Agile Roots 2010 – Building Great Software

Guest post by Andrew Shafer

Last night at LaunchUp, I failed you, so today I’m going to try to fix that.

When someone doesn’t buy your product, it often doesn’t mean it is bad or even that they wouldn’t love it. Usually the problem is your pitch and the call to action.

You can blame the people you pitched for not understanding the wonderful things you have to offer, investors or customers, but that just takes away your personal power to do something about it.

Here’s the problem, software… you suck at it.

You might know some PHP, some Java, some Ruby, whatever. You might be smart. You might be clever. Every line of code is a liability. One day you’ll look back and know that.

And if you aren’t a coder, you’re at the mercy of yours to express your business ideas as software, which you probably suck at expressing in a way the developers understand. You know this is true because of some of the software that got produced didn’t match what you thought you were asking for. Tell me I’m lying.

I’ve been involved with building, supporting and selling software in some capacity for 13 years. And I’m still working getting better at understanding every aspect of how to make software into a business.

I’ve worked for 3 venture funded startups. I’ve co-founded and raised money for startups. As a result of this, I know co-founders and engineers at dozens of startups and worked with them on their software strategy and infrastructure. I’m talking about companies that you know by name, read about on techcrunch and probably use everyday.

Agile Roots is a conference about many lessons I wished I didn’t have to learn the hard way.

There will be practical information about product innovation, user experience, planning, test driven development, and more. This will be straight talk presented by a world class lineup of speakers appropriate for anyone involved in a software business, executive, product manager, developer, testers in any combination.

All that and your registration includes food during the conference and a dinner from Utah’s own Pat’s BBQ.

So here’s the deal, I know Agile Roots will help you make better software. And here’s my call to action…

Pitch me why you should come. Pitch me why how your startup is going to change the world.

I’ll search twitter for tweets with both #agileroots and #launchup. If you can’t say what you have to say in 140 characters, I will follow links and read whatever you have. I will probably also poke around on your site if you have one. If you aren’t on twitter, you can send me an email (andrewcshafer at gmail), but seriously, get on twitter.

You have until Monday at 11:59 PM.

Winners will get announced on the LaunchUp blog. We’ll do a featured interview with you on the Agile Roots blog, announce your company at the conference and I’ll personally make sure you get taken care of.

Help me help you.