The amount of startups has exploded in recent years due to the radical decrease of costs of building a technology business. Startups like us take advantage of such to be learn in our operational costs and are also jumping on the bandwagon of being lean in our software development process.
In my last post I covered our Customer Development process. I'll now briefly cover our Lean Startup Process which is embodied in the employment of three systems: 1) open source and free software, 2) agile software development and 3) customer development.
Open Source & Free Software
At the forefront is free infrastructure software (i.e. Open Source) like Ruby on Rails and extremely affordable computing software (i.e. Cloud Computing) like Heroku and Amazon's Web Services.
Agile Software Development
In a nutshell, we build only what we need to build to validate that week's hypotheses. To dramatically reduce waste we strive to ensure that changing our software isn't a daunting task. We focus on completion over perfection to get the product out early and often. We break down and estimate all development tasks and continually cut features, simplify and restructure to make our release goals. Everything is continually tested to find bugs in order to prevent them as much as possible. Creativity is optimized as we're continually improving the product as opposed to making it 'perfect' as we initially assume.
Customer Development
All product development is focused on rapidly iterating according to the product and business hypotheses we've proven from our customers. I covered Customer Development in full in my last post.
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