Whenever we help a business launch, we never know how it will impact other businesses. By helping Dave Manzer launch MyLocalReporter.com, we helped Lauren Conrad get her Austin-based business, Dogadillo, into the Austin Business Journal.

Watch the video to find out how it all came together using MyLocalReporter (via Facebook).

I love it when our hard work to launch a startup ends up helping others through that startup! That is what we are all about!

Want to know more about the technical details of we put the site together? Read on…

How We Launched MyLocalReporter.com

Dave approached us with a deep understanding of PR and a vision of being able to help small businesses target local media outlets without spending thousands of dollars in PR. After a few hours of discussion, we put together a plan for a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that met both the business goals of MyLocalReporter and the desired budget.

To accelerate the delivery of the project, we selected a few key technologies:

1. Ruby on Rails – a web application development framework that is great for both small and large-scale web sites
2. MongoDB – a database that provides a high-performance, flexible, schema-less database for rapid development
3. Heroku – a low cost Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)  that provides easy deployment of any Ruby on Rails, Java, or JVM-based language with on-demand scaling

Combining these technologies, along with our test-driven development process, we were able to accelerate the development of the MVP. We then integrated the design provided by The MOD Studio, who had already engaged with Dave in a previous project. They delivered both the design and the WordPress site for the marketing and sales site, while Blue Jazz delivered the web application. This provided Dave with the ability to engage with his existing design team, who already understood his business needs, while leveraging Blue Jazz to launch the first version of his web application.

The work for MyLocalReporter isn’t done yet. Dave has more planned and we will be there to help him launch his ideas. In the mean time, visit his web site and discover how your business can take advantage of targeted, hyper-local press releases.