Some folks from the Boulder startup community came together last August to see who could eat the most sushi. I participated in the Sushi Regurge, but (as I promised Amy) stopped once I was full. Actually, I didn’t stop when I was full, I stopped when I couldn’t choke down piece number 55.
While that was going on, a couple guys who met at Boulder Startup Weekend 2 were over on the side catching up and intelligently observing rather than participating in Sushi Regurge. After realizing they both started out their careers working for nonprofits, they started discussing how they hadn’t volunteered at all recently. Being good techies, they whipped out their iPhones and searched the App Store for "volunteer" only to find only some apps for Tennessee Volunteers fans. They looked around at the startup talent in the room, busily wolfing down sushi, and said, "This should exist. I bet we could build it."
What followed was a year-long community project involving over 100 volunteers and zero budget. Applying guerrilla startup tactics, they leveraged many parts of Boulder’s startup community: they went to the iPhone Dev Camp, PodCamp, and BarCamp, got lots of help from the crew at TechStars, listened to feedback at Boulder Open Coffee, got help and direction from EFCO and the Community Foundation, and presented at the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup. The result was a supportive community who continually stepped up to help when needed and a core team of volunteers who met most Tuesday nights through the spring and summer to write code and build the "business."
The result is the SnapImpact and their iPhone app. Their mantra – "make doing good easy" – is pleasantly consistent with Boulder’s startup community. Great job everyone!
My friends at Rally Software continue to grow like crazy. As the Agile software development methodologies goes mainstream, Rally continues to lead the market in providing Agile application lifecycle management (ALM) software.
One of the things Rally has been doing as part of “bringing Agile to the masses” is the Rally Agile Success Tour. As a recent attendee at one of the events said:
"I thought this would be a Rally sales pitch… It was most definitely not that."
If you are an Agile practitioner or interested in learning more about Agile, the Rally Agile Success Tour has stops in Boston on 9/17, Seattle on 10/1, Chicago on 10/15, and London on 10/29. The cool thing is that rather than hearing a sales pitch, you’ll hear real customer stories from the likes of AOL, Constant Contact, Sermo, BMC, Microsoft, Boeing, and Getty Images.
When I invested in Rally in 2003, I was betting on the notion that Agile would go mainstream within a reasonable period of time. It has and I’m super proud of the company the Rally gang has created.