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.
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.
Congratulations..Do you mind if you I ask how are you taking the payments. Did you implement the billing system for user registration and recurring payments or used an existing payments ? We are a start up building our SaaS products. We are in a phase with a need to implement accepting online payments. Any guidance in this regard is greatly appreciated.
We use Braintree (http://braintreepaymentsolutions.com/) as our credit card gateway and merchant account. I can't say enough good things about them... they're one of the rare companies now that offers an excellent product and excellent service. (Although I sound like an advertisement, I get nothing from them for saying that. :)
Our system interacts with their API when people sign up, and for recurring billing, we implemented a simple nightly process that also uses their API.
Braintree is what we are test driving right now. My question was did you build your system for the customer sign-up /management/recurring payments to interact with Braintree API or did you use any existing software/frameworks. I am looking for any suggestions/solutions on this. Thank you for taking your time to answer my questions.
We (Braintree) have updated some things since AgileZen integrated: we now provide client libraries that simplify integration and also have much more robust recurring billing capabilities.
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.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 43.0 ms ] threadIt'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
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.
Our system interacts with their API when people sign up, and for recurring billing, we implemented a simple nightly process that also uses their API.
I was always happy using it as a developer, though.