We went through AngelPad with the guys at Sourceninja, so we’re proud that they’re one of our oldest and most loyal customers. Sourceninja is worry-free open source management made simple.
One of the first lessons of AngelPad that the founder Thomas Korte impressed upon us was to maximize every minute of every meeting, because time spent in meetings has a multiplier effect. Every meeting costs the number of minutes it takes multiplied by the number of people in the meeting.
For the Sourceninja team, this used to mean 20 minute standups for their four-member team on a daily basis. 20 minutes five days a week for four people multiplies out to close to 7 hours per week spent in their daily standup.
The guys at Sourceninja love iDoneThis because it’s a time-saving tool. Instead of spending time in meetings, they’re getting stuff done. Brett, one of Sourceninja’s founders, told me that iDoneThis is “the easiest method I’ve found to have open communication in a team.”
That means a lot to us because Brett and his co-founder Matt have been around the block. They worked together at PGP, a startup, and stayed together through PGP’s acquisition by Symantec, the largest maker of computer security software. They’ve gone through many different companies’ attempts at solving the hard problem of communication: how do you stay focused and communicate what you’re doing? Besides standups, they’ve used wikis, sat in other kinds of meetings, and written weekly email rollups.
iDoneThis succeeds where other methods have failed because it gives visibility into the entire company and provides a record of everything that’s getting done, but it doesn’t force people to waste time listening to information that’s irrelevant to them. They’ve used those extra 7 man hours every week to make incredible progress—like with the Heroku add-on that’s launching soon—toward building an awesome product that makes open source easy to manage and rely upon.