The beginnings of Rootstrap originated when Ben Lee started Neon Roots in 2011. He recognized a flaw in the traditional agency model – agencies were good at selling clients products they didn’t need, while raising their prices, instead of truly helping them. Once these agencies got their clients dependent on them, the idea of staying lean and building true MVPs went out the window.
Ben saw an opportunity to create real value and build genuine long-term relationships with clients, far more than he could ever predict, with a straightforward process that brought results. When clients came to Neon Roots with an idea, this process that became a prerequisite to every development job that Neon Roots took on.
The process, currently named Roadmapping™, was intended to address the questions of: what are we building, and why are we building it, all before any client money was wasted in writing code. Other agencies claimed to offer discovery or inception services but those were meant to create additional “needed” features to push the client down paths way beyond their budgets.
