Tech Talk in Qatar
We recently did our first tech talk talking about software development in startups. We’ve been meaning to do one for a while but never got around.
Why Software development?
We’ve been trying to hire our first engineer for sometime now, and something we constantly experienced was this challenge to convince people to come work at a startup. It’s still a very alien concept to come join an early stage startup as compared to working at a big corporation. In Qatar, it’s even a bigger challenge where the startup mentality is still in its nascent.
We decided we should do a tech talk to give people a glimpse of what it’s like to work at a startup. More importantly, inspire people to come work at a startup.
Since we were hiring an engineer, we thought doing it on software development would be the best option. Also, because software development is one of the most crucial things startups spend their time doing, at least, in the early stages. Most startups are trying to solve a problem through their product. Their products are helping people find or do something more conveniently or economically or both!
So hiring the right people to build great products becomes imperative.
Event Organizer
We didn’t know much about doing a tech talk and getting people to attend it since we had never done this before. We got in touch with Bedaya, they help people with entrepreneurship stuff. Also, they do quite a few talks and events themselves. We were grateful that they agreed to sponsor the event at Katara.
Startups
IoGrow: A lead generation tools for startups and SMES.
Meddy: A place to help people find best doctors in Qatar
Speakers
Ilyes Boudjelthia: Google Developer Group (GDG) chapter founder in Qatar. He also ran one GDG Chelf, one of the biggest GDG chapters in the world. He’s also a Growth Hacker at IoGrow.
Meziane Hadjadj, Software Engineer at Iogrow.
Haris Aghadi, Co-founder at Meddy
Google Developer Group (GDG)
We kicked off the event by Ilyes talking about GDG. GDG is a community primarily for developers and tech enthusiasts who are interested in Google technologies.
GDG is worldwide event. Organized and led primarily by the community itself. Anyone who’s a developer or interested in Google technologies can become a member.
There are lots of benefits of being an active member of GDG. You get early access to new technologies and products Google is releasing. You get to go to cool events like Google I/O and also visit Google HQ in Mountain View, California. Ilyes has gotten a free Chromebook Pixel, Google Glass and has gone to multiple Google events. Moreover, it’s a great way to build up your network by meeting great developers, designers, and entrepreneurs from all over the world.
For more information, check out GDG
IoGrow
After Ilyes, we had Meziane from Iogrow, talk about engineering at IoGrow.
It’s a simple lead generation tool for startups and SMES. It provides tools to organize your sales process.
They have an awesome LinkedIn integration that allows you to quickly get leads from LinkedIn user profiles and then organize and filter everything in Iogrow CRM.
IoGrow heavily leverages Google API since most startups and SMES use Google apps. Their app is built on a lightweight python framework, webapp2 and it’s deployed on Google Cloud Platform. They pretty much use everything from Google.
Lot of people want to pursue the path of entrepreneurship but very few actually do it. They are always waiting for the “perfect” time, but it never comes and it never will. You just have to do it. If you don’t do it, someone else will, and beat you to the market. You need to get your product out in the market in the hands of your customers. Because in the beginning stages surviving your startup is more important than anything, and customer feedback will certainly help you with that.
Meddy
Haris from Meddy talked about how they converted a classroom project at Carnegie Mellon Qatar to a consumer healthcare startup.
Meddy came out of a lean startup project where Haris and his team talked to lot of patients and clinics before building the product. Their team hacked around lots of prototypes to test and validate the need before actually building the product.
They first started with a Photoshop mockup to get feedback from people and constantly iterated their prototype to get more feedback. They only coded the product once they had strong customer validation. Before that it was all on Photoshop, Bootstrap, Google forms, Mailchimp etc.
The backend of the actual product is built on Django, a python framework and for frontend — we use a heavily customized Bootstrap. The product is deployed on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure
The reason we were able to iterate so quickly in the early stages is because we followed the lean product development methodology instead of Waterfall. Startups need to build and iterate quickly; they don’t have the luxury of spending months in product development like big corporations. Hence, they need to follow the lean methodology, as compared to Waterfall.
It has become relatively easy to build products and launch startups at very little cost. Most of the tools and frameworks are already open sourced, so anyone can easily build a product at almost no cost. Here are some of the tools and frameworks we use to build our product.
Slack, Trello, Hackpad, Conjure.io, Mixpanel, Inspectlet, Monitority, Moz Open Site Explorer etc.
Read here for more details about all the products we use
Talking to customers is the most important thing a startup can spend their time doing. It’s imperative to figure out how the customers are currently solving the problem, so you know if your new product is better than their existing way of solving the same problem.
Ship Fast; Ship Early; Iterate Quickly
It was a great event at last. We met some awesome people from QCRI, Evently, Zomato, QatarLiving etc.
We look forward to having another one soon.
