Catalio: Where it all began…

Our journey as a team began a little over 3 years ago. We were a group of business and tech-savvy professionals that were working the regular 9 to 5 grind, yet we each had ambitions of working abroad from the beach while providing a solution to our customer’s needs that makes their life better.

It has taken a while to find the need we are going to solve, so we continue to maintain primary jobs with the anticipation of being full-time Dynamite Development (DynoDev) employees in the near future.

Sometimes it’s the journey that teaches you a lot about your destination. — Drake

In so many ways this is the reality of our journey. We have gone down a few paths trying to make our way, yet we ran into some roadblocks and had to chart a new course. The journey has led us to this moment and as we continue toward our destination, let’s take a look at how we got here.

The Journey of Becoming an LLC…

It all began in our CEO’s apartment in Houston — the common denominator that brought our team together. We spent several nights working through the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of our first idea, which would eventually lead to forming an LLC. This was an exciting time as well as a learning process. Each step brought us closer to being a legit business and each step was an accomplishment that many of us on our team had no clue would happen in our lives.

Our Clients Ideas are Awesome

Coming up with a company name can be a fun creative exercise for some, but for us it probably was our first task as friends turned business partners. It wasn’t easy, but we knew we wanted something special to be portrayed with our name.

Dynamite Development, helping your ideas explode into reality! Hopefully it’s as catchy to you as it is to us. Our core, here at DynoDev, is to help your ideas/dreams become a reality. We went with a rocket theme because we are based out of Houston, and our team has a strong passion for this great city.

Along with the name and tagline…the logo creation process was exciting. To have a visual representation of who we are empowered and motivated us as a team to make progress one step at a time, one day at a time to strive to accomplish our goals.

Businesses need banks. We were no different. Since we were operating on an extremely lean budget, we needed to find the best bang for our buck. Turns out there are some decent free options. We have since learned there are times you get what you pay for when it comes to the service industry. Since we have opened our account, we have had to put together some creative ways to deposit payments and revenue. We’ve lost an app on our phone. Have had to wait until the next day (or until Monday) to speak to customer service (they are always nice though). Overall, it’s been okay; however, as we expand and grow, we may need to start the finding a bank journey again.

Determining what problem that we would solve became frustrating. We brainstormed building websites to generate revenue. We began to build custom apps for local Houston businesses, but we did not feel we were fulfilling our purpose. Then all leads went cold for around 4–6 months when all of a sudden the idea of a lifetime was presented as we were looking at problems in our work life that needed to be solved!! Finally, a real need that we could provide a solution to…Catalio.

The Lightbulb, Catalio…

Our company is a mix of technical and business personas, so we can all understand how difficult it is to gather requirements to make a great application. At face value, it seems really simple. Meet with the people who need / want their idea to come to life, and build it! A lot of problems arise though when trying to do this.

Very rarely do people really know what they want.

When meeting with most people about their idea, you begin to realize they are either not the ones who need the automation or application, or they only know a piece of the process. This leads to spending time, energy, and money on an automation or application that doesn’t actually address the problem that needs to be solved. This is very frustrating and why we believe there is a huge market in gathering requirements more efficiently.

It would be great if everyone knew what they wanted, but it would even be better if people could not change their minds! Just kidding, but really you don’t realize how often people can change their mind on how to do something. There’s nothing wrong with this, unless your entire application life cycle is centered around gathering requirements first, before going off and building, then coming back after a few weeks / months to only realize your client changed their mind!

Rome wasn’t built in a day, but they were laying bricks every hour.

We’ve all probably heard the first part of this quote, but this particular version by James Clear — Lay a Brick post made it very clear for us. There has to be a better way to build out someone’s idea and make their idea come to life. Some of us were already exposed to Agile & Scrum methodologies, but it just clicked when we tried to actually build applications for our customers.

We all read Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time and quickly were convinced that we needed to do this, but not the way you might think.

Instead of building software and helping others achieve bringing their idea together, we wanted to use this process to help us build software that could help, educate, and make life easier for people who gather requirements. Some of us were already in the Salesforce world and knew how hard it was to gather requirements and document how and what capabilities were being created and used at our jobs.

So that’s what we went off and started doing! Catalio is a documentation app that helps view and track your Salesforce capabilities. Admins and teams stay updated on capabilities from the beginning, while building, and to the very end.

The Process So Far…

Scrum has become the foundation for how we continuously improve how we deliver results. We all as a team dedicated ourselves to becoming students of Scrum and the Agile methodology of managing projects. Scrum has given us a more purpose-filled journey to delivering task. We are achieving more as a team by working as a team to hold one another accountable for finishing task in a timely manner by swarming on a task that may be challenging or because of the fact that we all have primary jobs. This is only the beginning so please stay tuned to our future blogs as you join us on our journey.

There are some exciting things on our horizon and we’d love for you to be in the know! So, sign up to follow our journey!