In the past two and a half years, we’ve built and launched many websites and web-applications for our clients, all of which we’re quite proud of. We gained a lot of experience and learned a lot about project management, scheduling, client relationships, and all of that fun stuff. We worked diligently and put in a lot of long days and nights to meet deadlines and keep our clients happy.

All the while we’ve been consulting, Dusty and myself have poured countless hours into our products: Tripleseat.com and SiliconPrairieNews.com. We’ve been splitting our time and focus between consulting and our products, which has been nothing short of difficult, stressful, and time consuming. (If we focus on the consulting side of our business, the product side suffers and vice versa.) Nonetheless, both SPN and Tripleseat have gained considerable traction and momentum over the last year, and, as founders, the need for us to dedicate ourselves fully to these endeavors has become paramount. As a result, we’ve decided that we will be halting consulting work and focusing 100% of our efforts on our products. It’s something that we’ve always wanted to do and there’s no better time to act on it than now.

Note to all of our current clients: We will honor all outstanding projects to which we’ve committed. Additionally, we will continue to support and maintain all projects we’ve built.

However, we will want to transition ourselves out of any and all support and maintenance roles as quickly and realistically as possible. We will be touching base with all of our current clients over the next week to determine the best plan of action moving forward.

Lastly, suffice to say, we will not be accepting any new projects going forward.

Ideally, our transition from a consulting shop to a product shop would be seamless, and we’d be able to find a home for all current employees in our reorganized company. Unfortunately, in the short term, sans consulting revenue, we would not be able to financially support either of the Erins so we’ve had to let them go. It’s one of the hardest business decisions we’ve faced; they’re two of the best employees one could hope for. So, any of you out there who are looking for a talented developer or designer, let us know and we’ll be happy to get you in contact with them.. or you can simply email Erin Hawkins or Erin Standley directly (click on their names for their email addresses) or find them on twitter: @erinhawkins, @tinyxl.

What Lies Ahead

We’re very excited for what lays ahead for both Tripleseat.com and SiliconPrairieNews.com. We’re aiming to grow these companies to the point where they are wildly successful. Both of these products will almost certainly grow to the point where we will need to hire on people, need more or additional space, take on funding, etc. For the time being, both SPN and Tripleseat will continue to operate out of our current office in mid-town Omaha. We’ll be bunking down, working hard, and knocking these products out of the park.

More to follow in the specifics of each of our software / company endeavors. For now, thanks to everyone who has been a supporter, client, friend and follower of BrightMix over the past two and a half years. It has been a fantastic run up to this point, and we’re more excited than ever for what’s in store.

BrightMix Founders,
Dusty & Kevin

Unfortunately the Midlands Business Journal doesn’t have an online presence for their articles or we’d link to it. If only there was someway to get them to put their content online (hint hint)

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!

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…

First Meeting!

Andy / Erin #’2 Desks

Robert / Allyn’s Desks

Programmers’ Whiteboard!

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!

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!

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!

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.

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…

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.

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.