In my welcome presentation at Acts as Conference 2009 today I talked about Unfuddle, a great story of two guys solving their own problem, and in so doing, helping many others, and creating a business. Here’s the full story as told by Joshua Frappier, one of the two Unfuddle founders.
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Back in 2006, I was working as a developer for a small software firm. In addition to my development responsibilities, I was also in charge of managing and maintaining the toolchain for our team. As a partially distributed team, this meant managing, patching, securing and backing up a dedicated, public facing server, keeping tools like Subversion and Trac up to date, providing in-house support and interrupting my workflow every time we wanted to add new projects or people. We were committed as a team to “doing development right”, but there had to be an easier way.
At the time, there were only a handful of hosted software project management tools out there — most of them, being geared toward the enterprise, were simply out of the reach (and needs) of a small software development firm. Like many in our industry, we turned to Basecamp as a holy grail for solving our team’s communication needs — and like most developers, we quickly learned that it was simply not designed with the needs of a software development team in mind.
I wish I could say that starting Unfuddle was the result of a revolutionary idea. But as with most products that make an impact, Unfuddle was the direct result of solving one’s own problems.
With a firm foundation in managing our small team’s needs, my partner David Croswell and I immediately began work on what would be the core of Unfuddle. We were not trying to invent something revolutionary. We were not trying to introduce some new paradigm to the software industry. We just wanted something that was simple and met our most basic needs – needs that no one else seemed to want to meet. Rock solid repository hosting, bug and issue tracking at a price that was sensitive to small development shops.
David and I have been committed from the very beginning to growing Unfuddle into a company that was sustainable. In this way, we have made many decisions that seem strange to some people. We have said no to every opportunity to accept investment. We have said no to adding features that would grow us beyond our ability to provide outstanding support to our customers. We have said no to growing our team beyond essentially a developer and a designer. We have strived to only spend our time on those features our customers have overwhelmingly requested.
As a result, after almost three years, David and I now have a company and product that we and our customers love. Every day we have the opportunity to serve and interact with tens of thousands of our peers as customers — all the while providing well for ourselves and our families.
What more could one really ask for?
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Great inspiration.
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