HelpBuddy: The official blog

So ‘Project Management’ is a term we all are familiar with. It refers to a process through which a team organizes all the elements involved in the development of a new product or a service. A project has a predefined duration, a limited budget and specifically allocated resources, in contrast to the normal ongoing business operations. Often there are projects assigned to different teams in a company which are responsible for its successful completion on time. Project collaboration deals with the processes and tools, which enable team members to work together effectively and provides a mean to organize the tasks pertaining to the project. Agile Development Project development frameworks are a good way to organize and manage software/website development projects. Agile development is an incremental software development framework that evolves through cross-collaboration of the project’s team members. It encourages teamwork and fast adaptability. A good example of a project development framework is ‘Scrum’; which is a widely used development framework based on agile software development concepts. The Tools of the Trade! There are many project collaboration tools available online, which allow for online collaboration, making it very easy to keep track of projects. Online project collaboration tools allow companies to have team members located anywhere in the world and still maintain productivity. And the most important thing is that some of them come for free for a limited number of employees. Isn't that awesome?! Additionally, these tools allow users to easily and quickly generate all sorts of reports, making it easy for all project stakeholders to keep track of the progress! The Tools Available! There are many software scripts and SaaS (Software as a Service) offerings out there that provide project collaboration tools. 37Signals was one of the first companies that brought in Basecamp as one of the first SaaS project collaboration tools. Since then there has been tremendous growth in this industry which largely corresponds to the number of new startups forming and requiring such solutions. That was all about Project Collaboration from our side! Hope you find this post helpful! :)

Outsourcing is no longer a rare, new term anymore. This is the stage where we actually start working on or implementing our project. It's called the 'Implementation' stage and in the Seven Stages to a Startup series, this is the third one. In our startup HelpBuddy, we started the implementation stage with outsourcing the work. As we all know outsourcing has become an increasingly important element in global business ventures, primarily IT related initiatives. Outsourcing lets business owners hire different people or companies to perform certain jobs instead of their in-house employees. In the past, outsourcing was a complex and cumbersome task and was only undertaken, when the need to fulfill specialized demands arose. But now, the web has opened up a world of opportunities for both companies and professionals, to easily outsource their requirements or services to interested parties across the globe. This makes life easier on both ends! Outsourcing can provide many advantages over having a job done “in house”. To start, outsourcing provides companies the option to hire freelancers on an hourly or project basis depending on what is convenient for the company. Additionally, outsourcing allows companies to find professionals that are extremely capable, sometimes even the best in their respective fields or others who are difficult to find in the local market. It is also worth noting that professionals from certain locations tend to charge considerably less while still providing a satisfactory quality of work. Another benefit of outsourcing your work is that you aren't responsible for the cost of the internet and the electricity etc. so you save up space, money and time because the freelance workers will work on their own systems with their own internet and electricity. Although it can be reimbursed through what you pay to them but it’s still a lot cheaper than having to set up an office and providing facilities to your employees along with a good salary.

You don't need a mirror. You look fine. LOL

Source: www.klinger.io

At this point of our 'seven stages to a startup' we are at the Initiation stage. We’re going towards familiarizing you with the techniques used for representing the functioning of your website. When it comes to sharing with your team the vision or imagery you have of your application’s design, navigation, functionality and interaction, you draw figures on whiteboards, you draw workflow diagrams; all of which is messy with arrows everywhere, labels everywhere, explanation of almost every function over and over to those who could not understand them previously.. Yes, it gets messy and we all are aware of it. So, here’s another way of drafting your application’s functionality at a more sophisticated and easy-to-understand level! You must have heard about prototypes and wireframes. They’re actually synonymous to each other with a slight difference. Wireframes are also in some way similar to low fidelity mock-ups, page schematics but the most common terms are wireframing and prototyping so we will introduce them to you today. Although, we are essentially focusing on web applications but we also understand that not all startups are web-based. They can be some sort of desktop applications or mobile applications (non web-based or native applications) and wireframes are equally important in their cases too, hence, we are using the term ‘application’ with ‘website’. Wireframing is a design method to sketch the websites at the structural level to layout the functionality and the website/application’s possible interactions with the user. Wireframes make the development process faster and more collaborative because they are simple and easy to make and use. Rapid prototyping (which you might have heard more about) and wireframing is that rapid prototyping is almost the same as wireframes but has a layer of functionality elements usually to create a simulation of the navigation available on the application to showcase its graphical animation effect. Wireframes basically plan out the entire website/application development process. Wireframes guide the design and development team by giving them visual cues of the general structure and feature-set of the application. They help developers plan every feature and piece of content that their intended website/application will have and that too before they even start to code! Let’s say that a wireframe empowers developers and designers by giving them a bird’s eye view of the entire project and its desired reults. Along with the User Interface (UI) that the wireframes provide, it also focuses on the User Experience (UX) as well. The layout is pretty much a skeleton and one can greatly focus on how the information will be presented, how the features are going to be aligned, and how the user will be taken through the different sections of the website/application. Hope you understand what wireframes are by now and found this article helpful! We're open for feedback. :)

You’re thinking about starting a business? Cool. Have you written down your business plan? No? …if you think you’ve got everything nicely thought out in your mind and it’s all going to go just as you’ve imagined, STOP! You were about to make a huge mistake. Never ever take the risk of shooting for a venture without writing down a proper business plan with all of its components well defined. A business plan is a vital element on which a business’s success depends. It’s a roadmap of your business and the crucial segments it constitutes of. Expert advice from successful entrepreneurs is also very essential in writing a business plan. And even after you complete a business plan, you still need guidance on it from somebody who’s most likely an entrepreneur himself because experience is needed to check a business plan and point out if anything impractical or non-applicable is there and mentor you to fix it. The most important thing is that your business plan is always a requisite throughout your business. Its job is never going to end. It’s going to be useful as long as your company is running. Furthermore, it might (most likely will) need revisions. As we all know, the market needs tend to change, you will always want to stay on top and for that, you’ll need revisions in your business plan. So, here’s a guide on how to write a business plan: 1. Executive Summary: this will be a short summary of your business plan; it will define your company’s goals. 2. Company’s Description: this will be a description of your company, what it will do, how it will serve the world, etc. 3. Financial Plan: in this part, you jot down the strategy you’ve determined for financing your company. This will include profit-loss, balance sheet, break-even, different ratios, and cash flow. 4. Market Analysis: you should know the industry, the market and your competitors well. 5. Service of Product: the service or product your company will sell. Explain why you will sell this service/product. 6. Strategy and Implementation: the company’s management, the roles people are going to share, departments’ formation and relations with competitors etc. This is a guide for you to write a business plan. You can always add in more details that you think play a vital role in your business’s strategy and planning. Hope you found this article helpful! :)

Since we’re going on about startups, this is something that might interest the upcoming entrepreneurs; those who are looking forward to launching more. Today we’re going to tell you about the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) concept which has been around for a while. It’s about time you understand what it actually means. Minimum Viable Product is basically the notion of starting up a venture with the minimum necessary features required. So you don’t just harness all of your resources in developing the complete application and showcase it. An MVP might be a whole product or it can also be a part of the product. The two main advantages of an MVP strategy are that it allows startups to break down the entire development project in chunks and encourages releasing parts of it incrementally over time. This way you don’t have to worry about releasing an entire application all at once and can test different features and modify them according to user feedback. Hence, you’re mindful of what your customers want and if they are happy with your product and its features or not. The whole point is to get feedback on your product and if it turns positive, you’re ready to pitch in some more! This short article was meant for you to understand the basic meaning of MVP. Hope you found it helpful. :)

We’d like to quote Plato here: “necessity is the mother of invention”. Couldn’t agree more! A need is requisite. The entry of startups in the market is considered to be a result of some need that wasn’t being fulfilled before and the entrepreneur took the opportunity of bringing their product in. A need requires constant refinement. Working out on the need opens doors to one or more ideas. Now it is very important to think about the individual features of the idea and create a roadmap of how to proceed further. You can use techniques such as ‘mind mapping’; you can represent your thoughts visually and strive for any improvements you can add. This way the very idea that you came up with can be refined. When we talk about refinement of an idea, we understand that we think over it a lot of times to make sure it’s what we want to go ahead with. As a matter of fact, when we think over it, there’s a good chance of getting more and more ideas out of it. This is simple brainstorming. Hence an idea can give way to new ideas which maybe further refined and are specific in nature. One can never be satisfied with just one idea to do something. Starting a business is always about giving thoughts to what you’re really going to do beforehand. Thus we recommend you to brainstorm as much as you can, look out for clues, and discover if there is more to that idea before reaching a final decision about your business idea.

Reference for this article is taken from the document written by Asad Aftab Iqbal, the founder of HelpBuddy. The document can be seen here.

Hello guys! In our last post on the blog we persuaded you to create a startup. And we also said it won't be an easy job. So we thought of giving you some guidelines regarding a newbie business venture or even if it is just an idea that you have. Here's a brand new '7 stages to a Startup' series which will focus on some awesome, real world challenges and examples that we had to face before and during the launch of HelpBuddy! Stay tuned! ;)

A business that is at the initial stages of its operation is a startup. Startups are categorized into several types these days, for example, web startups, tech startups, e-business startups and internet startups. In several startups, the entrepreneur bootstraps his business which means he starts a new business by making use of the little operating revenues and the initial personal resources available to him. In bootstrapping, you don’t have to take huge bank loans, which, indirectly means reduced interest rates. The above definition for a startup business is valid if the entrepreneur has the courage and passion to see things through and, of course, believes in himself. To start a business, a spirit of entrepreneurship is required. With limited resources at hand, the entrepreneur has to be innovative in their utilization, and finally, to be successful there needs to be commitment, perseverance and a long-term vision. Be it a small or a big idea, it can work for you if you have a clear vision of what you’re going to do and how you’re going to make use of the resources you have. In old days, when you had an idea that you wanted to turn into reality in the form of a running business, you would automatically be mindful of the investments and budget inputs you would have to make in order to get the business functioning. Now, with internet as the ultimate facilitator, you don’t have to be worried about everything in monetary respect. You don’t have to give up bulks of money to achieve a running business. In fact, these days, there are numerous businesses that operate on web only. Here, I’d like to quote Josh Quittner from his article in Time Magazine on April 9, 2009, ‘The New Internet Start-Up Boom: Get Rich Slow’, as he named such startups as “LILOs, for a little in, a lot out.” To have a smooth business, you need to adopt the strategies we've mentioned above. It’s not all that easy to dive into the world with something new, and expecting a warm welcome by the industry is absurd too, but once you’re in there, you’ll know that it was worth it! :) Because the deal is simple: if you wanna get somewhere, you gotta risk something. ;)

HelpBuddy will not only be an ‘institution-only’ facility but shortly you’ll see a new release with tons of new features! As you know, the beta version of HelpBuddy is already up and running, it’s about time we unveil some of the pieces we’re building and joining at our Development wing at HelpBuddy. HelpBuddy’s ‘City Network’ feature is on its way! Imagine it as a chance to have a loudspeaker in your hand and you are allowed to shout out what you need to everybody who can hear you not only in your campus, but in your whole city... “Now that would be fun!” - As one of our friends commented on it. Yes, that is going to be fun and what’s even better is that your circle of ‘listeners’ is going to be widened! This ultimately means more offers, more buyers, more traders, and more swappers, and all of it is equal to ‘more audience’! Soon it’s going to be a place where you can trade with just about anyone in your city. So, what would you shout if you were given a loudspeaker to ask for something? :) We'd be glad to hear from you. :)

Yes! This is what we're here to facilitate you with! :)