The Salon

Crafting a successful tech startup mirrors the finesse and strategic gameplay of golf. The journey from bootstrapping to success is laden with the precision, patience, and technique similar to maneuvering a golf ball through the courses to the final hole.

In the exhilarating realm of entrepreneurship, building a tech startup is akin to mountaineering. From setting out on an uncharted path with bootstrapping to reaching the summit of success, the journey is filled with trials, learnings, and triumphs.

In the vibrant world of entrepreneurship, establishing a tech startup resembles a game of tennis – navigating the business landscape from bootstrapping to attaining remarkable success is akin to playing skillful shots in a competitive match.

In the thrilling world of entrepreneurship, starting a tech startup can be likened to surfing – mastering the tides of the business ecosystem, from bootstrapping to achieving monumental success, is akin to conquering the unpredictable waves of the ocean.

Explore the ins and outs of bootstrapping for startups. Weigh the pros and cons, understand its significance, and discover strategies for effective self-funding.

Explore tech startup essentials for experienced professionals. Navigate through key steps & challenges with strategies in adaptability, customer focus, & leveraging knowledge. Acquire skills to secure funding & build resilience in the innovative, rapid-paced startup realm.

Discover the powerful fusion of baby boomers' seasoned wisdom with tech innovation, as they redefine entrepreneurship in the digital age.

For baby boomers, tech entrepreneurship isn't a sunset venture but a sunrise opportunity. Dive into the compelling journey of seasoned professionals breaking barriers in the tech world!

Discover the journey of starting tech ventures after 50. Dive deep into embracing failures, the art of pivoting, and the wisdom Baby Boomers bring to the startup realm. Learn how age and experience become assets in today's entrepreneurial landscape.

Bootstrapping is worn as a badge of honor these days amongst startups. But the reality is many of us have growing careers, a spouse, kids, and financial obligations that make bootstrapping seem like an option only for the young a reckless. The truth is bootstrapping isn't for everyone and there are times when it should be deployed and times when you need other options. The good news is there are options for the would-be founder with responsibilities beyond pure bootstrapping or having a rich family member write you a check.

When it comes to building software, iteration velocity is king. The more shots you take over a shorter period of time, the faster you will get to your goals. When people hear iteration velocity, they tend to focus in on the term velocity, and parallelize it with the quantity of tickets completed in a sprint. This is the wrong way to look at things. In surfing, if we simply measure time in the water, we'll see little to no gain in our abilities. What we really want is repeated attempts at our ultimate goal, in rapid succession, over a short period of time.

At Cause of a Kind, we specialize in working with non-technical founders. People with great ideas and industry expertise around the problem they are solving, but without a way to implement them. Steve Jobs had Steve Wozniak, and in order for you to to manifest your dreams, you need to find your Woz. But where to begin?

Explore the journey of a tech professional who tackled a productivity gap by creating her own software, transforming from a seasoned professional to a successful tech entrepreneur.

My business partner is also my best friend. We are also 50/50 partners. Every decision we make requires two yeses. Despite the near ubiquitous advice that having a partnership like this is a disaster, for us it works. If you're wondering how, it's grounded in three core principles that I'll share.

Explore the power of holistic marketing, integrating SEO & organic research to boost brand visibility. Success stories of Nike, Apple & IKEA guide the way.

We focus a lot on MVP's and custom tools for small businesses Cause of a Kind. Many people as me why we aren't embracing more no code and low code tools. For me there are a few parts to that answer and one of which involves the recent "AI revolution (and yes, I'm cringing as I write that too)."

Explore the transformative power of serverless architecture in startups and cloud solutions. Understand why this innovative technology, offering scalability, reduced operational costs, and swift deployment, is reshaping the IT landscape. Learn about key considerations for DevOps teams to fully harness serverless benefits.

Discover the intricacies of HTTP status codes. Understand their categories, importance, and impact on web development, SEO, and efficient user experience in our comprehensive guide.

Choose a unique approach to product development with Cause of a Kind. Our agile methods promote constant learning and growth. We're your partners in design and development, crafting resonating products.

Discover the fun and cheeky, yet technically serious guide for founders on 0-to-Minimum Viable Software Product (MVP). Learn the guidelines to follow and pitfalls to avoid for successful product development.

Software orchestration is a process of coordinating and synchronizing different departments and teams within an organization to produce top-quality software products. It involves managing the entire software development life cycle from design, development, testing, and deployment to post-deployment maintenance and support. This approach helps organizations to achieve their business goals faster and more efficiently, reduce costs, and stay competitive in the fast-paced technology industry.

In this blog, we discuss how to dynamically add structured data for SEO to Webflow. Steps include identifying the structured data, creating a custom code embed, and previewing and publishing changes. We also discussed how to use Webflow's CMS and dynamic data to automate structured data population. A JSON example for a blog post is provided.

Svelte Kit is a performant, flexible, and beginner-friendly web app framework with built-in server-side rendering. Best for small to medium-sized projects and high-performance apps. Limitations include a smaller ecosystem and limited browser compatibility.

Partnering with a software development startup studio can be an excellent way for businesses to leverage technology to create innovative solutions that can give them a competitive edge. However, choosing the right partner can be challenging. Here is some practical advice for people looking to partner with a software development startup studio.

When building software, speed, and quality are crucial, but it is impossible to achieve both without considering the price. Investing in talented software developers and adopting Agile development methodologies can help achieve a balance between speed and quality. Although the cost may be high, the cost of fixing low-quality software is even higher in the long run. It is essential to invest in the development of high-quality software from the outset to ensure long-term success.

Creating a perfect SEO report and identifying SEO opportunities involves a combination of data analysis, insights, and actionable recommendations that can help improve a website's search engine visibility.

Structured data is a type of data format that is organized in a specific manner, making it easier for search engines to understand and display information about a website. Structured data is crucial for search engine optimization (SEO) because it enables search engines to better understand the content of a webpage, which can result in higher visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).

To achieve higher rankings, there are two main areas to focus on: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO refers to the factors that you can control on your website, such as the content, title tags, and meta descriptions. Off-page SEO, on the other hand, refers to factors that are outside of your website's control, such as backlinks and social signals.

In today's digital age, optimizing your website for search engines has become a crucial aspect of online marketing. With the ever-evolving algorithms of search engines, it can be challenging to keep up with the latest trends and tactics.

Astro and SvelteKit are two of the most popular front-end development frameworks used to build modern web applications. Both frameworks are designed to make the development process more efficient and faster. However, there are some key differences between Astro and SvelteKit that developers need to consider before choosing one for their next project.

Scaling a software development agency can be a tricky task, especially if you want to avoid hiring new employees. However, it is not impossible. Here are some ways to scale a software development agency without hiring new employees.

React.js and Svelte are two popular JavaScript frameworks used for building web applications. Both frameworks have their own strengths and weaknesses, and developers often choose one over the other based on their requirements. In this article, we will compare React.js and Svelte in terms of their differentiating features, shortcomings, community documentation, and future trends.

Starting a startup is not easy. There are countless challenges to overcome, including attracting customers, building a team, and ensuring that your product or service is delivering the value that customers expect. One of the biggest challenges, however, is developing and launching the software that powers your startup. That's where WEEK2WEEK®️ comes in.

When starting a software startup, one of the biggest challenges for founders is figuring out how to fund their company. There are several different ways to finance a startup, each with its own benefits and drawbacks. In this blog post, we'll explore the differences between bootstrapped, pre-seed, and venture-funded startups, the different phases of investment that a founder should consider, and the milestones for measuring success.

Explore data-driven insights with our in-depth guides. Learn how to use data to improve business performance, optimize marketing strategies, and boost customer satisfaction.

Unleash the power of your data with our step-by-step guides. Master data analytics tools like Looker to boost your business growth and customer engagement.

Choosing the right developer framework for your project can be a daunting task. With so many options available, it can be difficult to decide which one will work best for your needs. Two popular frameworks that are often compared are SvelteKit and Next.js.

Compare the top serverless SaaS platforms: AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Microsoft Azure, Vercel, Heroku, Fly.io, and Digital Ocean. Uncover their unique strengths and features for your business.

Explore a step-by-step guide to implementing serverless architecture, offering practical insights for startups and small engineering teams. Learn how serverless can boost efficiency, limit expenses, reduce DevOps needs, and accelerate time-to-market. Step into the future of cost-effective and agile software development.

Discover the transformative power of serverless architecture in this enlightening blog post. Learn what 'serverless' really means, explore its key advantages such as cost-effectiveness, scalability, and speed, and understand why this technology is shaping the future of business. Embrace the tech trends of today to build a successful tomorrow.

Let's remove the channel of marketing from the equation and simply focus on the consumer. Regardless of the marketing channel you specialize in or prefer, understanding a consumer's lifecycle as they engage with your product, service or solution is a critical insight to creating effective marketing campaigns in the first place.

What are the Dimensions of Avatars, Profile Pictures, Banners, and Posts and Other Media on Social Platforms? Each Social Media Platform has a specific set of criteria for media assets. Everything from Dimensions to file sizes is available here.

Cause of a Kind is an elite team of software and web developers, advisors, consultants, and designers founded by Mike Rispoli and Justin Abrams. They help brands create scalable & secure digital presence by building software products, with one of their recent projects being AngryBirds by VeeFriends. Mike and Justin focus on partnering with companies that have powerful social impact initiatives and are committed to making a difference in the world.

ISLAND PARK, NY — Justin Abrams, an Island Park resident, is CEO of the creative studio, Cause of a Kind. The technology company builds software for small businesses. Abrams said they partner with businesses of all shapes and sizes to help with their vision.

Its arguable that everything is becoming a search engine and learning how to meet your customers in the platforms that they are spending their time in, is the correct strategy.

The goal of marketing campaigns is misunderstood. Everyone wants to crack the code to create the best marketing strategy. The biggest piece of advice that I offer marketing teams and content teams is a term I call, Cross Channel Synergies. I create the best marketing strategies because I'm keeping it all super simple.

There's been a lot of talk about performance of front ends and one metric that comes up often is how many frames per second a framework can handle. For the vast majority of us, these frameworks have been fast enough in terms of fps for the last ten years. In fact, just like my cinematography experience, I suspect we're making our applications feel unnaturally fast.

Creating a sitemap.xml file was something that always nagged at me when working with headless content management systems. "What do you mean Contentful doesn't do sitemaps?!" my SEO colleagues would say--not understanding what headless means fundamentally. This was one thing that the old monolithic systems like wordpress seemed to have in the bag.

I've long been a consumer of cloud service providers. I have historically used Heroku for the majority of the projects I have worked on over the years and have been pleased with their offering. New on the scene is Vercel, also a cloud hosting provider, but with a different focus. Where Heroku found success embracing the move to cloud based servers and building a solid platform on top of it that was easy to use, Vercel has done the same with a focus on the shift to serverless and edge computing. So which should you choose? As with anything in engineering, it depends.

I'm sitting in my lab actively auditing a massive enterprise eCommerce site and wanted to share a few steps and insights from my checklist. It isn't my full checklist, as that is accomplished over weeks and months, but as I sit down this morning, I thought I would share a bit of my formula.

16 months ago, this website was underperforming for its core competencies. ALL of the traffic coming to this site was sending signals of indexation to Google for ALL the wrong things. Here is what I did to course correct.

If we break away from SEO 101, and move SEO into a place of strategic big data parsing, the true Voice of the Customer, and unify/influence the greater digital mix, SEO becomes part of the genetics of a marketing motion. Literally the digitalDNA 🧬of a brand.

Virtual reality is the next big thing in the world of gaming and entertainment but its use cases far exceed the limits of your traditional gaming console. VR has been around for decades and has been used in the military, education and entertainment industries. Recently, it has become more mainstream thanks to the introduction of affordable headsets like the Meta Quest 2 which provides a top notch VR experience completely wireless and without the need to connect to a high powered computer. This mainstream adoption has led to a large expansion in VR software and has brought us one step closer to the true potential of this technology.

There isn't, but there should be! 💡 Blockchain is a tool for building Web3, which to me simply means the internet of value (owning digital things). But that also means blockchain need not be a part of that equation at all.

With headless content management systems, designers and developers are given incredible power and flexibility. Power we never had with the monolithic solutions of the past like Wordpress, Drupal, Shopify, or Magento. The problem is that with great power and flexibility, comes great complexity. We spend a lot of time and energy on the design of our interfaces for customers. Yet, we think very little about the user experience of the back end systems that go into this.

Welcome to the digital helix. 🧬

As an agency owner, I'm the guy that has to pretend to like your bad ideas. I've heard all ranges of bad ideas. I've listened to a guy trying to sell jarred air from different parts of the world. I've entertained building a play to earn game described as "a total Ponzi Scheme." Some days I hear so many bad ideas I want to hang it all up and close my laptop for good. I'll move the whole family into a Yurt in the woods--never to look at another glowing screen again.

I don't really believe in competing channels of marketing. I believe in a holistic approach to inbound and am a student of the relationship between the channels, particularly Google PPC and Google SEO.

Eventually, SEO can contribute the lion's share of inbound activity and share a healthy holistic relationship with the other primary channels of inbound like PPC, Social, Advertising, and PR. A durable inbound future ensures a continuation of YoY performance regardless of a loss in budget for Paid Strategies.

Client anxiety, we all know the signs. It starts with emails every few days to check in on progress. They start benign at first. A new idea about a feature, a nice to have here, something they forgot to tell you about a customer there.

When it came to becoming a software engineer, I fell in love with how intellectually stimulating and downright demanding it is on the brain. However, most of the time, the job is devoid of excitement. Sure there are those crazy bugs that come up a few times a year, but the day to day goes by at your resting heart rate. It's far from boring, but it's not exciting.

Building software at the intersection of Marketing and Technology is always a tricky conversation with non-technical stakeholders. With the correct approach, we connect to business KPI's and ensure that the software or web solution accommodates the business goals.

Cause of a Kind's CEO, Justin Abrams connects with KNXnews 97.1 Los Angeles FM Radio to discuss CEOs that are getting way bigger raises than regular workers. Justin rationalizes and offers a contrast to this common business practice.

Today I'd like to talk about javascript, why it's great, and how it relates to guitarists vs. drummers...

I've had many engineers come to me asking for better specifications over the years. The specs are too vague or the design didn't account for certain states. Sometimes it's the client asking why the developer didn't "just do this." Sound familiar?

One of the first lessons we learn as software developer is "don't repeat yourself," or DRY for short. However, when developing user interfaces, this rule often bites us the most later.

Code reviews have always been a struggle at agencies. Most specifically because sometimes there aren't two people working on the same project. Who gives the review? We decided to change our approach to code reviews as well as re-thinking their true purpose...

A few years ago, a hiring manager asked me what my definition of tech debt was. I gave what I thought was a perfect answer, the hiring manager nodded and smiled, jotted a few notes and moved on. I have since learned that I was dead wrong.

Inside every organization there exists a natural tension between design and development. In healthy organizations this tension produces magic results. These are interfaces that delight and win awards. Interfaces that leave you awe struck.

In 2019 my co-founder Justin and I pitched 40 prospects, of which we lost every single sale. Fast forward to today where in the last 12 months we've pitched 13 clients and closed all 13 deals. What changed?

Last year, we had a major delivery issue. We were struggling to deliver bug-free software on time. When we got into quarter one of this year, we realized that we had to put a stop to the madness, here's how...

A common gripe with focusing on developer experience (dx) is that it's less important than user experience (ux). Of course what we ship to user land is the most important thing. But in my experience dx and ux tend to go hand in hand...

One of the hardest things to figure out while running Cause of a Kind was how to scope different engagements. The entire agency business runs of fixed scopes, but they are incredibly risky and in the long run don't help the client, but hurt them through strained relationships...

Discover the fascinating world of deep-sea creatures with our engaging articles and stunning photography. Dive into the mysteries of the ocean with us.

In this episode, we explore the differences and similarities of Flutter and React Native and ask the important questions: How much better should the other framework be for you to switch? And what actually makes a framework better?

If you sit back and think for a moment: what is the most valuable profession? What is the profession that single-handedly contributes the most to the world? Most will say the big obvious ones. Physician, Clergy, Politician, Real Estate, Lawyers, Nuclear Scientist, Quantum Physicist... Let's convince you, it's a Software Engineer.

At Cause of a Kind, we always want to accomplish our core mission. We specifically aim to attract organizations of all shapes and sizes that have roots in cause and mission. We look to attract businesses with missions committed to making an impact on society, the environment or are in pursuit of original innovation.

It is quite often we encounter founders and their ideas, and more often than not, we collectively determine that the idea, while terrific, has some significant complexities that are far too often, overlooked. There is always a point in the conversation, usually around the time when a founder says, "this feature doesn't feel super complicated" after they compare their idea to Uber or Instagram, or Facebook, where we unpack and ultimately reveal exactly how complicated a "simple" feature can be. Founders often times have incredible dreams and goals, but often lack the advisors or the professional background to truly understand what they are asking for from a development agency. That's where we come in.

CTO, Mike Rispoli joins industry commrad Alexander Benkendorf on the DiTalks Podcast. The DiTalks Episode 2 - What if a badass coder shared his true beliefs and misconceptions about the current market and how projects should really be done to be a success?

An important lesson I have always lived by is, "first impressions only count, if the last impression, impresses." My time to practice that wisdom is now. This is how you say goodbye to your dream job, and hello to your dream career.

I recently built a custom React Slider using React's `context`. So what problem was I trying to solve that made me reach for React’s context? I needed a way to pass the state from the main slider's container component to each child slide item without knowing beforehand what number or types of slide items I am rendering.

There appears to currently be a small missing piece to the recent explosion of NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens) platforms. To me, it is like real estate. You can own the house, but can you also own the land?

Recently, I had the pleasure of helping to develop an eCommerce site. One of my favorite parts was engineering the product display page. I want to walk through some of the logic that was housed in the hook that accompanies the front end component for the PDP

A Need for Speed! In the end, we were able to knock down our build time from `~15+ minutes` to `~5 minutes`. What a difference! As this is statically generating 100s of pages at build time.

If you’ve been a JavaScript developer for a little while, you’ve probably read or heard about TypeScript.

JavaScript on the server-side (or outside of the browser) has opened a wide range of applications for the language. And that’s one of the reasons it is one of the most popular right now.

So I've been working on this Spotify/SoundCloud clone app called MP3 Pam for a couple of months now. React on the front-end and Laravel on the back-end for the API. I use React Hooks and Cloudflare Workers quite a bit and I thought it would be good to share some of the things I've learned on the internet. ;)

five different building sites and a parent company site all running six separate instances of wordpress. It was a huge time suck for the team to manage as they had to login to five different admin portals to update content, and if they wanted to share assets across properties they had to either copy it to the other instance or upload the images individually each time.

So I pose the question to the community, what are the drawbacks of using a localStorage based shopping cart for this scenario? Has anyone done this only to regret it later?

A few weeks ago I came across some Gatsby and Netlify tutorials and was intrigued by how far the jamstack has come. I'm not going to go into a diatribe over what jamstack is, but I had my doubts over this serverless revolution. Nonetheless I decided to run through the setup and was pleasantly surprised not by serverless per say, but by the Netlify offering. Authentication, lambdas, and contact forms -- all with generous free limits?

I found there to be very little information on how to set things up easily on Windows and having just started using Windows I don't know much about the packages and powershell so it felt nice and easy to do this with Linux. Hope I saved someone, even if its my future self, some setup time.

Have you built apps in both of these types of setups? Am I correct in thinking there isn't much difference in the load a serverless node setup and elixir can handle? Anyone test any of these? And lastly but more generally, how do you resist the urge to just fall back on good ol' javascript when the learning gets tough?

Imagine a world where every occupation had the type of power a tool like Stack Overflow has bestowed upon Software Engineers. Surgeons could repeatedly look up the difference between slicing and splicing, and mechanics could crowdsource the best way to remove a transmission from a Buick. The internet is full of information on almost anything you want to know, however, for students, finding answers to specific questions, explained for the right grade level is a challenge. Kids learning at home under quarantine, without ready access to their teacher, would greatly benefit from a community like Stack Overflow. So I decided to take a crack at building it and I’m going to show you how I went about architecting the application.

One of the most effective means of growing an audience is through email referrals. The rise of newsletters like Morning Brew and companies like Harry’s showcase that offering a tiered rewards structure for referring friends can grow a list to astronomical numbers. That is, provided your newsletter or product is actually something people want. The following describes how you can build a simple version of this program yourself using Ruby on Rails API.

At Cause of a Kind, we remove location from the equation. We want to identify top talent. We pay a standard rate for the role and in the entirely remote environment, we do not consider where a team member is from, only that they are talented.

September is climate change awareness month, and for many climate scientists, there is no software more important to their work than climate models. These climate models allow researchers to simulate the effect of human activity on our world in order to determine the most effective ways to slow climate change while making predictions about what can be expected in the future.

The history of Ruby on Rails is an interesting one. It is a language that used to be popular but fell out of favor until a few years ago when it was suddenly thrust back into the spotlight.

The web is supposedly going through a period of revolution. But most people are not aware they will be witnessing how the future generation of the internet is going to unfold in front of their eyes. Blockchain is at its infancy. We are exploring its capabilities.

That time we met the legend, Ben Shapiro, host of The Voices of Search Podcast. Discover actionable strategies and learn ways to gain insights through data that will help you navigate the topsy-turvy world of SEO & Content Marketing.