As a startup, we have the opportunity to seed the company culture and process. This affects what tools we use to manage these processes. We are still experimenting with various tools, and I foresee there will still be a lot of changes in the near future. Nevertheless, I have listed down all the tools we are using to keep this ship sailing.

Tools we evaluated, but didn’t make the cut:

• Retrospectiva for keeping track of our projects’ tasks and change sets. We stop using Retrospectiva because it does not have enough features to support our version of agile software development.
• Acunote for tracking projects’ tasks. Acunote is an excellent tool. But we decided to switch to Rally due to more complete feature sets (bug tracking, estimate vs actual time comparison, etc). Free for teams of 5 and below.

Tools we are using now:

• TextMate for Rails development.
• SVN for versioning our source code.
• Mac OS X for a rock solid platform. The ability to run Windows using Parallels or Fusion for cross-browser testing is a nice bonus.
• Basecamp for tracking our administrative and non-coding tasks.
• Apple iCal with WebDAV for sharing calendars internally.
• StikiPad for our internal wiki.
• Google Apps for email hosting.
• Google Alerts for keeping tabs on what the web says about us and our products.
• WordPress for all our blogging needs.
• Amazon S3 for offsite backup and asset hosting.

Tools we have our eyes on:

• Rally for managing our projects. Community Edition is free for teams of 10 and below.
• Campaign Monitor for email lists management and marketing.

Most tools listed above are hosted and come with affordable pay-as-you-go or free plans. This frees the company from a lot of fixed costs and full-time maintenance effort so we can focus on building the next big thing.

What tools you use to run your startup?

RSB started with myself (Kegan) and Kamal back in August 2007. Today we are proud to announce that we have grown by more than 100%! The new additions to the team are Sean Sean, Aizat, and Saimer.

Sean Sean Tan has been freelancing with us since September 2007. She is our CSS Princess, wielding her magic wand to ensure our web apps are pixel perfect across different browsers. We are excited that she will join us full-time as a new member of the RSB Super Band this December.

Aizat Faiz is the programming genius. He is currently an undergraduate student in Monash University, so we worked out a flexible arrangement that keeps everyone happy. We first met Aizat at the very first Malaysia.rb meetup (there were only three of us that day) and every meetup since. It boggles the mind when you consider how amazingly active Aizat is with involvements in Malaysia.rb, the Malaysian FOSS community, part-timing with QubeConnect and juggling school at the same time. We even managed to team up with him for a couple of Rails competitions. Such talent and drive is hard to come by, so we are extremely happy he is now on board with us.

Finally, I’d like to introduce Saimer Moo - our handyman. He has all the skill set in the whole software product development lifecycle. He can code, do graphic and web design, and perform system administration. A group leader and managing a few people in his previous job, Saimer has joined RSB to venture into a whole new world of Web 2.0.

We are not stopping here. RSB is constantly hiring. Drop me an email personally at kegan@ror.com.my for a chance to work with these amazingly talented people, building the next big thing on awesome hardware.

Our company, RSB, was incorporated in August 2007. For those who don’t know, RSB stands for Ruby On Rails Sdn Bhd (633553-T). Some even call us RSB Sdn Bhd or Ruby Super Brothers.

As the company name(s) would imply, we are a Ruby On Rails software house based in Cyberjaya, Malaysia. Everyone here is a Ruby/Rails enthusiast. We think it is the right tool for building (most) web applications. We are also passionate about Agile software development, in particular the XP methodology. Coupled with Rails, this enables us to rapidly churn out solid web applications while maintaining a good work-life balance. This is codified in our unwritten rules: thou shalt write the tests first, thou shalt pair program (unless unavoidable) and thou shalt leave by 6PM.

On the hardware front, we strongly believe in providing the developers the best tools to work with. Each developer is provided a MacBook and a 20″ widescreen LCD. Did I mention that we are actively hiring?

So, what do we do? We build engaging social web applications. Watch out for our upcoming product launches.

How do we make money? The short answer is that “We don’t, not yet. But we have some solid plans”. The long answer is the same as the short answer. So how do we survive for now? Well, we have very strong private funding. And that’s all I can say for now.