News from Moritz “Mo” Plassnig and Manuel Weiß of Codeship, the Austrian startup offering integration and depoloyment for web applications, whom inventures.eu has been checking in with quite regularly (read our reports here and here). The duo is still in Boston, finishing up the TechStars programme and currently fundraising. They plan on building a new team back in Vienna, and if all goes according to plan, Codeship will set up an office in Vienna’s 2nd district in August.
“We highly recommend TechStars”
Now that they have had some time to reflect on the TechStars programme, Moritz and Manuel can share some insights of their presentation on the demo day. “We knew we had a super technical product, and some in the audience might not understand what the benefits of our service are,” Moritz recalls. “Some people advised us to pull Austrian jokes – we didn’t do that. At the end of the day, you have to make your own decisions.”
To make their product more accessible to the audience, they compared themselves to well-known startups such as Heroku and New Relic. “Everyone got it,” said Moritz, “and we got really valuable feedback.”
Contrary to a mentor’s belief that content marketing doesn’t work, Codeship found out that this is not the case for them. They did take TechStars mentor Bob Mason‘s advice to ride the continuous deployment train to better sell their product to enterprise customers.
What’s next?
Currently, the Codeship team is working on “small incremental changes”, with a more sophisticated road map and a better line-out of what and when to build. They are looking for developers in Vienna and are working to support other hosting providers such as EngineYard and Heroku. The team is also building systems for cloud computing service RackSpace, Amazon and private servers, with easier setups, and optimising their user interfaces. Updates on this will follow soon enough, as we were told.
On short notice, Codeship is involved with organising the first Rails Girls Boston, aiming to help women to build web apps.
Stay tuned for more!
