Agile Business Development at Its Best

swamble.gifI have been mulling over the concept of “agile business development” for while now. An extension of agile software development, I believe the more agile an entrepreneur can be in building a business, the sooner he or she will learn the success factors.

Think about the following methods for agile software development and how they might apply to creating a business:

  • Customer satisfaction by rapid, continuous delivery of useful software
  • Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)
  • Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication
  • Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
  • Simplicity
  • Self-organizing teams
  • Regular adaptation to changing circumstances

I’ve been talking to a lot to Gerard Ramos about the current set of agile business development, and how much he has embraced an embodied this approach with his current two projects: Swamble & Readum.

Swamble is a social wagering site that Gerard built based on a concept he devised last summer. He created an initial proof of concept site, launched that, received feedback could be fun to do this over web-based phones, re-engineered the site to work well in mobile phone browsers, submitted to Tech Crunch 40, got great feedback from Mike Arrington, was written up on TechCrunch, signed up 600 users, launched a Facebook app … you get the picture.

All the while, he was extremely outwardly focused rather than inwardly focused. He reacted to the requests of his users, and is building Swamble based on what people really do want, not what he thinks people want.

Last weekend, Gerard took agile business development to another level. With a partner in Las Vegas, Gerard entered Rails Rumble competition and in less than 48 hours created an entire web app called Readum.

Readum is a web app that people can use to create podcasts of the blog posts from blogs that they like to follow a daily basis. Imagine instead of sitting down and reading posts over a couple coffee in the morning, listening to the posts on your iPod as you head into work. That’s what Readum does.

I’ve checked it out, and I’m very impressed. I’m most impressed by the fact that El Luchadors were able to assemble this in less than 48 hours. Learn more about how they did it here. Congrats guys. Great execution on agile business development.

Head over to the Rails Rumble and check out Readum. Voting for the best web app in the competition ends this Thursday. The guys would love your support, so vote for Readum to inspire them to build it out so that we can all use it.

Great work guys!

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