KennelCoach, lean dog breeding software

A new approach!

Ever bought a piece of software that, after you booted it up, had so many options and features that you didn’t know where to start? Rows of buttons, complex dialog windows, unintelligible error messages? A product that made you wonder if the people who created it were even in touch with reality? In the past, and even now, this is unfortunately more often the case than not.

Luckily, in recent years, a new wave of companies started cropping up that decided to take another approach. An approach where the goal is to create an application that fills an actual need, that is started from assumptions but validated through use by actual customers sooner rather than later, where the outcome is a lean product and not a bloated mess.

Or to give a more graphically interesting comparison:

Lean

Bloated

Which one would you choose?

What about KennelCoach?

This approach has been named the “Lean Startup” movement and KennelCoach embraces it fully. KennelCoach wants to become synonymous with dog breeding software and the Lean Startup approach is the best way to get there. KennelCoach believes that reaching out to dog breeders early will ensure that you get a streamlined web app with functionality you’ll actually use. All fat trimmed off, all waste eliminated.

How lean are you?

The proof is in pudding as they say. Let’s look back a bit a the (albeit short) history of KennelCoach and how it used Lean Startup principles so far.

One of the main tenets of Lean Startups as employed by KennelCoach is to “do the least amount of work that provides the maximum amount of learning”. When the idea of a web-based dog breeding application popped up in my head, I did not start creating this application right away. I did create a small website explaining the idea and put up a request to subscribe to a mailing list. I figured, if enough people sign up, this means there is an interest. A small amount of work (set up the website) for a large amount of learning (start building the application or not). What did I learn? That waiting till people came to my website would take too long. So I looked up kennels online and sent them an email, (kindly) asking what they thought of the idea. The responses I got together with the mailing lists sign ups were enough to tell me to continue.

For the next step, I figured the least amount of work would be to build a small prototype to put online and find out what people thought of it. And so I did. At this moment, KennelCoach is in a private beta test phase accessible to mailing list subscribers (subscribe to be a part of the next batch of invites that go out, dog breeders only please ). Even though I have a ton of ideas to put in the web app, I only implemented a little bit. Enough to get feedback, see that I’m on the right track and show users that they can give feedback and are listened to.

Finally, as a Lean Startup, KennelCoach uses a bunch of other tools to get new ideas to customers quicker and to improve communications. To give just a few examples of what KennelCoach uses:

• Heroku: This is where the KennelCoach web application is hosted. Heroku makes sure that new versions of KennelCoach are easy to deploy and that the app keeps on running so that I can focus on building out new functionality and not waste time on setting up the whole infrastructure.
• UserVoice: KennelCoach uses UserVoice to capture user feedback from inside the web app. Users make suggestions, can see suggestions of others and vote them up. Meanwhile I can ask for clarifications and show the progress on ideas that were submitted.
• MailChimp: MailChimp is state-of-the-art mailing list software. When I need to reach out to my list of interested users, they make sure my mail arrives.
• SnapEngage: I just got this through an amazing deal on AppSumo. They let me embed a small chat window right into the site so that anyone visiting the site can contact me with questions right then and there. It’s not integrated just yet, but watch out for it soon!
• and there are a bunch more…

But why?

I love dogs.

It’s that simple.

My parents always had dogs. They bred them as well. And when my wife and me moved from an appartement to a house, it gave me the opportunity to get a dog as well. KennelCoach is my way of wanting to give back to dog breeders. The goal of KennelCoach is twofold: to allow dog breeders to spend more time with their dogs and less with administrative jumble, and to let them be more informed about the status of their kennels.

I’m confident being a Lean Startup will help us get there.