We believe in developing a vision, then a plan, defining the objectives and results to know if we are succeeding and delivering on time, every time. Our big, hairy, audacious goal is to build the most used – even celebrated platform – that facilitates the invention, construction, and improvement of software.

Our vision is to deliver happiness to the teams that build software and customers of our customers who use the software.

What we don’t know is the eventual impact of AI on the software development lifecycle. But what we do know is the thoughtful application of it and other technologies that can be used to improve the experience, velocity, and quality of software.

Now, a few quick facts about the future of Atono. 

Is atono bootstrapped?

Yes and no.

We raised $4 million from a closely knitted group of investors who believe in our vision and capabilities. We’ll likely need to consider an A & B round to develop and grow faster. But each round comes at a real cost and an impact, so those decisions will be thoughtfully made at the right time.

Are there financial goals?

Yes and no.

Goals and directives are more like it. On the spending side, the directive is to “be cheap” (e.g., conserve cash) unless it involves our people. We don’t ever want to be in a position where we need money, that would impact our velocity and my sleep quality. We aim to build a successful SaaS company with a unique revenue model – our financial goal is to eclipse $100m in annual recurring revenue by 2030.

Right now, however, we are focused on MVP, message-market-fit, product-market fit, developing thoughtful and helpful product-led growth capabilities, and so on. Much to do. We have several competitors approaching the problem in a similar way to one another – we believe that is our window of opportunity (or they are all correct and we missed the memo). 

What are the product goals?

First and foremost, Atono must solve real problems.

We'll use AI where it makes sense, not to claim “AI-powered” in our marketing. We're accepting and aware that many teams build software differently than we do, so we're building capabilities to provide flexibility and speed, not an “our way or the highway approach”. We believe in the power of teams and collaboration, so we will stay focused on those capabilities. We also believe in and desperately want criticism of our service, the product, and the company. The goal of MVP is for teams to plan and build software using Atono. Roadmap, stories, acceptance criteria, grouping stories into epics and milestones, tracking cycles and velocity, managing defects, and experiencing a different way of using stories to get work done. 

After MVP we plan to expand our capabilities and our approach. We'll build more features around testing, developing our automation framework, begging for customer feedback so we can iterate, building out our service capabilities, and much more.