Last year we were a completely unknown company and were happy to come under everyone´s radar as it enabled us to work faster and concentrate on the site. This year things are changing and we are stepping up PR efforts to get better known worldwide.
Today there is an article about Habitamos (Adoos) in El País.
El País is possibly the most widely read Spanish newspaper in the world. You can read the article below:
The majority of our visitors probably won’t notice that we pump out
new features nearly every day..!! Yes, I am serious, everyday day we
tweak the code or implement something new.
Our team works
really fast and even though we are 10.000 km away, Skype keeps us close
together. Our average development life cycle usually takes 1 to 4 days as we take a concept from idea to implementation stage:
Day 1:
Someone proposes a new feature. We brain storm the idea as a team and
discuss how to implement. Then, sometimes we do a couple of html
prototype (pure HTML, no CSS).
Day 2:
The feature is finalised and gets programmed in PHP/Perl, this takes anywhere from 1-8 hours depending on the complexity.
Day 3:
We roll out live and wait for 24 hours to collect traffic data. With over 80,000 visits/day we have a good sample to test with.
Day 4:
Evaluate the traffic data and decide. If the reaction is good, the we
keep the feature, if not we bin it and go back to the original version.
—
IMPORTANT ADVICE
If you are working on a
startup make sure you work with extremely short development cycles. I
recommend you read the following essay:
Paul Graham´s 7 Golden Rules for Startups:
1. Release early.
2. Keep pumping out features.
3. Make users happy.
4. Fear the right things.
5. Commitment is a self-fulfilling Prophecy.
6. There is always room.
7. Don’t get your hopes up.
This is a message for all the Internet entrepreneurs that read my blog…
RELEASE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, EVEN BEFORE THE SITE IS FINISHED!
Good Luck
Growth in May has continued strong for Habitamos.com. Google
Analytics says we’ve had approximately over 1,2 million absolute unique
visitors in May.
This month has also been fantastic in
financial terms. It’s the first month ever that Adoos has made
significant profits. Now everyone is now being paid full salaries and
I’ve even started paying off some of my debts.
Here are the latest figures for Adoos in Latin America. The first
months are always incredibly tuff and its really hard to initially
convince web users to post an ad!
