Today marks BrightMix’s one year anniversary. Magically, we’ve made it through an entire year!

Many of you probably never saw our first, founding blog post, since we literally had like 4 readers back then, including our Moms (plus the website was an eye-seering neon green back then – yikes!). Reading that post brings a little tear to my eye, and reminds me of who we were back when we first started – 2 developers who had just quit their corporate jobs, out to show the world a thing or two!

Well, here we sit, 1 year later, still kicking ass and doing our thing. It’s been an interesting ride, and we’ve progressed quite a bit from being just 2 lowly developers… you learn a lot after running a business for a year.

A Rough Progression of BrightMix via Blogposts

I wanted to create more posts about our company as we progress, but I only managed to create 3 over the course of the year. Better than none, I suppose!

• One Month of Official Business
• Three’ish Months of Official Business
• Seven Months of Official Business

Some memorable occurrences for us:

• the day we collected our first check – we scanned it we were so excited!
• Moving into our own office space
• Flying to Boston and forming a partnership to create Tripleseat.com
• Hiring our First Employee, Erin
• Hosting our first Summer Internship
• the BrightMix open house party, yum, quesadillas
• Helping Sojern launch a nation-wide product

So What’s Next?

As we approach our second year of business, a few rules of the game have changed for us.

Programmers doing design work is out, graphic designers doing design work is IN!

We’ve integrated graphic design by designers into our software development process, and I don’t think we can ever go back. Having talented designers on staff has allowed us to create some pretty sweet websites in a fraction of the time it would have taken us.

Creating and Launching our own Products

Our Tripleseat product is nearing completion. If all goes as planned, restaurant owners and managers will be using it… and loving it! Tripleseat is currently in Beta, but we expect to have an official release sometime in August.

Similarly, the yet-to-be announced product that our Summer Interns built will be beta launching at BarCamp Omaha on August 16th. Stay tuned to the Internship Blog for more details on that.

Bigger Visions… Bigger Goals

Our starting goals revolved around securing a steady stream of income to help bankroll our business, making a fun workplace environment, and coming up with a great software development process.

We’ve pretty well tackled all aforementioned goals, so it’s time to find new, bigger, and better goals!

We want to position ourselves as the leading web development company here in Omaha. Similarly, we want to help drive and push this community into the modern age of web 2.0. As such, we’ve become involved with the Chamber of Commerce, as well as seeking and making connections with other innovative professionals around town. We’ll see where things take us!

Our Thanks to all BrightMix Supporters

It’s been quite a fast year for us, and we’re very grateful to all of our BrightMix supporters. Stay tuned to the blog for year #2 of BrightMix action – if everything goes as planned, it should be another exciting and eventful year!

p.s., some upcoming occurrences: BrightMix.tv, another re-branding of BrightMix.com, campfire hijinks, Office space style printer bash!

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Low and behold, our Summer Internship Program has started! We’re happy to welcome aboard Allyn, Robert, and Erin #2 (and arguably Andy, who started with us a few weeks prior).

We started day #1 at the ridiculously early time of 9 a.m. Allyn, Robert, and Erin #2 arrived and we chatted for a little bit about this and that. Without wasting too much time, we dived right into talking about the interns’ summer project – code named the “Feisty Piranha Project.”

What’s this Feisty Piranha all about?

We’ll be releasing more details about the project’s purpose, goal, and overall meaning soon, but for now, you can check out the Interns’ blog at FeistyPiranha.com.

Everyone get to Work!

By mid-afternoon, much was talked about and Dusty’s voice was pretty much gone, so everyone moved to their workstations to start hacking.

We set up our two programmer interns, Robert and Allyn, in our old conference room, which turns out to be a pretty sweet workspace.

Our two designers are in the main room with Dusty, Erin, and myself. Surprisingly, even with 7 people here in our 900 sq foot space, it’s not as crowded as we expected.

Some Photos…

Our Weeks of Preparation!

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been busy preparing for the arrival of our interns.

This involved a lot of planning about the project and how we’re going to run it, in addition to buying a bunch of awesome equipment.

Since we’re all about treating our developers/designers right, we purchased 4x new desks, chairs, MacBook Pro’s, 24” monitors, and various mice and keyboards, based on request.

We have no shortage of equipment around the office now. As an added benefit, we can just turn on our fleet of 24” monitors this winter instead of running the furnace ;-)

We had our hearts set on getting some fashionable new Ikea desks. However, the closest Ikea is in Minneapolis – not exactly a hop, skip, and a jump away. Fortunately, Erin #2 and her husband Johnny happened to be in Minneapolis.. at Ikea… at a very opportune time! Thanks for bringing us our new Ikea desks!

As it turns out, assembling the desks was a breeze, but the file cabinets… Well, the first one took at least 2 hours to put together, and the other ones are still, um, under construction.

Anyone out there want to come in and assemble these things?!

All in all, we felt the Interns’ first day went really well and was even marginally fun. As for what the interns thought? You’ll have to find out by checking out their blog at feistypiranha.com!

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Thanks to everyone who came out for our Open House Party bash. It was great seeing our family, friends, and business acquaintances all come together to celebrate our company. We hope everyone enjoyed the event.

More people turned out than we expected; at one point in the evening, there were about 50 people in our office!

By the end of the night, all of the beer and wine was consumed, as well the snack foods. (The Quesadillas only lasted a few hours.) All in all, we’ve branded the event a sweeping success!

We also had a sweet vinyl sign put up on our front window, compliments of Marlina. It seems as though we’re totally official now!

We spent most of that Friday preparing for the event: cooking, cleaning, moving stuff around, etc. Our thanks to Erin G., Erin H., Evan, Marlina (and Marlina’s sister who loaned us the Quesadilla maker), Shawna, and Jane for helping us out.

Now that we’ve got our open house party out of the way, we can move forward on having other fun and exciting parties. Such as the BrightMix summer slip-and-slide party and the BrightMix summer ice cream social!

Photo Time! See all Open House Party Photos!

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This was suppose to be a six month post, but it got delayed on account of our being too busy to blog. So, here we are at roughly seven months of business, continuing to rock and/or roll…

Since our last post, at three’ish months of official business, a whole lot has happened.

We Hired an Awesome Developer!

Shortly before Xmas, we posted a listing to hire an ASP.NET developer, two months and a series of interviews later, we welcomed aboard Erin.

Erin just had her one month anniversary, and she seems to be enjoying her new position at BrightMix. She’s helped Dusty and myself adopt a new pattern for our ASP.NET development called Presenter First, a rendition of the ol’ Model View Presenter pattern. Presenter First has helped us write code that is inherently more automatically testable, something that is challenging to do in ASP.NET.

Erin also just recently launched her own blog, ErinHawkins.com. Good things will come from her blog, so add it to the feed reader nearest to you!

BrightMix’s First Company Outing (Many More to Come)

In line with our goal of providing an awesome place for developers to work, we had our first company-paid outing a few weeks ago. Since there’s only 3 of us working at BrightMix, we invited along some ringers ;-)

Why have frequent company outings? Well, because we like our employee(s), we want them to continue working with us, and we want them to feel appreciated.

If everyone is kicking booty at their work, it makes all the sense in the world to start the weekend early by taking Friday afternoon off for a fun-filled bowling excursion. Oh, and participate in the taking of some sweet jump shots!

Continuing Client Work

In early December, we began work with a company here in Omaha called Sojern. We can’t disclose any of the details about their company or product. But, rest assured, it’ll be a pretty big deal once it has launched, which should be happening shortly.

Similarly, we’re on the verge of launching another big website for our other major client. Details for that are also soon to come…

Ack! Apple Converts!

For the longest time, Dusty and I were big Apple haters. This was mostly due to our being forced to use the inferior Macintosh computers back in our younger years (Middleschool and Highschool). Recently, though, Apple has taken a drastic turn for the better, with its new PC hardware-based machines and unix-based operating system. We use MacBookPro’s exclusively for our Ruby on Rails development work now.

I also just recently jumped on the iPhone bandwagon. Oh iPhone, you’re oh-so glossy and lovable…

A Business Trip to Boston

In early January, Dusty and myself flew out to Boston to meet up with a potential client.

The result of it all? A new partnership and product under development, TripleSeat. TripleSeat will be a web-based application to help restaurants manage the booking and sales of their private dining rooms.

We expect to launch version 1.0 of TripleSeat this May, which is coming up shortly, so keep your peepers peeled.

Impending Summer Internship Program

Mostly recently, a lot of our focus been getting ready for our Summer Internship Program. The goal of our internship program is to create and launch a product of our own, as well as find some of the best up-and-coming developer/design talent around the area and hopefully teach them a whole lot about the creation and launch of a brand new Web 2.0 product.

We’ve had a ton of people send in applications – more than we ever expected. We’re currently in the process of conducting in-person interviews with our top candidates, and within two weeks, we’ll be making offers to three of them.

Party Pizzas and Foosball Anyone?

It’s the little things around the office that help differentiate our company from XYZ corp. A few weeks ago, while chatting with Erin, we (possibly just myself) determined that the office needed a toaster oven so we could actually bake stuff like party pizzas, pizza rolls, and chicken nuggs.

Additionally, at some point, it was determined that we needed a Foosball table for the front room of our office. Erin was extremely helpful in facilitating the attainment of the table; in fact, she pretty much found the thing and got it to our office – we just footed the bill. High five, Erin!

The Official BrightMix Open House Party

Since we started the biz, Dusty and I have touted how we’re going to have this glamourous, earth-shakingly awesome open house party. At first, we were going to host it at my house (since we used to work from there), but then we moved to a real office. Then, it got drearily cold for a few months…

Without further ado: the official BrightMix Open House Party will be on Friday, April 25th, starting at 4:30pm and ending… well, whenever it ends. We’ll be providing drinks (of both the alcoholic and non-alcoholic variety), delicious snack foods (quesadillas, chips, etc.), and entertainment. We’ll be sending out more formal invites to our giant list of contacts.

Well, that wraps up our last few months of busy, busy business – stay tuned for more happenings!

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When Kevin and I were originally talking about starting our own company, naturally one of the major first decisions is what to actually name it. Today I was rummaging through our Google Docs, and I stumbled upon a list of possible choices that we contemplated, before finally settling in on BrightMix. Note, however, that this is far from an exhaustive list, but rather one of many “digital napkins” that we scribbled ideas on. It is, however, mostly unedited from when we originally wrote it many moons ago.

Name	Notes
BrightMix	plus homonymic britemix
TrueAnomaly	enigmatic!
RollingAhead	i actually think this could be a sweet product site… cars or something?? new age car searching meets web 2.0
SuperiorSimplicity	implies simplicity = good
Simplinity	???
Probably Not
TidyCoder	This would be a sweet coding resource site
RenovatingSoftware	Needs “Software” to work
EvangelizingSoftware	Needs “Software” to work
YeOldeSoftware	Ye Oldest name of all
ConvergingSoftware	Needs “Software” to work
Rhyzz	hard to spell and/or pronounce?
Definitely Not
RoflCode	Joke.. .haha. rofl
GhettoBlasterSoftware	joke… long live the ghetto blaster
BarelyLegalCode	The red light district of coding
InfusingCode	mmmm, delicious infused vodka
Anomical	i can’t pronounce this
CodeRehab	drug connotations
RollAhead	“roller head”, rolllingAhead seems better

Some funny ones in there, and the comments are priceless. My personal favorite? YeOldeSoftware of course. What a great name. As you can see, many of the choices that we made were cutting-edge names – some even enigmatic. Nothing generic like “blah blah solutions”, (which actually isn’t a terrible name, if you actually use “blah blah”). We’re not huge fans of completely generic technology company names. Rather, most things are “web 2.0” style—combinations of two unrelated words. You see that a lot these days, from many of the companies that we aspire to be like: 37 Signals, Jackson Fish, Fog Creek, Clear Function, Adaptive Path, Blue Flavor, Simple Bits, Logical Awesome... The list goes on and on. Two-word names are all the rage..

If anyone wants to actually use any of these names, let us know… We actually own quite a few of the domains .. haha.

For about a year leading up to starting the company, Kevin and I spent a lot of time in Campfire, and on Google Docs, brainstorming a ton of stuff. I’ll try to dig up some of the other docs that we put together, or chat sessions we had, which give great insight into the thought process that went into us forming the company.

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After about a month of posting jobs and interviewing candidates for our first developer position opening, we’re happy to welcome aboard Erin! Hooray!

Erin brings to the table a lot of programming and leadership experience. Oh, and she’s nice and we like her!

We spent the majority of the day in the ol’ conference room. In the morning, we went over the in’s and out’s of our business, and in the afternoon, we went over a lot of the details about our clients and our current projects. There’s a lot more going on here than we expected—definitely way more than someone can absorb in one sitting, but Erin bared with us.

On a side note, we had to re-arrange the office in preparation for Erin’s arrival. In the process, we actually found a room arrangement that looks and feels a helluva lot better than our original layout. Sweet…

To celebrate Erin joining us, and the creation of our new whiteboard, we took some time out of our busy day to film a short time-lapse video in the conference room, an idea first presented to us by the cool people over at Carsonified. We felt the need to take the video just a little over the top, so we added in some Chariots of Fire. Enjoy ;-)

A few more Photos of our work…

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Not too long ago we had our one month of business anniversary. Well, actually… that was about 3 months ago :-)

We were talking the other day about how fast time has started flying for us since we opened up shop. But, on that same note, we’ve managed to accomplish a great deal in a short amount of time. Back when we were employees at corporations, time stood seemingly still and things happened at such a slow pace.

What have we accomplished, you ask? Here’s a run-down of the latest happenings since our 1-month anniversary posting.

New Office!

In case you missed it, we moved into a real office about a month ago. Apparently the ceiling leaks, which is kind of a downer, but our landlord should have that fixed soon. Other than that, we’re really enjoying the office.

The move was great for me because I can get out of my house and go someplace else to do work, and it’s great for Dusty because it’s closer to his place of residence.

We were initially wanting to have an open house party shortly after moving in, but we decided it wouldn’t be all that exciting because we don’t have much furniture yet. Plus, it’s crappy and cold out. So, we’re aiming to have an open house party sometime in the spring of 2008.

New Website + Logo + Hosting!

In early November we migrated BrightMix.com to Slicehost.com. Read more about our positive experience with Slicehost here.

Along the same vein, after being stuck in the logo design process for a few months, we worked with the Granger Group to finalize our logo. While we were at it, we re-branded BrightMix.com.

New Client!!

New business is always good business. In late November, we started working with a new, top-secret client here in Omaha. We can’t give out any details, as we’re under an NDA, but the idea is exciting and it’s being built using Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

New Hardware!

We attained another Dell 24” LCD monitor, which has taken up residence on my desk as my secondary monitor. (I was briefly in violation of our own credo regarding dual monitors).

Also, Dusty managed to score us a rad printer from a family member. This new printer is replacing our older, also donated printer. It can print at a whooping 17 pages per minute, while our old one could only do a lowly 6. That’s approximately a 300% increase! Woohoo!

Full-time Hiring Positions

We’ve yet to announce this officially, but we’ll almost certainly be looking to hire 1-2 full-time developers to help us out. At a glance, we’ll be looking for individuals who are savvy with ASP.NET, SQL, Javascript, and CSS. More details on the positions and how to apply will become available very shortly.

BrightMix Summer of 2008 Internship Program

Additionally, we’re looking at hiring a small team of interns to help us out this upcoming summer. We believe we can provide an awesome, interesting, and, above all, meaningful internship experience, similar to the type of internship program you’d find at FogCreek or JacksonFish.

The fact of the matter is that many companies out there hire interns because they need a cheap, temporary employee to perform some lowly and boring task (paper shredding or coffee fetching, anyone?). While this is great for company XYZ, the intern isn’t going to learn and benefit from much of anything. Our aim is to have our interns develop a brand-spanking-new web 2.0 application, from start to launch.

We’re still hammering out the details of the program, but we’ll probably be making an announcement within the next month or two. We’ll likely be looking for 2 computer science students and 1 graphic design student. Stay tuned for more details.

Omaha Developer / IT Job Site

After perusing Omaha’s various big job search sites, we’ve come to the conclusion that there is no good resource for finding good local developer and IT staffing positions. We’re looking to solve this problem by creating a job site geared towards this particular market. More details on this are soon to come.

Where We’re Headed

Obviously, as indicated by our move into an office space and our plans to hire on developer help, we’re looking to grow BrightMix. Over the next few months, there’s going to be a lot of planning on Dusty’s and my behalf to get this stuff all figured out. At the same time, we’ll be focusing hard on doing exceptional work for our clients. Busy times, indeed!

That about sums it up – we’ll post again as soon as time allows.

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Though we’ve talked a bit about what we do, how we run our business, and a few of the projects we’ve launched, little has been said about the people behind the curtain here. You know, the dudes actually running the business, writing code, drinking Diet Mt. Dew, and burning the midnight oil.

At the time of this article’s creation, we are two dudes: Dusty Davidson and myself, Kevin Zink. Together, we run/manage the business side of BrightMix and develop software.

Some Shared History

At our cores, we’re both developers. In fact, we first met and worked together as coworkers at Genesis Systems, another small software company here in Omaha, where we were both programmers. At Genesis, we discovered we had a lot of similarities in our views and beliefs on business and software development.

We only worked together for about a year, as I left the company to join a large corporation (read more about my job history on my blog’s about me page). But, this is where the seeds for BrightMix were first planted. Soon after my departure, Dusty also left Genesis for a corporate job.

Over the course of a few years, we talked a lot about how crappy our corporate jobs were; they were straight out of a Dilbert cartoon. We also talked a lot about how we could do so much better if we were to run a company. Well, last summer, we had both had enough and decided it was time to make a go of it.

So, that’s a brief history of how we came about. Lets take a closer look at us as people.

Dusty Davidson

Since Dusty claims he doesn’t like writing about himself, I’ll be doing the honors!

Dusty is sharp, opinionated, outspoken, humorous, and pretty hip.

Back when we worked as employees, Dusty claimed that he “just wanted to be a programmer”; however, he’s an incredibly gifted technical innovator and impromptu thinker. For Dusty, the term technical evangelist really fits the bill.

If you want to get Dusty excited, start talking about big picture ideas and Web 2.0 technologies.

Interesting Tidbits about Dusty:

• Backpacked around Europe for 6 months after college
• Built a cool Mame Arcade Machine
• Created a semi-popular photo annotation project called Photonotes
• Ran in the Omaha and Minneapolis marathons

Dusty is Awesome because he:

• Wears sandals a lot, even when it’s really cold out!
• Drinks a lot of Diet Mountain Dew, like 6 cans per day sometimes
• Drives a faded 1996 1994 Toyota Corolla
• Has “I’m getting married badge” on his blog... 6 months after getting married
• Is self-admittedly addicted to Google Reader

Kevin Zink

What can I say about myself? Well, I used to be really shy, but not nearly so much these days. I’m fairly smart, outgoing, and at times funny. I’ve been told numerous times that I’m really good at listening and understanding people.

On the technical side of things, I’m pretty far up there on the software development curve, probably not too far behind Dusty.

I’m very level-headed in my approach to solving problems; I’m good at “keeping things real,” so to speak.

Interesting Tidbits about Kevin:

• Big into Home Improvement projects
• Motorcycle Enthusiast
• Has more clothes than his girlfriend
• Fascinated by popping dance styles

Kevin is Awesome because he:

• Is unnaturally good at PC / Console games (Rock Band or Guitar Hero Anyone?)
• Fell through the ceiling in his house
• Is fascinated by “bling” and animated effects in business software
• Once wrangled an opposum
• Has his computer set up in the middle of his living room

You can read more about us on our personal blogs at Zinknation.net and Dustyd.net.

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A little over a week ago we announced our plans to move into a new office. Well, after a very exciting and lively week of planning, cleaning, and moving stuff, we’re all done and settled into our new digs.

Thurs – Saturday… Cleaning!

All things considered, the place wasn’t actually in that bad of shape, but we wanted to make sure that we started off all nice and shiny. So, Kevin and I spent the better part of Thursday and Friday making trips to Walmart to buy cleaning supplies, and doing the important cleaning. (ie, I cleaned the fridge, so we could get Diet Mt. Dew & Beer in there right away!)

I want to extend a special thanks to my family (Marlina, Jane, Dee Dee, Sara & Joey) for all of their incredibly hard work and help getting things cleaned. They spent pretty much all day last Saturday scrubbing walls and toilets and windows and floors. We couldn’t have done it without their help! Thanks everyone!

Last week… Settling in…

Last week, as a two person company, we had to get back to business as usual. That meant we had to get everything up as quickly as possible. Luckily, we are a young company with simple needs. We essentially moved our computers, did some configuring, and we were up and running! Gotta love being able to do that!

And furniture? Ah, who needs it ;-) We actually lucked out quite a bit on this… The guys that were there before us sold us some things, and left some more things. All said, the desks, tables, refrigerator, chairs & pool table were all left there. This naturally added to our ability to get things up and running quickly, as there was no “moving” to be done, per se. This also helped us to not have to outlay a bunch of cash. As a bootstrapped company, every dollar really matters in the early stages, and we’re excited now to be able to slowly and deliberately purchase the things that we need.

Picture Time!

I’ll leave you with a bit of a photo tour of the place… For all of our photos, be sure to check out the BrightMix photos page over at Flickr.

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It’s amazingly hard to believe, considering we just had our 1 month aniversary, but it’s official: BrightMix is leasing a real, honest to goodness office space. No sir, no longer will we be running our day to day operations from the confines of Kevin’s living room.

On Thursday, Nov 1st 2007, we officially move into our new digs at 5018 Leavenworth street here in Omaha!

Here’s an arial shot of our new place:

Interestingly, over the course of about 48 hours, the opportunity to lease this new office space arose, we deliberated and discussed it, and, after realizing that timing can never really be perfect, we coolly and decisively decided to go for it.

Some Questions We Asked Ourselves

Do we even need an office space?

This was an important one. We’ve preached about the benefits of “bootstrapping” our company by running lean and mean. And, to be perfectly honest, we’re completely content and comfortable where we’re at now. However, we’re in this for the long haul, and we have to move out of Kevin’s living room at some point, especially if we take on more people. So, we figure, why the heck not now!

How will we benefit from this office space?

One of the hardest things I’ve found that we deal with as a freelancer-turned- small-business business, is handling the stigma of the individual. That is, conveying ourselves as a “company”, and not simply some dudes who write software in their spare time… and happen to make money in the process.

While we believe whole-heartedly in the value of staying small, there’s definitely a fine line. In my opinion, nothing legitimizes ones business more than having an office. However spartan, however small, if you have an office, you’re the real deal, and you can avoid unfortunate scenarios like:

Potential Client: You guys sound like the rockstar developers we need! So where do you guys work from?

Us: Uh, err, um, from Kevin’s basement.

Potential Client: Ah.. yea.. hey, gotta run.. to do.. other thing.

Is this the right space for us?

We’re very particular about the types of offices that we like and that we don’t like. This space, with its “lofty” feel, and more importantly its “non-office” feel, fell nicely into the first category. There were other appealing traits, too. First, it’s only a 1 year lease. No long term commitments for us; it’s just to early to know what kind of growth we’ll experience. Second, we don’t have to do much “build out.” The previous tenants, the rad guys of the Divvy Collective, did an incredible amount of renovating and remodeling to the place. As a result, it’s in move-in condition and then some. Oh, and thirdly, did I mention it comes with a pool table? I think that pretty much speaks for itself.

Stay tuned for more pictures and stories from the move-in, as well as the date and time of our Open House!

P.S. Here’s a sneak peek at how the office currently looks (prior to us moving in)... This is the entrance / waiting room.

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Praise Jebus!

BrightMix has officially existed for one entire month.It was an exciting month, and it went by lightning quick.

Accomplishments for Month #1

Here are some of our major accomplishments during our first month of operation.

Set Up of Basic Office Services

Service	Our Solution	Cost
Email / Calendar	Gmail tied to BrightMix.com domain	Free!
Phone	GrandCentral.com number tied to our cell phones	Free!
Document storage	Google Docs	Free!
Source Control	SVN hosted on DreamHost	$10/month
Company Website	Mephisto hosted on DreamHost	^
Bug Tracking / Project Management	37 Signals Basecamp	$10/month
Time Tracking / Invoicing	Freshbooks.com	Free!
Online Chat	37 Signals Campfire	Free!

In the spirit of bootstrapping, we aimed to keep our total monthly service fees low. These days, by leveraging Google and other web 2.0 companies’ services, it’s freakishly easy to get all of the basic services you need to run a small business for pennies on the dime.

Getting Bad Ass Development PC’s Up and Running

Unlike some of our previous employers, we consider the developer’s PC’s performance to be tantamount to getting things done quickly and efficiently. Accordingly, we purchased and hand-built two high-end, multi-processor PC’s with lots of RAM and fast hard drives.

We also believe that dual monitors (in particular – big monitors) are quintessential to software development work. Dusty’s set up has dual 22” Samsungs while mine has dual 24” Dells (it’s not compensation for anything – honest!).

As a side note, we set up an old spare PC to be our local database / file share / VPN / print server. It’s nothing fancy, but it gets the job done for now. It took us about a day to get up and running with all of our PC hardware.

Settling into our Office

We’re currently housed up in living room of my house. It’s spacey and nice but not located in or near any sort of businessy area here in Omaha. It didn’t make sense to go start renting/buying an office space from day #1, but, business has been good, and we’re already entertaining the idea of leasing a space.

Where’s our Whiteboard?

A good whiteboard is integral to our day-to-day planning and operations. After browsing through the Office Max most local to us, we determined that their whiteboard supply was 1) priced outrageously high and 2) not big enough. The solution? Bootstrap your Whiteboard! using Shower Board from Home Depot.

Step 1: Glue Shower Board to Wood Frame using Liquid Nails

Step 2: Write like it’s nobody’s business!

Establishing a Day-to-Day routine

It has taken us a few weeks to adjust to our new work style and environment. Needless to say, it’s a bit of a trip moving from the employee to entrepreneur. Meetings with clients take up a larger amount of time than we expected, working late into the night happens frequently, and the wearing of corporatey clothes has all but vanished. In fact, a potential new BrightMix slogan we’re throwing around:

“We haven’t worn shoes since we quit our day jobs!”

Consulting Work

Due to our massive sexiness and awesomeness, we’ve had a number of consulting deals come our way very rapidly. Our initial goal was to do just enough consulting work to cover the bills and pay ourselves the salaries that we had at our old day jobs. This would, in theory, let us spend about half of our time working on a software product of our own creation.

As it turns out, we’re on the verge of getting more consulting work than we can handle as a two-man operation. As such, we’re throwing around the idea of bringing in help in the form of interns, contractors, or possibly even employees (gulp!).

Things We Wanted to Accomplish

Some things that we wanted to do within the first month but did not…

Spending More Time Blogging

We originally figured that blogging would be an integral part of our operation. We do or find something cool—we post a blog entry about it, followed by a round of enthusiastic high fives.

Easier said than done. The cold, hard truth of the matter is looming client deadlines take precedence over blogging. (Note: this post was actually created a week after our official 1 month mark!)

Spending More Time on Internal Projects

We haven’t spent more than maybe a few days worth of time on some of our internal project ideas. Hopefully we’ll be able to dedicate more time to these endeavors soon.

Branding Ourselves

We’re in dire need of a logo and a new skin/theme for our website. We’ve had some “complaints” about the neon green theme of the site. Apparently if you stare at the page long enough, it gets burned into the back of your retinas. Our apologies… our intentions were never to sear your retinas!

Similarly, our complete lack of a logo has postponed our ability to get business cards. This is becoming troublesome as we talk with potential clients and we have to verbally give out our email, website, and phone number.

Also, you’re just cooler if you have a business card – it’s science.

Where We Are Headed

Over the last month, we’ve managed to hammer down our day-to-day operations, basic office services, and solidify some of our client relationships. It’s been good.

Moving forward, we’ll be focusing hard on continuing to do good work for our current clients while probably taking on some new clients. We’re also looking at getting into a real office space and hiring on some development help, in some fashion.

We’ll post again as time allows!

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Hooray! BrightMix has officially been founded!

What We Do

Right now, we are primarily a software consulting company. In the future, we will be transitioning into a software product company. Either way, we want to create workable, simple-to-use software solutions and deliver them on time and within budget.

Why Start a Company?

BrightMix has been a long time in the making. We've worked in small and large companies as coders, architects, and team leads. Needless to say, we've witnessed and experienced a multitude of the problems that result from bad management and lackluster software development.

We hate seeing simple applications made horribly complicated and difficult to maintain. We also despise solutions that use the wrong technology, re-invent the wheel, or, simply put, don't solve the problem they're meant to solve!

As employees, we struggled to get our bosses and coworkers to adopt software development ideals that are undeniably faster and work better. We also hated being low-level programmers with little-to-no say in what we were coding. Ultimately, we concluded that the only way we would ever be more influential (and happier) developers would be to form a company, specializing in software development and solutions.

We're not Joe-Blow Developers

We're well-read, albeit not published (not yet anyway!), we know our programming technologies, and we have freakishly high standards in our work. To us, software development is not just a damn day job, it's what we love doing.

BrightMix Founders,
Kevin Zink and Dusty Davidson

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