Our founder Pedro Oliveira hosted Landing.jobs 1st AMA (Ask Me Anything) with RedLight Software’s founder, Miguel Antunes, as our first guest. There was a lot of smart questions being thrown around and Miguel did best he could to quench our user’s endless thirst for knowledge with great success! Great Internet moment, I might add.
Check out the original posting on Facebook (you need to ask permission to enter our secret society, muahaha) or have a look at some of the best Q&A below:
1. Igo Lapa: Why choosing Rails instead of php, Python or even NodeJS?
Miguel Antunes: Clever! So far we figured out that Rails makes developers “happy” in a general way (I know it works for me). 🙂 And keeping our developers happy is very important to us. Also fits well with some of our customers (quick prototyping, deployment, and a bunch of configuration management/continuous integration tools out there). However, we love to learn new stuff, because sometimes a screw is better than a nail! 😉 So we’re very open about applicants and often invite them to join us even if the profile is a bit different from what we expected at first…
2. Artur Goulão Ferreira: Scrum, lean or something in between ? Also how did you get your first client?
Miguel Antunes: Seems to me that this needs to be answered in two rounds. 🙂
We normally use “our own flavour” of Scrum (so easy answer is “something in the middle”). We’ve baptised it Organic Development and we’ve actually been pushing it to be taught in the local University! It’s deeply based on scrum (sprints, product owner, points, the works) but we do small adjustments on the process along the way. For us it means to do constantly improve not only the software but also the process. We don’t think that one size fits all customers, so we start with a best practices approach and improve on it along the way so that we keep our customer increasingly satisfied. Some call it “ongoing sales” we call it “getting better all the time”. Everyone gets an equal vote on improvement (from CEO to Junior Dev), by the way!
We got our first client the hard way: hustling! And we’re proud of it! 🙂 Along the road we created great relationships with our customers and great references! Now we kinda get calls from new customers that get referred to us. Now 90% of our customers are in the US and they love working with us using our process. They participate, they’re engaged and it’s been working great, even in bigger projects!
3. Filipe Agostinho: Why did you decide to have an office in Coimbra and another one in Lisbon and how is the experience of coordinating the work between the two offices? Any good advice you can give about managing remote teams? 🙂
Miguel Antunes: Remote is part of our DNA! Most of our customers are in the USA and I actually live in Lisbon!! (BIG LOVE ❤) while most of the team is located in Coimbra (ALSO BIG LOVE ❤)! This means we started off learning to do remote on the a day-by-day basis. It also plays an important part on our recruitment process: social skills are very important and if you want to have two development teams separated, you must avoid, at all costs, having someone in your team who does not compute (pun intended) with remote work.
To avoid communication problems we’re very keen on adopting the *right tools*, such as Slack, Trello, Jira, Toggle, GotoMeeting, Hangouts, and are always looking to improve.
In a short sentence: Communicate often, use the right tools and improve on your issues daily!
4. Joan Viladomat Comerma: Can you share some tips on how to get such a big clients like Unilever? How did you make them to trust a startup?
Miguel Antunes: Our experience is that you start by working with one of their subcontractors (in our case it was with Bürocratik) and keep keeping them happy. So the way there is definitely to build trust and work your way up the chain. Although, if I have to be honest I prefer working with smaller (leaner?) companies and startups (still can be very profitable) that have fun products and projects. Big corporations might sound sexy and fun (uhm?) but most times they are not quite so.
5. Sérgio Isidoro: Is RedLight a consulting company or a software house?
Miguel Antunes: Ahah, great question! We’re kind of bipolar here but we do both. From our current website (which is on the verge of being updated), you wouldn’t guess that we’re a software house. We do have our own products and we’re currently developing things that we’re really excited about. We just can’t disclose anything right now but in the next few months we’ll start giving away beta invitations to one of our products. Stay tuned. 🙂
Just to conclude here, we started as a consulting company, yes. But we do love products and the process of making one. Our way of working here is to fund our own products with the revenue that comes from consultancy.
6. Rita Mendes: What are your plans for the future and your strategy?
Miguel Antunes: We love our philosophy of “horizontal growth”! We believe we can be really promote excellence if we keep investing in small extraordinary teams, that focus on a niche, technology or product. I have no doubt that’s the right growth model for the next decade, and we’ve been proving it in-house and through partnerships for engaging bigger customers and projects.
7. Rita Mendes: About Coimbra, would you recommend the city to other entrepreneurs? Why?
Miguel Antunes: Coimbra’s environment is very cool!
We’ve got a vibrant tech and startup community as well (considering the scale). We’ve got awesome examples such as Feedzai, doDOC,Just in Time Tourist, Critical Software, WIT Software, among others, so have no doubt about talent.
Cost is very accessible, even for PT ranges (you can have a beer for 0,50€, lunch for 6€, and your own apartment for as little as 300€).
Night life simply does not have a limit here as well, as we’re surrounded by students and party people 24/7. You can also get a very cool office space for a couple hundred bucks in some of the coolest offices I’ve seen so far (come see to believe!)
8. Paulo Teixeira: How did you get funded or what creative strategies did you use to execute on minimal cash flow?
Miguel Antunes: Don’t focus so much on funding! One of the reasons we love doing consultancy is to get self-funded (we call if an hybrid model). It gives us a degree of independence and we will try to keep it as long as we can! Even if you’re trying to launch a product, getting funding too early is exhausting and might get you to lose a big slice of your company before you even launch!
Do some services or freelancing, save some money with your co-founders and invest it on your product. Most of your costs should be feeding yourselves anyway!
That said, if you really need the capital, there’s a bunch of mechanisms to help you out there:
- Don’t forget the FFFs: it will give you pressure to succeed and you will probably avoid asking them for money if you’re not 100% committed!
- There’s more grant money out there than you imagine. Sometimes they lack visibility, but if you look around online you’ll find it’s not as hard as you think.
- Talk to your local Incubators. They know investors, grant programmes, public funding initiatives better than anyone! Don’t forget they “feed” on your success so they’re interested in helping you out!
In any case, I’m always open to listening to whomever needs some help, so drop me a line! 🙂
Paulo Teixeira: Really great answer! Just to be sure FFFs = friends, family and fools?
Miguel Antunes: Yep! FFF for the win 🙂 Helping with rent and bills was probably one of the best investments/help some one has ever provided me with!
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