How to destroy competitors’ business model. Web 2.0 style. Part 2.

Build a great development team

• Work on the leading edge
• Attract more like us
• Be passionate
• Multiple language culture
• Everybody contributes

Work on the leading edge.

Coders love to work with really cool, leading edge technologies. Often you will find that the best coders (rockstar quality) will find you because they hear what you are about. Web applications today have some exceptional tools available. Our team built their applications using the following and more.

AGILE development (it rocks), Ruby on Rails, (with boundless stored procedure libraries), Python turbogear, Ajax (Google loves it), Ferret for indexing,  CronJobs for cleanup, Business Intelligence tools (Analytics, dashboards), data migration tools (take out the drudge work), distributed databases when needed, and dynamic load balancing (no latency), pretty well the whole open source bag of tricks. It also helps to have a really cool funky physical environment All these reduce coder workload while increasing speed. stability, reliability and productivity.

Attract more like us

Employees will recruit others who share similar goals. That is how rock star employees come to us. Good employees help us set company culture early (learned this from Jeff Bezos, Amazon). The result of these policies is very reduced churn and reduced hiring costs. The company wins in so many ways.

Be passionate

If you love your work – it becomes better work. As a result employee productivity grows to a high level. On the wall is a slogan Corporate zombies need not apply.

Multi-language culture, be international from Day 1

Our company has Japanese, Chinese,French, Spanish and Eastern European members. More team members are located in Asia and Europe. Canada is a multicultural country, so use it to advantage. Learn from the similarities and differences and apply them to the localized sites. Coders have a say in marketing, since they know the buyers!

Everyone Contributes

Build a team whose depth of experience spans many years to give balance and focus to efforts. The business leader has already taken one company to very strong financial exit, so he is well aware of what to focus on. The technical leader ran 78 simultaneous multi-language highly secure websites so has been there, done that. By employing individuals with rare deep core technology experience and drive, the company is saved from making others mistakes, but can learn from all the lessons already out there. This allows a greater chance to be fast second in a market to scoop up all the marbles when the leader crashes and burns. Internal policy is to try everything, there is something to be learned from what works and what does not.

Next. Build a Strong Infrastructure