BetterLabs
From PuneTech
BetterLabs works with very early stage (pre-seed or seed) startup founders, to get the first version of their product designed, implemented and tested with real users. Their pricing model is a combination of cash and equity.
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[edit] Overview of the Process
This is the process BetterLabs (BL) typically follows with their clients:
- Founder/s and BL sign a mutual NDA
- Founder/s and BL discuss the core concept on phone/in person
- BL confirms open questions, level of interest/fit, and discusses a potential plan
- Founder/s and BL sign an agreement with milestone-based planning
- BL follows a UI-first approach to development
- Daily updates and weekly meetings to track and drive progress
[edit] UI-First Development Model
BL strong believes in defining a product by starting with the user interface and getting the interface and interaction design finalized before starting to write backend code. They have a unique user interface definition methodology using Microsoft Excel that defines the product specifiction to a granular level of detail ensuring the founders, designers and developers get on the same page in the shortest period of time. Excel allows for very quick creation of mock-ups of the user interface. This is very well suited to a startup environment as the product evolves through a lot of iterations in the beginning.
[edit] Technology Used
These are the technologies that BL typically works with
- Ruby and Ruby on Rails
- PHP, Zend Framework, CakePHP
- LAMP Stack
- JS, AJAX Flex, CSS, XHTML
- Facebook Platform for Facebook application development
- OpenSocial for OpenSocial application development
- iPhone Application Development
[edit] Links
- Website: http://www.betterlabs.net
- http://www.better-marketing.com - Marketing services for B2B marketers
- http://www.indiagoes.com - An Indian news aggregation site created by BL
- http://www.indiamarks.com/ - A crowdsourced guide targeted towards Indians
[edit] People
- Satish Mishra - COO and Technology Evangelist
