John Hwang on "Business Matters"

By Grace Eyre on 28 08 2011

The Interview

Last week, John Hwang was interviewed by Andy Johnston and Angela Brown for a Business Matters episode on Chamber Talk Radio AM 1340.

The show’s hosts highlighted Mutually Human’s notable success as a Michigan small business, while John discussed his involvement with the West Michigan technology community, his own experience getting started, and advice for potential entrepreneurs.

Getting Started

The four original founders of Mutually Human met at a Ruby User Group. Together, they decided that they could build a culture, a community, and a company that would allow them to practice a better way of building software.

"The Ruby language is an amazing platform that we’ve been able to leverage,” said John, citing how the use of Ruby has facilitated their style of “extreme programming”, which is a highly iterative, rapid style of software development, as opposed to traditional, blockier multi-stage methods.

West Michigan Culture

John has found the culture of innovation in West Michigan to be overwhelmingly positive.  There is “a tremendous amount of people out there who are extremely interested and willing to go out of their way in helping entrepreneurs succeed, as well as in building an infrastructure and ecosystem here,” he said.

He goes on to discuss the innovative Business Model Canvas and the important role of customer development in building a business from scratch.

Listen to the Full Interview:

Business Matters: August 20th, 2011