include setting up an email marketing campaign (e.g. engendering trust through free email based training), onboarding, and as much contact with potential customers as I can manage. It's also time to start regular blogging (I've already analysed my competitors' blogs and have worked out my strategy).

I've learnt a lot in the last year, especially about fear, motivation and procrastination (and the importance of giving yourself a break). It's been more fun than that makes it sound.

I think I've reached the hard bit. Or at least, I'm venturing into a minefield of known unknowns.

Catch you later for a beer...

Graham

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Graham Ashton
Founder, The Agile Planner
http://theagileplanner.com | @agileplanner | @grahamashton