pupeno

I'm finishing building a (free) app that checks on you automatically, by email, and when you are not doing well it lets your closest friends know you can use a phone call. I have a name for it, but I might want a better one. What would you call it?

My company is trying to get some processes in order, have more accountability, be better in general. It's a good thing and I'm helping, even leading some of the projects. But now I am being asked to make a change request ticket for each software release. I dislike the idea, am I wrong?

This is what we currently do:

- All code is in github.

- All issues are in Jira.

- Almost all commits are connected to a Jira issue.

- We track versions in Jira.

- We put the tickets in the correct version when we release.

- We can do rollbacks with the click of a button.

- We have automated tests, but not enough; we rely a lot on manual testing right now. We are trying to fix this.

I managed to negotiate to the point of having all our change requests pre-approved and they'd be ok with us automating the ticket creation (eventually). They were quite surprised when I told them we release tens of time a week and that's because we inherited a system that has a lot of manual steps to release. I'd like to release tens of time a day. But in my opinion, it's still bureaucracy. It's still filling a ticket with tens of fields, most of which are not applicable for a software release. Obviously I'm being told it only takes 5 minutes but I worry. Bureaucracy eats your time 5 minutes at a time, until nothing is left.

I'm biased because no company I ever worked for had change request tickets for releases except one: banks. And banks are horrible places to work as a developer, which is why they pay so much. I hated every minute of working there, but the pay was good and it funded one of my startups. I don't want my company to be that and we can't afford it.

Any opinions? Any data? Any resources to help explain non-software people how the software world behaves? Am I overreacting here?

I'm trying to figure out market fit for my app and I'm starting to feel my message is not clear and that I may need a re-brand. I want to be meticulous about it coming up with a new name and a new tagline. My plan to test them is to set Google Ads with that name and tagline and measure their catchiness by the click through rate and the accuracy of the message by how many people show interest in one way or another after clicking on the ad.

What do you think? Is this a good plan? Any improvements?

Alse, since I don't want to set up a new domain name for each new name I try, and I'd also would like to, if possible, convert some of these click throughs into sales (to not waste the ad expenses but also as a signal of the message working), my plan is to set a landing page per re-branding attempt at my current web site, but what do I do there? Should I just be honest and say something like "Thank you for your interest in X, it's actually named Y." Should I even go as to say that we are searching for a new brand?

My product allows to automatically repurpose idle computers at the office (while people are not actively using it) and turning them into dashboards showing information that can be useful for people at the office. Things like Google Analytics, Twitter activity, KISSmetrics, etc. It can also be used to set up permanent screens with the same web pages as it ensures they are up to date, fresh and rotates through them. We also allow custom CSS and JavaScript to run on each page so you can remove stuff you don't care about (like menus) or that you don't want to show in public displays (like account numbers).

What would you name such a product?

I'm in the process of pivoting my startup, and for this new product we'll need to raise money. The product was half built some years ago but the timing was bad and it was shelved. Today the timing is excellent for it.

I started filling up an entry in AngelList about the new product, but it's asking for questions about the operation of my company, for which the answers would show we been running for 4 years, while the product even though we built part of it ages ago, it's not in operations and it's nothing more than a landing page.

The reason why I wasn't creating the profile with my company name is that if someone look at our company's website, we have other products, including some experimental, lower profile stuff that really doesn't need the funding I'm trying to raise.

What should I do? Any advise?

This is my company: https://CarouselApps.com and this is the new product: https://Glycast.com

We are getting a few big name companies, organizations and universities to buy our product. I'm talking about world wide known brands. I'd love to have a page showcasing the list of high profile customers, with their logos and so on, but of course, I can't use the logo without permission.

I asked a few and they all rejected it, many on the basis of existing policies they have to stop this from happening. We certainly could use the validation for PR. Any recommendations on how to approach customers for this? Is it legal for me to use the name of this customers, without their logos, without requesting approval?

My product is Screensaver Ninja (http://Screensaver.Ninja), which I though was going to popular amongst small companies and individuals but it turned out to be more popular with big brand companies.

I have a small company with a few products that's successful enough to pay the bills and the salaries of the 5 people working at it. Recently, someone came to me with the idea of a product that I might be interested in building. What we do best is build products.

This person doesn't have the money to pay for this product to be built and even if they did, that's not what I'm interested in (as in, I don't want to be an agency, I want to own part of the product). I'm having a hard time figuring out how this could work in terms of equity and amount of work. Does anybody have an example of such a thing?

For example, for our own products, sometimes we reach a level in which it's feature complete and we stop adding features while we work on the marketing and if we don't increase revenue for it, we don't pour more development resources into it. When it happens with a third party, I can see this being problematic.

Sometimes one product requires urgent attention and resources are taken from another product to do so. When we own all our products it's a simple prioritization problem of what is more urgent, which product is bigger, etc. When one of the products is partially owned by somebody else, the equation would also include whether we are doing our part of the deal.

Whenever I push this model forward, I see up writing long detailed specs (that are hard to change on the fly) and committing a predefined amount of time to each project that will require time tracking. One of the reasons why I co-founded a startup instead of working on an agency is because I don't like either of those things and I believe they hamper coding productivity, so I don't want to push these things to my developers, that joined this company with the expectation of a different workplace too.