Mat Atkinson of ProofHQ, a proofing and approval tool that is "as easy to use as email," writes in to tell us how Getting Real influenced his team:
We used Basecamp to run our product development. You may remember that we also integrated our own product with Basecamp so that designers can add rich review and approval capability to Basecamp projects. It's been a huge success. Nearly 30% of our clients are Basecamp users.
I saw the post on LILO and wanted to let you know how much that resonated with our story and how much Getting Real influenced us. It helped us build ProofHQ on a $15,000 budget and bootstrap to breakeven.
We started work on ProofHQ in Jan 2007 and I bought Getting Real on 15 March 2007. Although I had founded a tech start-up before, Getting Real summed up exactly how I wanted ProofHQ to be run. Frankly, it was an inspiration then, and continues to be today. That's not to say that we agree with everything in it, but the main themes ring so true.
We built ProofHQ to solve one of the biggest problems that we had faced in previous jobs - getting graphic and web design reviewed collaboratively. We now use ProofHQ every day all day to manage design of our own app, so we really did build it for ourselves. This was a key lesson - USE YOUR OWN PRODUCT.
We decided to fund development organically. My last start-up raised a lot of VC, so this time we wanted to try a low-burn approach. We focussed our own efforts on core R&D (there is some cool image conversion and streaming technology under the hood), but we outsourced our design, corporate ID and non-core web application work via Elance and 99Designs. We spent a total of $15,000 getting to Beta in Jan 2008. VC IS NOT THE FIRST OR ONLY OPTION.
HAVE A MANTRA - Our mantra from day one was that the in design and marketing bad process kills great creative. Every designer, design firm and marketing team strives to deliver great creative, but with inefficient processes even the best creative gets undermined. Our aim was to focus on one small but very common area of marketing process... getting design reviewed and approved. Back in 2007 it was sometimes hard to get heard as marketing budgets were still big, but in 2009 that is a message that resonates loud and clear.
We launched in May 2008. By November 2008 our revenues exceeded operating costs for the first time and we just broke even. All this has been possible by keeping the team small, keeping our costs low and moving fast.
Well I could go on and on, but it's great that 37s has had an influence on us in so many ways.
Do you have a Getting Real success story? Let us know.
