Articles tagged 'business'

Why launching your product is so important Aug 23 2013

Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the MVP

An MVP, or a minimum viable product, is a key part of what we work with clients to achieve on brand new apps and greenfield projects. The idea behind an MVP is to isolate the smallest amount of work you need to do to get your idea in front of people, so you can see whether it works, and how it works (or doesn't), and see what direction to take it in next. The reason we always look to advise clients to go down this route isn't because we want to work with clients for the smallest time possible (we hope that we'll cultivate a working relationship that continues for lots of development iterations to come!), but because we know how important getting a version of your product out there is, and how important it is to businesses like yours that it can be done quickly and affordably.

If you've been following along with our other posts, you've probably already done some legwork to research and prepare your ideas. You may have even collected a lot of interest on a pre-launch page. But the actual product still might not be as useful or profitable as you think, at least in the incarnation of it you have in your head. The absolute best way to put that to the test is to go ahead and put it in front of people. You'll sometimes see people refer to a prototype, and there are times where a prototype of your idea is the best first step - especially useful with engineering physical products. However prototype implies that it's transient, temporary, something that is there to be replaced with the real thing once the specifications are fully explored and buttoned down. With an MVP, while we're making sure the project stays agile and open to change based on feedback, we're still building the product in a meaningful way, so that it can be built upon and extended for years to come. We're not delivering something to be thrown away, it's simply the first stepping stone.

So how do we go about defining an MVP? The idea is to boil your idea down to its simplest form - the phrase KISS ("Keep It Simple, Stupid") comes to mind. Figure out the core ethos behind your idea, what really makes it tick, and then ascertain the smallest amount of features needed for a user to get that in front of them. With every system, there are some tasks that ideally would be automated, but in the beginning can be manual tasks without too much effort. This means that any dev work to automate them can be excluded, to start with. As soon as the manual work becomes burdensome, then that's a nice problem to have, as it means the app needs to scale, and that's generally as a result of user engagement and growth. No point scaling before then prematurely though, as you're simply burning dev cycles, and you're not even really sure if that feature is something the users will love, hate, or be indifferent to. By focusing on the minimum amount of work to get something in front of a user, you're minimising your exposure if it turns out to be something they don't want, and making sure you collect great feedback to help build on it if it's something that they do find useful.

We'll work with you to pare down the feature set in this way, and with our KickOff packages can schedule work based on how small the idea is, and the length of time required. We can then work with you to build it out very quickly, with a constant feedback loop along the way, and then we help you to launch to your users - whether that's a closed private beta, an open public beta, whether you charge for it or not from day one, those are all things that are up to you. But getting it into users hands, so that their feedback can drive you towards a successful product, that's the key part of the process, and it's what we focus on and deliver when you engage with us to build your idea.

Some people might worry as well that by trimming the feature set to define an MVP, it could result in shipping an imperfect product, and what if that results in your vision not being fully grasped by users, or even worse, small issues or imperfections damaging your reputation? The bottom line however is that no matter how hard you try, how long you work, or how much you spend, your first launch of a new product or idea will almost certainly not be perfect, and more importantly, won't be exactly what users need. You might be in the right ballpark, you might solve a problem for the users, but to do it right, you'll need to work with them to find the sweet spot that your product can reside in. So knowing that, surely it's better to start that iterative customer development process sooner rather than later?

Why not get in touch with me today for a free 30 minute chat about your idea, to see how quickly and affordably I could build your dream app?

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All new KickCode and introducing Hijax Games Jul 6 2013

I have completely forgotten to post on here about the relaunch of the KickCode site, or my new gaming focused development brand, d'oh!

First things first, I rebuilt and relaunched the KickCode site a good few weeks ago. The new site is smarter, cleaner and clearer, and focuses on what we do best - helping businesses improve. Whether it’s increasing revenue or users, decreasing churn, or another business goal you have, we can almost certainly help you achieve it. We’re providing lots of good business and technical content on the blog too, and you can sign up for the newsletter to get a nice round-up of things we’ve written, worked on, or found interesting. Check out the new site now!

I’ve also launched a separate gaming focused brand, called Hijax Games. The thinking behind this was to provide the same great focus we do on KickCode, but specific to the game development niche. We’ll be working on our own games and sharing development progress from those, as well as being available to work on client game development. Lastly, we’ll be providing great game development content to help other game developers, with the tools we’re best at, from RubyMotion and Joybox, to Unity3D. Expect lots of interesting stuff over the coming months, and again you can sign up to the Hijax newsletter to be kept in the loop.

So that’s that, busy few weeks launching those - let me know if you have thoughts, comments or questions on the new sites, and please get in touch if you think KickCode or Hijax Games can help you with your idea!

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From pre-launch landing page to launch - getting your site online Jun 27 2013

If you've been following along on the previous posts, you've identified a business idea (or more than one), done some market and audience research, and setup a pre-launch landing page to further gauge interest. Assuming you're happy with the level of interest, and still feel that the idea you've chosen is a good one, now it's time to get online and actually launch!

Depending upon your product, you have a multitude of options for getting a site up and running. As a result of the many different options, we're not going to go into tutorial level details for working with each option in this post, but we will go ahead and outline the different paths you can take - you of course need to find the best one for your particular business!

Blogs

So if you're in the business of either selling your information, or your expertise, you most likely want to focus on a blog-like site, with some additional information about yourself. This will allow you to write and demonstrate your knowledge to the world! Anything to do with blogs brings Wordpress instantly to mind, but you could also look at Tumblr, especially if you were planning on a blog that is perhaps more personal and encouraging more social interaction (reblogging, liking etc) than a corporate business blog. Again it depends on your target market as to the aesthetic you're aiming for - Tumblr is probably easier to get up and running with, and has a wide variety of free and paid themes, but Wordpress will give you a lot more options for expanding the site at a later date in terms of features. It too has a galaxy of available themes and styles ready to use.

If you think that you need more than "just a blog", and customising Wordpress heavily to achieve that doesn't sound like fun, then you can move more into more generic software that lets you build websites with lots of different features. Virb is just one site that offers this, and it offers a wide variety of themes meaning that with just a little bit of time, you can piece together the features and style that you want for your site, and include a blog alongside other features like a photo gallery.

Selling physical products

Of course, if your product involves e-commerce, and actually selling and shipping a product, then you need something that makes setting up an online store easier. If it's a physical product, then you can setup an online store in a few different ways. Shopify is one such package you can use to setup the store, with different plans available that offer differing feature levels. Another popular site is Big Cartel, which again offers different packages to suit different needs, and is fairly easy to get up and running with. How complex you want to get with the store depends on the types of products you are shipping - but for the most part, as a small business just starting out, you want to make sure that the store is personal, and engaging - you're not (yet) Amazon, and so impersonal e-commerce won't get you very far. Instead, make the store fun, and people will be more likely to stick around - and the longer they stick around, the better the chances they'll buy something. We'll come back to personal touches a little later.

Digital products

If the product is digital (such as a screencast, e-book, etc), then you can use a digital delivery provider such as Space Box, Digital Product Delivery, or Gumroad. These apps make it easy to setup products, upload them for people to purchase, and then they provide checkout links that you can drop on your site (see the above options), and you have yourself a business that will (hopefully) make money as you sleep, orders coming in and being fulfilled without you being sat at the computer. This process will work best if the amount of products you envisage offering is going to be quite low - so if you write a new book a couple of times a year, or do one screencast a month, it'll be manageable. Anything more, and you'll probably want a storefront of some kind.

You can use Shopify or Big Cartel mentioned above to also deliver digital goods - Shopify integrates nicely with FetchApp, and Big Cartel uses their own app, Pulley. This gives you the storefront with customisation and extensibility, and differing levels of packages to suit your needs, but with digital goods, similar to Gumroad and Space Box. This is an ideal solution if you have an extensive array of digital goods for sale, because although you're still not having to deal with inventory with digital products, it will be easier to keep track of all the things you are selling in this way.

Bespoke development for specific requirements

Of course, it might be that you want a storefront with something very custom, or a very specific, unique design that meshes with your ideas for business branding. Or perhaps your product doesn't fit into the above categories, and you need a custom app building to support the product - or maybe the product itself is a custom application. In that case, you need bespoke development, something we offer here at KickCode. We have a bunch of experience with a variety of sites and products, and with different e-commerce and CMS platforms, meaning that we can (where feasible) start with those as a base and build out your custom features, or if required, start from fresh with an entirely custom built solution that will be perfect for your business. Contact us to find out more!

Personal touch

Once you've got your site setup, either using an online software package to configure and host the site, or by contacting a reputable, reliable web development company such as ourselves, you'll need to promote, market, and sell! As I mentioned, a personal touch will be key no matter what industry you are in, and no matter what product you are selling. Simple things such as dropping people a note via email to ensure they were able to download their digital goods purchases, or scrawling a smiley face on the receipt when bundling the physical package ready for shipping and delivery, can make all the difference. It may not be the one thing that ensures they use you again, but it can't hurt, and it'll certainly help when someone asks them if they can recommend anyone in your area of expertise, or where they got that fantastic product they bought from you. As a small business, your biggest advantage over bigger businesses is your agility, your ability to do small, personal things for your customers that the big guys couldn't possibly do. Make the most of that!

Next time

Next time out, we'll jump ahead a bit to when your site is launched, and analyse how you can work out what is working, and what isn't on the site - and then show you how to tweak it, re-analyse, and progress. Whether you need to focus on increased user signups, more sales, or a decrease in cancellations, you'll be able to use the same pattern to improve your results.

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How to setup a pre-launch landing page for your business idea in 20 minutes Jun 7 2013

This is part three of our series on finding, validating and testing business ideas to launch a new business that not only makes money, but makes you happy too!

Part one: Business? What business?

Part two: Validating business ideas

In the last post, we looked at the best ways to validate your business ideas, to find the best one if you have multiple ideas (or at least to narrow them down), and to ensure that there is an audience or market that could be receptive to what it is that you want to offer. We did that by looking at search results and advertising reach, however it's not as concrete as getting people to actually say they are interested. The next step is to give people a way to do that, so that you can start reaching out to them, and marketing your idea before you've even started it.

Before we start

As it's early days, you might not have a name yet for your business, idea, or product, especially if you're still evaluating a few concepts. However you need something to refer to it by, and so the users that will see your landing page will have a name to call it. This doesn't have to be the final name, and so if you're in doubt about it, just keep it simple, clear, and the most important thing of all - you need a matching domain name to go with it (preferably .com). If a domain isn't available with the initial name you have in mind, remember to add something to the end - "book" for a book, "app" for an app etc. You can then purchase your domain very cheaply from many different online places, however we'd recommend either 1and1, DNSimple, or iwantmyname.

Options

Now we have a domain, let's take a look at the options we have for getting a simple landing page up and running to let people register their interest.

Launchrock

Launchrock, as the name indicates, is mainly geared towards pre-launch pages. It includes a lot of features designed to help incentivize users for sharing the page when registering their interest, and to promote social aspects and integration. It therefore fits nicely with any kind of product that is social in nature, as it sets the right tone in terms of engagement. You can turn these options off if it doesn't fit your business/product, although the more sharing and social options you provide, the more chance you have of an idea "going viral" and being widely circulated.

Unbounce

Unbounce is for building and publishing landing pages, a more general aim also taking into account existing businesses and products that want specific landing pages for ad campaigns, for certain products or offers, or when they're launching something related but new. They also have a keen focus on what's called A/B testing - a type of variant testing that allows you to present two versions of the page to different users, and to see which one performs best. This allows you to make small modifications and test them, with real analytics to look at when deciding whether to make the change for good or not.

Another thing they provide which is very nice is an extensive range of templates for your landing pages, coping with numerous different scenarios, and a lot of different well put together styles. This means you can get up and running with a great looking landing page in not much time at all.

ConvertKit

ConvertKit takes a slightly different focus again. The idea with ConvertKit isn't to immediately try to sell someone a product, or get them to register their interest directly for a product per se, but instead provide an engaging landing page that will allow the user to register their interest in whatever it is you do or offer. It's a bit more about expertise, with the focus on "drip marketing", and allowing you over time to demonstrate what it is you can do with informative, useful emails, so that when you are ready to launch a product or new business idea, you have an audience who is ready to hear about it - and not only that, they already trust you.

Putting it into action

As with our last article, let's run through a concrete example to setup a landing page, and see how it works. Each of the tools we outlined offers something slightly different, and there are numerous other tools and apps that provide similar things. We chose those three to demonstrate the spectrum of aims you might have with a landing page, but now we're putting it into action, let's pick a specific scenario, and follow through how to set it up.

Here is where I also give you a sneak peak at something new we're thinking of building here at KickCode - I'll be putting my money where my mouth is and setting up a landing page myself! The new app is called Stashlog, and is an app to catalogue your entertainment media, from books and CDs, to DVDs and videogames. We'll go into more detail on our ideas for the app in a future post, but for now let's get that landing page up so we can gauge interest in it!

We're going to use Launchrock, because of its focus on landing pages specific to new businesses or products. It's also free, which makes it great for trying out new ideas quickly and easily.

Head over to launchrock.co, and enter your email, then a password to begin. When you first login it'll start a project for you, and ask you to choose between a landing page and an embedded widget. We'll select landing page:

We then need to choose a theme. Pick one that you like the look of, and that suits the idea. You can select them to preview them. We've gone for the mobile app focused theme, as one of the core Stashlog features will be the iOS app:

You'll need to select "Use Theme" on your chosen theme, and then you can customise it further with your own text, colours, and images. Don't worry too much about making the text absolutely perfect right now, you can refine it over time. Just make sure it communicates your idea clearly, and proof read it a couple of times to make sure there are no spelling or grammatical errors.

After that, you can customise the sharing options, including the email that will get sent to users by other users if they share to their friends.

You can then work through all of the social options to point people towards Twitter, Facebook, Instagram accounts etc. Don't worry if you haven't set these up, you can add them later.

After that, you can configure the email that is sent out when someone signs up - you generally just want to thank them for their interest, and perhaps encourage them to share the page with friends. You'll need to enter a physical address to have on record as part of the CanSpam compliance.

Almost there - now we need to decide what domain to set the page up on. You can fill in the subdomain here, and then need to go over to wherever your DNS for the domain is hosted to setup the rest. Most likely the DNS is hosted with the company you registered the domain with - Launchrock helpfully provides a link with instructions for a lot of the main registrars to help you with the DNS setup.

Lastly, you can choose whether your landing page will show up in the Launchrock directory, which may attract additional interest - that depends upon how you want to promote the site, as to whether that's a good fit for you. If you just want as many eyeballs on the page as possible, then it is probably a good idea! Then enter a few tags that relate to your idea to help search engines index the page.

You can also enter a Google Analytics ID to provide page analytics. We'll be looking at analytics in more depth in a later post.

The progress bar at the bottom will let you know if you've entered everything you need - if it's still under 100%, hover over it and it'll tell you what you missed (I forgot to upload the images used on the iPhone and Android devices on the landing page). Once you've done everything, it'll change to a big green "Launch site" button!

Go ahead and press it, and you should see a "Successfully launched!" message.

You can now go ahead and promote this - bear in mind that if you've just set the DNS up, it might take a while to propagate so that everyone sees your shiny new launch page, so it might be worth trying the URL yourself first, as well as sending it to a few friends to verify it's accessible.

All being well, when you visit your launch page URL, you'll see your landing page, ready to accept email addresses from interested users.

You can check out the actual landing page I just setup for Stashlog here - remember to signup if it is of interest to you!

Next time

So you have a launch page setup for your idea, or perhaps even multiple pages for different ideas. How do you determine if there is a lot of interest, or which page is performing best? Next time around we'll look at setting up analytics, and then analysing that data to make informed decisions and to take the next steps for your idea.

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Validating business ideas May 29 2013

In our last post, we discussed how the business you always wanted to start might be right under your nose, waiting to be explored. It might be a passion or a hobby, or something you have a lot of experience with - but by finding the right way to monetise it, you could turn it into a source of income, and therefore freedom. Or it might be that your idea is more about making a change rather than making money - that's great! But you still need to ensure it's a valid idea, with a valid audience, in order to succeed.

So let's get to the nitty gritty - how do you know if your idea is a good one? What if you have several ideas, and you have no idea how to decide which one is the best one to progress with? Well there are a few different tools at your disposal to find out audience and market data that can help inform your decisions, and we're going to run through those now.

Tools

The first step is the simplest - Google for your idea. You might have a few ways that you can search for your idea in mind - the best thing is to try to put yourself in the shoes of someone trying to find you. What are the kinds of things they might search for? Make a list and try them all, and keep an eye on what the top results are, how many results there are, and whether any of the results are that similar to what you had in mind. Bear in mind that as you are validating the market, and therefore your idea, you should actually hope to find some competitors. If it's something incredibly revolutionary then there may not yet be an existing market for it, but for everything else it's unlikely you'll be without competitors - unless it's not a particularly good idea. Other people with a similar idea or in the same market as you serves two purposes. For one, it proves that it is a good idea, or at least good enough to get to the point that someone else thinks it is valid too. And secondly, it allows you to gauge your own site copy, information, and even price points with a direct comparison to a competitor, which will help you to make your idea the most attractive and competitive it can be.

Once that's done, and you are happy that there are some people that would be receptive to your idea, then the next thing is to quantify that market a little. You can do this using the Google Keyword Tool. This tool lets you specify a search phrase or word, and will let you know how many people approximately are searching for that term each month (globally, and within specific locations), as well as providing the stats for a whole bunch of related keywords and search terms too. You can compare the figures amongst keywords and search phrases, to see what seems more important to people.

The next tool for establishing the reach of the target audience is to use Facebook adverts. You can go through the process of creating a Facebook ad without actually posting it, and doing so will let you narrow the target market using various different filters (such as gender, age, and other pages liked) in order to find the total reach for your advert. This isn't an exact science, but given the vast amount of people that have Facebook accounts these days, and the fact that you can narrow things to just your target market, it provides a valuable tool in establishing the rough market reach for an idea, and as a way to compare multiple ideas against each other it is pretty useful.

Putting it into practice

Let's put this to use with a concrete example though, so we can see how these tools work in practice. Our great idea that we want to validate is an iOS app that will let you track the number of cups of coffee you've had in a day. Incredible right?

First off, we'll start with some Google searches:

coffee tracker

coffee cup tracker

caffeine tracker

coffee counter

coffee cup counter

As we can see, there are a few competitors in this space, and specifically there is already an iOS app. This is good in as much as we're not the only ones to think of this idea! But the downside is that we'll have to bring something else to the table to be a worthwhile alternative to this existing app. For now though, is the target market big enough to make the app worthwhile?

Here we can see the keyword breakdown for our search terms - as we might expect, the other keywords are dominated by things that people search for a lot more - coffee, coffee shops, and coffee beans. There is a fair amount of people searching for "coffee counter", but still perhaps not as big a market as we would have liked - or perhaps it's simply already exhausted with the existing competitors.

However, let's take a look at the Facebook research to see what the potential market reach would be there:

You can see most of the main filter options there, alongside the very easy to use audience number on the right that will change as you alter the advert parameters. We have a potential audience of almost 16.7m people that like coffee in the UK and USA, between the ages of 20 to 40, so maybe this app isn't such a bad idea after all!

In all seriousness, the Facebook reach needs to be taken with a pinch of salt, and you shouldn't be basing your actual business plans or revenue models on this data - it's mainly useful for comparison purposes, and for smaller niches.

The value of a niche

One other thing to bear in mind is that sometimes you might have a product or idea that is very specific but valuable to a niche, and therefore would have much smaller figures using these tools. If you had an idea to sell a $0.99 app to a potential audience of 16.7m people, and a $10K training course to 20K people, then you'd make more money (assuming you were able to completely saturate both markets, and ignoring overheads) from the training course! The point is that these tools will work best when comparing ideas within a similar scope - perhaps when comparing the different types of training you might offer, or if you wanted to write a book for a specific field but wanted to narrow down the most interesting and sought after topic.

Next time

So now you have some tools for comparison - simply running through your list of ideas should let you prioritise to bring the ideas with the best potential to the fore. The next step is to setup a landing page for the idea (or for all of the remaining ideas, if you are still whittling them down), to gauge interest for an idea or concept by asking them to register for more information, or even pre-order if applicable for your product. We'll work through how to set this up in next weeks post.

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Business? What business? May 24 2013

If you have browsed around our new site, and you don't happen to own or run a business right now, you might have wondered - "why do they keep going on about my business? What business?". The simple truth though is that most people have dreams of running some kind of venture, whether it's something they want to do for the experience, or for financial reward, and whether it's something that's a passion, or simply an opportunity. Almost everyone I speak to talks about "one day starting my own thing". Why not make that day today?

Even if you have a full-time day job, there is no reason that you can't start in on your dreams now. Evaluate your options, validate your ideas and concepts, prototype them in your spare time, and talk to people about your idea to get a feel for how it'd be received. Start small, but make sure you start. The more you work on your idea, the more you talk about it and share details about it, the more real it becomes - until one day, maybe it can pay the bills!

It's true that here at KickCode we want to get across how focused we are on helping businesses be the best they can be, bringing our expertise to the table in order to help achieve goals such as increasing revenue. But "business" is quite a far reaching term - and it extends from a single person with a great idea, to startups, to established companies and corporations looking to improve or expand in a specific area.

So, if you're asking yourself "business? what business?", remember that your ideal hobby, activity or craft might actually be a great business idea - make sure to explore it!

In a future post we'll talk more about how you can quickly validate business ideas using online tools, or to whittle down your ideas and pick the best one if you have a few of them! To make sure you don't miss that post, or any other future posts, subscribe to our newsletter.

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Understanding Management Dec 15 2009

I recently embarked on an openings course with the Open University, with a view to it being the first step for me on the way to a distance learning business degree. The openings course is mainly designed to get you into a studying frame of mind, and is perfect for someone like me who is returning to studying after six years. However, as the choices for the two openings courses on the way to a business degree seemed fairly dry (Understanding Management, or Understanding Society), I figured on the most interesting thing about the course simply being getting to grips with studying itself. I opted with Understanding Management.

As I’ve gotten through the first part of the course however, and with my first assignment submitted today, I’ve found that actually the course material has provided me with some rather interesting thoughts and concepts. The general idea that is presented throughout the first half of the course is that we are all managers. Management is made up of distinct, identifiable processes and roles, and we all implement a mixture of these processes and roles while managing tasks, however big or small they might be. We simply use a different set of these processes dependent upon the job at hand.

Instead of thinking about the stereotype of stuffy management and managers, it is important to understand what the concept actually is, and further to that, how it can be effectively applied, and become something useful for everyone who might happen to be “in charge” of something. And that really is anyone - whether it’s managing your finances, managing your workload, managing a party, or managing Christmas dinner. We’re all managers of something, and the sooner we can understand the processes that make up how we manage, the quicker we can improve them and become more efficient at it.

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Agile and Scrum'd Dec 14 2009

I’ve been meaning to write this up for almost two weeks now, but there is no time like the present! A couple of weeks ago Robert Dempsey, CEO and founder of Atlantic Dominion Solutions took some time out of his busy schedule to speak to me about agile, and specifically agile from a freelancers point of view.

We had a great chat and covered a number of different things, but it was very cool to get his take on how much of the agile process a freelancer can really implement. From my own experiences so far, I felt that certain aspects still translate to a one man band scenario really well (client user stories, organising development into sprints and iterations), but there were other aspects such as daily standups and sprint retrospectives that I was struggling to identify where they might be able to fit in.

As I explained to Robert, effectively as a freelancer I am doing what amounts to a standup (what did I do yesterday, what am I doing today, what is blocking my objectives), only I’m doing it in bitesize chunks throughout the day. I’m managing my workflow, changing projects if something is blocking my progress, and checking off things as I get them done. The key difference for me is that my standup needs to account for my entire workload, which might encompass multiple projects for different clients in any given day.

After speaking with Robert, it became clear that while I don’t need to do a lonely one man standup in the strictest sense, there is still potentially some value in me attempting to take a set time period at the beginning of each day to accomplish the same thing as a standup - clear off what I achieved yesterday, plan what I’m working on today, and isolate/identify any blockers to my current and planned work for the day - in this way, I won’t need to waste time on those things throughout the day, where it potentially might be more distracting to my overall workflow. At the minute first thing I do each day is Inbox Zero, so it makes sense to follow that right up with a standup which is another potentially great productivity task that’ll help me to plan and organise my day.

Robert also mentioned that over at ADS they are building out some really great resources on agile, and coming at the topic from lots of different angles, so that people can understand how it might work for them, regardless of their situation or how they work. Specifically the up and coming Agile for Freelancers section looks to be very promising, and I’m looking forward to reading the resources that come out of this work, as well as giving them useful feedback from a freelancers perspective.

I really enjoyed the chat with Robert, and will definitely be speaking to him again in the future - hopefully I helped him a little in terms of getting more information on a freelancers perspective, and he definitely helped me out with some general advice on agile as a concept, and how it can be applied even in scenarios where it perhaps isn’t immediately obvious.

Lastly, he is currently running a very generous offer for the agile web application Scrum’d which ADS have built - a year free on their top of the range corporate product for any company still in its first year of business. He was able to hook me up, and I’m excited to start using it more extensively, and providing ADS with some feedback, as they seem very interested in turning user requests and feedback into reality, and are incredibly focused on crafting a tool that users really get the most out of. Thanks again for the free year of Scrum’d Robert!

I’m hoping to write up in more detail over the coming months my experiences of the bits of the agile process that work for me as a freelancer, and the bits that need tweaking or don’t fit so well. If any other freelancers have thoughts, questions or comments, I’d be delighted to hear from you!

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