This is the press release announcing the acquisition of the company my wife and I launched last July. I posted a Review My Site on HN when we launched, so I thought everyone might be interested in a follow-up.
It's our first startup, and we went from launch to sustainability in 6 months, then acquisition in 9 months. It's been a crazy ride. :)
Congratulations! We use Kanban and have been evaluating GreenHopper. One of the reasons we use GreenHopper is it is installed locally on one of our servers. Companies like ours (despite exceptions for Salesforce.com) are hesitant to lose IT control and project data privacy and put stuff in the cloud - to the point where hosted solutions are almost by default not considered (Basecamp, Campfire, etc.). Any consideration to selling an installable corporate version?
First, congratulations! Doing what you did in 9 months is every entrepreneur's dream (well, most of them anyway).
Also, I'm looking through your product and I have to say I love the way you've done the tour and videos. I hate going to a new product and seeing a 3-5 minute video explaining the entire product. It means I have to disrupt whatever I'm doing to see what the deal is. If a feature is introduced in the beginning of the video, I may have forgotten about it by the end.
Having many >20 second clips makes it much easier to see how the product works. My company is looking for a new Agile tool now, and AgileZen is high on the list.
Thanks! We did that intentionally. I have the same complaint about long tour videos. It also helps when we roll out new features -- we don't have to re-record the whole tour, we can just add another video.
Congrats! I can see why Rally would make the acquisition. Their core product has about 8 different ways of doing anything and lots of extra clicking. Definitely needed streamlining - this is as of several years ago, they may have improved it.
You can ask me any question other than that one. :) Their offer was generous enough to make us completely scrap our plans for staying independent and growing the business ourselves. It wasn't just the money though, after meeting Rally we were convinced that everyone was better off if we joined forces.
[+] [-] nkohari|16 years ago|reply
It's our first startup, and we went from launch to sustainability in 6 months, then acquisition in 9 months. It's been a crazy ride. :)
Here's our blog post about the acquisition: http://blog.agilezen.com/2010/04/14/rally-software/
Here's the original Review My App link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=691673
[+] [-] wallflower|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattmaroon|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viggity|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leftnode|16 years ago|reply
Also, I'm looking through your product and I have to say I love the way you've done the tour and videos. I hate going to a new product and seeing a 3-5 minute video explaining the entire product. It means I have to disrupt whatever I'm doing to see what the deal is. If a feature is introduced in the beginning of the video, I may have forgotten about it by the end.
Having many >20 second clips makes it much easier to see how the product works. My company is looking for a new Agile tool now, and AgileZen is high on the list.
[+] [-] nkohari|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkohari|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jim-greer|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] encoderer|16 years ago|reply
I was always happy using it as a developer, though.
[+] [-] fretlessjazz|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bond|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] senthil_rajasek|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkohari|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonlbaptiste|16 years ago|reply