Companies and teams of all sizes need to arrange frequent meetings with their members to keep their work details shared.These meetings are of high importance and help employees collaborate with one another, perform better and be more productive. Still one problem remains and it is the fact that these meetings have a very prolonged duration.

One brilliant idea changed the way those meetings take place which directly resulted in shortening their duration. Agile experts suggested that companies organize daily stand up meetings instead of sitting around a table discussing for days on end. However we might yet be at a turning point where even the agility of stand up meetings might need to be surpassed.

Slack can be more than just a messaging app

Slack is one of the hottest new tools that offers communication for teams. It allows for members to exchange information in public channels, closed groups, or even private messages to each other. Aside from being an excellent messaging app it is vastly used as a tool for many other purposes through the use of integrations and slack bots. Slack bots could be described as third party mini services that turn slack from a simple messaging app to a tool more versatile than Batman’s utility belt.

Using slack as a platform they allow you to assign tasks, set reminders, post funny gifs and the list goes on and on.

Introducing asynchronous stand up meetings

Slack bots are a whole new world to discover, but since we are talking about stand up meetings, let’s stay on topic. Introducing asynchronous stand up meetings with Geekbot.

After you add it to your slack and set your personal configurations all you need to do is return to slack and wait for the stand up. Geekbot will then check if it is time for a stand up and if so it will check to see which of the members are online. It waits for a member to be online and then proceeds to ask the set of questions you set. Finally it posts all the individual stand ups to the broadcast channel of your choice so all your team members can stay synced and help each other.

Benefits of being asynchronous

• Asynchronous stand up meetings means that you no longer need to organise large teams to meet at one time. Each member is asked separately and then contributes with their progress report to the meeting. All reports are then posted for all members to see.
• Different time zones are no longer an issue since members are included in the process gradually and only after they are online.
• Asynchronous means that one member’s obstacle is no longer a blocking issue for the rest of the team

In conclusion making your meetings more agile means you are actually saving up time. Time that can be spent where it actually matters, on your project.

So add geekbot to slack and boost your team’s productivity, it only takes a minute to set up.

A couple of startups later and here we are starting a new venture. After all we are VentureGeeks right? This time we are going for an extension over email. I hope we are not too early, but I am sure we are not too late either.

The problem

There are so many ways we use email every day, but still there is no way to do this with your team. How do you know what a customer replied to your colleague? Or how do you delegate work that reaches you through email? What about support. Do you use a tool that none of your engineers ever opens, or you keep the feedback for the “founders” of your startup?
The current solutions contain an “email killer” and a lot of copy paste in chat rooms and task management tools. But wouldn’t it be more sane to just do the job straight from your inbox?

Enter Collab email

Collab.email is a new service that aims to solve all the email related problems in the context of a team. Our product is still under heavy development but as you can see in the video it can make your life easier:

We’ve just started our private beta, so if you are familiar with the problems we mentioned above please be our guest and signup now.

Does this problem sounds familiar? Well look no further as we have just solved it with MonitorCoin. With this little iOS app you can check your coins in any of the exchange markets below:

• Bitrex
• Cryptsy
• Poliniex
• Coin Market Cap

In order to use the app you just need to enter your API keys and presto! For security reasons it can’t perform any transactions so don’t worry to use it anywhere.

Feel free to download the app from the App Store, and share your feedback in the comments.

It sounds easy but it’s not as the devil is always in the details. Here I’ll try to share a startup story that went well, and the lessons we’ve learned in the process.

Step 0: Solve a problem

This is the most obvious part. You need to solve a problem but not just any problem. You need one that someone would actually pay to solve. Having knowledge of the problem is essential here, and that’s why startup rockstars like Paul Graham will advise you to solve a problem of your own.

For us the problem was SEO. Most startups don’t know how to do it, and those who hire someone pay a lot of money. This is obviously a problem for a startup that runs on FFF money.

Our team was into SEO for years and that’s why we found the best way to make it work for our sites. And this is how the idea came: Let’s sell this to others, we’ll be the cheapest SEO service out there and as our techniques work even after the Panda update we are going to make lots of money!

So we thought let’s create a web site and sell our service to as many people as possible. Right? Well not exactly

Step 1: Find a target community and test things out

So instead of building something we just went to webmaster communities and tried to sell our service there. “Sell” is the keyword as this is how you get real feedback. So my tip here is that you should get feedback from people who are buyers. If you are asking for feedback in general you just distract yourself.

The reason we haven’t created a web site as a first step was simply because it was easier to create a sales thread in a webmaster forum. This was the best thing we’ve done, because we were now dealing with real people who wanted to buy our service.

This helped us understand the need of the customer. The way we did it, doing customer validation online instead of actual “getting out of the building” helped a lot as we now had the convenience to talk with many people at the same time. The downside is that this way you are getting exposed, but who cares? After all if you are going to fail, it is better to fail fast.

Step 2: Understand the whispers

One of the important aspects of this communication is that you understand how your customers perceive your product. The words they use to describe it actually gives you a clue for the language you’ll use in your marketing efforts.

On the other hand the problems they have even after buying your product guides you on how you are going to optimise things later. The important thing here is to understand their underlying problems. As Henry Ford once said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

You need to deal with as many people as possible and then track their problems. Take notes of what they are saying. While this happens it’s better if you are not building your product. We took more than 3 months talking with our customers through forums or Skype to understand their needs and then started building.

Of course most of the teams out there can’t put that in use as you already building something. The key is to have someone dedicated in that communication. Then whenever you have enough findings from the customer feedback the team brainstorms and the product becomes better.

The difficult part here is that you have to filter which problems you actually need to solve, or which extra features are essential for the product. If you do anything your customers want, you are going to risk the whole thing. Too many features will make your new customers unable to understand how your product works, so that’s why you need to…

Step 3: Choose your customers

I know you want to build the next billion dollar company, change the world and all that but for now you should just pick a niche. In our little venture there were many types of customers: noobs, professional webmasters, entrepreneurs, corporations looking to cut ppc costs, etc.

So we picked entrepreneurs and experienced webmasters. The reason is that we are simply the same people as well. That means that we can relate to the customer and communicate better. That is probably the foundation of any successful venture.

This way you create a better path for your product development. Whenever a new idea pops in you can think yourself in your customer’s position in order to understand if it helps or not.

For us it’s easier, as we ourselves use our service. So for instance we know that our statistics for SERP position don’t work very well but we don’t care so much. The real important feature of our product is actually getting sites ranked, so anything else is a side problem we can solve later. The funny thing is that customers don’t even complain because we simply fill their actual need.

If we were just listening to the geek inside us we will probably worried about details like this. But this is why you need to always think like your customer.

Conclusion

Building a startup is not easy. You might need to fail a few times before you get it (we’ve failed so many times that I can’t even count them anymore…) but that’s ok because you only have to make it work once. For us, this time means an exit in the six figure range, which is nowhere near the exits we read on TechCrunch but it is enough to help us build our business the way we want.

Startups are about solving problems. Solving problems for others requires talking with them. The fact that they know their problem and want to pay for a solution doesn’t necessarily mean that they know the solution as well.

So what you need is to create a communication channel with a community, trial and error. And one last thing. Don’t be afraid to ship buggy products or even being wrong in general. It looks like this is the way to get the best feedback.

Hope that helped. Now let’s get back to work

How our little story started

We’ve started back in 2008 with the vision of creating a complete social media client. In fact we were just creating a product for ourselves but as it seemed many people liked it. This way we became a team very fast and Social Whale transformed from a pet project to a full time business for everyone involved.

The experience was fantastic. We were one of the first tools that added so many networks, we were picked up by geek VIPs, we won a few contests and in general our little team from Greece was ready to reach the skies. But…

We’ve failed. Many many times

And failure was fantastic too. We’ve learned so many things, and as people were still loving us after each and every of those failures we were happy. And we were keep going, and we were keep on failing.

But finally we understood that we had to stop chasing this vision. At least for the time being. After all it’s all about the team, not the product. And some times you need to let go.

Below are the main reasons we finally shut down the service:

1. Startups need a lot of money

Keeping a team of great talented people requires money. Of course we had no problem sacrificing anything in order to keep our vision alive, but after a point it was obvious that Social Whale would never had the chance to bootstrap and take care of our financial issues. On the other hand raising funds for a crazy idea like this is very hard, especially in a place like Greece.

2. The “open web” is old news

Since the last years an observer of the big social media players can see that all the openness that created monsters like Twitter and Facebook is fading away.

Suits now need money so everyone is closing their platform in order to make some. We really hope that this trend will stop when social networks find a way to monetize their growth, or maybe when other networks emerge that deal with the problem. But until then we can’t risk our efforts.

We are really sad that Twitter actually banned clients, social backup services and in general they are restricting access to their API. This is a reality that should keep every cool team out of their ecosystem.

3. Startups are about the people who create them

The ultimate lesson we got from this experience was the importance of our team. We really like working on cool things that can help people, and in order to do that we need to… well exist. So we decided to start another product that can actually have some impact, and in the same time help us have our costs covered.

It was a fantastic journey. We really feel grateful to all those people who have supported us, and we hope we can do something with our beloved whale later.

Kind of a sad story, but we should keep in mind that the end of something is usually the beginning of something else

Most of us work in Thessaloniki, Greece, but location in general is not a problem. Of course, we would like to meet you in person from times to times. The hours that you work is not a problem as well, as long as you can deliver your part in time.

Here are a few tools and technologies we use. We will appreciate if you have some experience on those:

1. PhP, objective C, javascript
2. MySQL w/ replication, Memcache, Redis, MongoDB
3. Frameworks like CodeIgniter, Kohana and Yii
4. Git, Trello
5. WordPress

Before you apply please take a moment and think that we are not a typical business. We are a family, and we only like super geeks to join us. The web is not a job for us, it’s our passion. So if you are not into this kind of spirit please don’t bother applying.

If you believe that you can fit, just drop us a line with a few words about you. CVs are welcome too, but we probably won’t read them. Also make sure to send us code samples or links to your github and other social accounts.

It took us a six-month period dealing with our costumers’ high expectations and finally we are pleased to announce the release of the brand new Instabuck.

After examining our costumers’ feedback about the initial release of our product, we decided to improve it with an array of key changes in the way things work. The main purpose of this release is to create a product even simpler to use, to provide a tool to the indie publisher that will make a difference.

So, what’s new?

Let’s start with the basics. The new service focused on the easiest usage from our costumer has many improvements in the user interface. Apart from removing any unnecessary things, we’ve added some helpful material.

Those are good news, but the real important thing about this release is our new payment system. The solution introduced makes our publishers free from paying a cut of their sales as they would do with our competitors. Another important thing is that you don’t have any obligation to pay us when you don’t sell. So with those in mind we invented the unlimited free trial.

So what this unlimited free trial is?

Actually, it is our way to help you start your digital product business. Create as many products as you want, use the service for as much as you want, and you will pay us only if the threshold of 3 sales in a month is exceeded. For each month that you have less than 3 sales you pay nothing. Fair enough, isn’t it?

This release is just the beginning focusing on the creation of a solid base for a product that really helps indie publishers.

Try Instabuck today

We would love to have you onboard and even more share with us your thoughts about our product. After all it’s totally free trying it.

As part of our WordPress optimization and hosting business(more on that on a later post) we needed a better way to debug WP. We found just code pieces, including this great post which was actually the inspiration for this plugin. Another finding was a plugin being sold, which is kind of lame if you think that you just combine a couple of open source libraries. Anyway here it is:

Developer monitor plugin

The plugin is displaying several debugging information through the Firebug console using the FirePHP library.

Bellow is a list of data you can get by its default configuration:

Database queries information

• SQL
• execution time
• calling functions

Variables

• $_SESSION
• $_COOKIES
• $_POST
• $_GET
• $_SERVER
• $_FILES
• $wp_object_cache

Of course you can always add more information. The plugin is suitable for production servers as you can choose which user group will actually get its output.

In case you do something which can be useful to others as well, please don’t hesitate to contribute some code to the project.

The plugin is GPL licensed so you don’t have to pay for it, but you are more than welcome to buy us a beer

Download the plugin

You can download the plugin from the official wordpress repo or by Github. Any feedback will be deeply appreciated.

At Friday night I went to the airport to pick up Thomas Sedlacek, one of the greatest economists of our time according to the Yale Economic Review. What is special about this guy is that he is not afraid to be wrong. I guess that’s a quality of a genius. We were talking about economics and he was taking notes even of my ignorant ideas. Another amazing thing about this guy, besides the amount of beer he can drink, is how much he doesn’t care about the status quo. This is actually the spirit of an innovator.

On the other hand, Eric is a guy with striking similarities to me. He is a geek and entrepreneur, a person that actually made a dream I also have, come true. His startup got funded by prominent investors in the Valley while his team still resides in Greece. A kind of attitude would be expected with such a tremendous success, especially in a country like Greece. To be honest, I was so wrong. Eric treated me like I was the genius and he was trying to advise and help me in different ways.

Those two short stories have something in common. Geniuses have long ago killed their egos and that’s exactly the way to make breakthroughs. Get over your self and focus on your passion. Sounds like a cool way to make the world a better place, don’t you think?

PS: Don’t forget to check our little contribution to the event, the TEDxThessaloniki Wish project for Archipelago Institute of Marine Conservation

Before the release notes, I would like to share with our fellow readers (that’s you) the story behind this project. As you may know, VentureGeeks is a very small team, and even though we’ve started with some funds we are constantly searching for new ways to bootstrap our business.

So we had a few ideas, but not enough time to develop them, and even though we were looking into the lean startup methodology we couldn’t find a solution. The “eureka moment” came when I saw this post from Noah Kagan, which was a great inspiration and even though we haven’t entered the contest we learned a lot.

So what’s Instabuck about?

The outcome of all this research is Instabuck, our first real attempt to a lean startup. The purpose of this service is actually simple to understand: we want to enable anyone with a downloadable product to sell it instantly.

This is something we are doing for years (selling information products) and even though we’ve started a business like that many times, we still need a lot of time to launch a new product. Well not any more

Features

So our first attempt to create a lean startup, is actually a service that you can use to launch lean startups (interesting huh?)

Here are some key features:

• It takes just a few minutes to launch a product
• Instant payments in your PayPal, AlertPay or Clickbank account
• Download protection (only buyers are able to download your products)
• Real time sales analytics with graphs
• Google analytics integration

But we are going to add more soon, like A/B split testing for your landing pages, iPhone app with push notifications for sales, more payment processors like LibertyReserve, 2checkout and more. Some of these features are already under development so expect an update very soon.

We hope you will find this service as useful as we do. Now please go on and test it with your own products, after all it’s free for a few days, and let us know how do you like it. Any feedback is as always deeply appreciated.