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Case Study

How Crashlytics Helps Mobile Developers Focus on the Things that Matter

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Crashlytics provides real-time crash reporting for mobile apps, down to the exact line of code that caused the crash. We chatted with Rich Paret, Director of Engineering, about how Crashlytics is leading the pack at an interesting stage of mobile development.

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Current mobile performance management options run thin due to a knowledge gap that arises after somebody downloads an app. Rich recounts, “When [our] founders talked to developers about what they were doing to manage the quality of the stuff once it hit the app store, we found out that some software companies were paying an engineer to read the reviews in the app store. Any review that was under 3 stars, they would try to reverse-engineer from the reviewer’s comment what was wrong with the app. That’s a crazy sort of situation to be in.”

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How VHX is Leading the Self-Distribution Revolution

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VHX is bringing digital video distribution up to speed with this internet-fueled modern age, delivering DRM-free video, such as Aziz Ansari’s Dangerously Delicious and Indie Game: The Movie, directly to fans. Having launched as a social video community — a way to discover, share, and queue video for later — VHX could soon be seeing their distribution platform and consumption community interact in interesting ways down the road.

We talked with co-founder, Jamie Wilkinson, who describes how the timing felt right for VHX’s push to help small filmmakers and artists self-distribute their work: “It really helps leverage all the growth we’ve seen in social media for people to actually financially support themselves outside of the old studio distribution model. For filmmakers, it’s really great because we don’t take any rights restrictions or exclusivity, so we push things to market super fast and work in a way where every project is individualized and has a bespoke solution.”

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How Wistia Builds Its Competitive Advantage

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Wistia provides super easy, distinctive video hosting, management, and marketing for businesses. We wanted to find out from co-founder and CEO, Chris Savage, how Wistia uses iDoneThis and why they love it.

In the past year, Wistia has gone through a growth spurt, doubling to a total of fifteen people. Chris wrote a great blog post about the challenges of staying productive during such rapid growth, pointing out how Wistia’s “internal communication mechanisms have had to evolve so that they are less disruptive, more relevant, and more helpful.”

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Allotted ample ownership and authority, people at Wistia have a great deal of freedom over what they do. As a result, as Chris explains, “it’s hard to know what everyone else is doing, which I think is really important.” So, the Wistia team uses iDoneThis to “facilitate what would often be those random connections that would happen if you were sitting next to somebody, if you were walking by somebody working on something.”

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How Any.DO Marks Getting In Sync as Done

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Any.DO is an elegant task management application available for Android, iPhone, and the Chrome browser. While the app has received praise for its simplicity and ability to sync across platforms, the Tel Aviv-based startup found that it needed some management tools to synchronize itself, with one of its founders, Omer Perchik, relocating to San Francisco. Plus, the company, which started in 2010, saw its team nearly double to twelve people.

Any.DO turned to iDoneThis to sync its team, and as co-founder Yoni Lindenfeld explains, to solve one of the challenges of fast growth — how to get all the newbies up to speed. “It’s a good tool to get new people coming on board to understand what other people are doing and to show other people what they’re doing.”

Communication and coordination are priorities for Any.DO, achieved through transparency regarding the inner workings of the company. “It’s really important for us for everyone to be involved and aware,” declares Yoni, as part of Any.DO’s tight-knit “family-style environment” work culture. These objectives led the Any.DO team to implement iDoneThis with a plan to be more specific in their daily entries. Yoni elaborates, “Before we started using it, we talked to everyone about how we would profit most from using it. It’s going great because people are writing more details about what they’re doing and other people,” —including new hires — “know more details. It’s a great tool.”

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How Mozilla Foundation Navigates Across Teams

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The Mozilla Foundation has a super software team working on projects that range from Popcorn (a video remixing application) to Thimble (an easy-to-use web page maker) to Open Badges (a digital badges system that support learning and achievement).

Developer Jon Buckley talked with us about the struggle to align three teams when Mozilla Foundation wanted to integrate Badges into both Popcorn and Thimble. Combining multiple product worlds could very well collide into chaos and confusing communication, but Mozilla Foundationis seeing smooth sailing.

Status update discussion used to fall to a weekly call, which was time-consuming, while a shared mailing list was only used periodically for such purposes. The Mozilla Foundation teams soon turned to iDoneThis to coordinate communication for people spread across time zones and for cutting across teams.  “You don’t have to worry about being in the same room at the same time. That asynchronous nature of updating people is very helpful.”

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How Reddit Builds a Progress Record (and the Front Page of the Internet)

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Reddit, the popular social content site and community, hands power to the people to decide what’s important and what’s not. iDoneThis likewise hands the reins to Reddit’s team to use how they see fit.

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With the Reddit team scattered, from San Francisco to New York and in between, the challenge may be to get a remote team on the same page. Yet, the main use of iDoneThis for the Reddit team is as a personal record, and then by extension, as a reference for the team.

Reddit’s general manager Erik Martin explains, “We all wear a lot of hats. We’re only about twenty people. All of us do a bunch of different things, so it’s hard for us to jump around. It’s nice to be able to track how that’s going, maybe not what we’re spending time on as much but what we accomplish on any given day.”

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How PagerDuty Gets Intelligent Messaging Across

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Systems down? Who you gonna call? PagerDuty is on it! The service dispatches alerts collected from system monitoring tools through email, SMS, phone, and mobile and provides no-fuss on-call management.

PagerDuty is all about intelligent messaging, integrating with tools you already have to notify the right person to deal with the problem, based on schedule and situation.

We’re fans of how PagerDuty promotes efficient, effective communication.  The company carries over this value to its inner workings as well, implementing iDoneThis in place of its old daily stand-up meetings. “Instead of adding more meetings, I can see what everyone is up to by simply checking my email,” saysPagerDuty co-founder and CTO, Andrew Miklas. ”The iDoneThis digests are the first thing I read every morning. I glance through them on my phone before I even get out of bed.”

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How Agiliq Creates Bespoke Webapps by Focusing Within

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Agiliq is a 12-person web design and development studio based in Hyderabad, India that builds web applications which provide that “just-right” fit for its clients. The key to crafting bespoke webapps relies not only on the ingredients of technology and design but on understanding your client and your client’s issues.

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But in order to do that, it’s important to understand the inner workings of your own team members and their work. Agiliq director and developer Shabda Raaj finds that using iDoneThis is integral to getting to the nuts and bolts of Agiliq’s operations. The results: a greatly streamlined workflow and improved capacity to focus on what matters, solving clients’ issues and getting more app-making done.

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How Roeder Studios’s Virtual Team Built a Social Media Empire

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Building a business from scratch is a huge challenge and doing it with a virtual team is even tougher.  The interaction and information exchange that happens when people work in the same room often get taken for granted.  It’s something that’s tricky to replicate when the team is straddled across different locations and timezones.

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So why bother with a remote team?  For founder Laura Roeder, having a virtual team is a competitive advantage.  It gives her greater flexibility in hiring to make that she’s focusing 100% on quality and fit.  It also suits her hands-off management style.  Everyone in the company has the autonomy to do their own thing, so long as they’re openly and actively communicating with the team.

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How Sourceninja Gets an Extra 7 Hours of Productivity Every Week

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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.

Sourceninja

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.

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