rMark Bio

"The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.” - Charles Darwin

The startup experience is pretty easy to imagine. First, you have a great idea, assemble a rock-star team and read all the books you can get your hands on. You are an Agile master determined to run “lean”. Even with such a promising, solid start, there is a faint, nagging voice that asks a simple but important question: with so much to do across so many aspects of the business, how do you get organized and manage all the moving parts effectively?

Not so difficult, you think. Just reach out to fellow entrepreneurs in the community.  The problem is that you often wind up with more answers than you know what to do with.  For almost every aspect of your business, there is an avalanche of solutions.  Slack, Hipchat, Skype, Yammer and many others to stay in touch. Google Hangouts, Skype, GoToMeeting and ScreenHero for video meetings and sharing screens. Trello, DaPaluse, JIRA, Pivotal, 10000ft, etc., to track your progress across development, product and marketing.  Before you know it, you have a full-time project on your hands just figuring out how to manage all of these tools, let alone managing the needs of your team and internal processes.

What the hell is going on here? I thought we were supposed to run “lean”?

If any of this sounds familiar, you are not alone.  We are about three weeks into our launch and the endless tool options can be a bit overwhelming. Figuring out how to run a business should not get in the way of launching a business.

In the spirit of collaboration, perhaps our experience can help in your quest to be the most lean, highly-connected, highly-efficient startup you can be. Taking a step back, we applied the same iterative and measurement practices that are the guiding philosophy of rMark and began to filter our options.

First, what are our goals for the next 90-180 days?  For us, this was easy to answer: obtain additional funding, continue customer development and develop the MVP.

Second, what is the minimum process our team members need?  Like many companies today, we are a remote team.  We work across multiple time zones, with multiple roles (management, development, design, science) each with our own needs to be successful. 

Third, what do we believe we will actually use?  We all love the “shiny new toy”, however, I have watched too many teams spend more time tool-hopping than integrating and using them to be successful.

Fourth, are we actually saving time and money using these tools? We need to ensure that any tool we utilize actually increases our communication and productivity across our respective roles and time zones, therefore saving us cash.    

After using a dozen or so different tools, we determined these were the best ones to help us today and for the next 180 days, and here’s why:

Product Management & Development: First, to help us drive our development efforts we went with what we know.  Our developers are well versed in the standard Agile methodologies.  We have used JIRA, Bitbucket and Confluence for years and we know how they work.  They’re straightforward and we can track our progress easily.

Project Management & Planning: Second, to help maintain focus across all the various projects, fundraising, product development, marketing, etc., we decided to go with DaPulse.  It provides a complete picture at once, while also being able to dive deep and capture the day-to-day conversations around the individual task.

Communication & Collaboration: Third, we decided to go with Slack and Screenhero for our communications.  We love these tools and their integrations.  As we grow, our foundation and habits of communication and process will be in place. In addition, we chose Evernote for our collaborative knowledge-base. Evernote makes it easy for us to capture and share websites, articles and data in well-organized notebooks.

In the end, to make sense of the intimidating excess of options, we applied the same model of test/measure/adjust when evaluating which tools best solve our needs for today’s goals. As we grow, we will reevaluate our processes and tools. Until then, the goal is to release our product, rather than spend all of our time and resources on managing tools. We picked the bare minimum we needed in order to gain insight, capture progress, measure and make modifications.

Stay tuned for further posts and let us know what works best for you in your launch experience.

Cheers!