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Reflections on start-up life: Week 42
This is one of those "it's easier to write you're going to do it than it is to do it posts".
Last week the focus was public relations. Well we have set the wheels in motion, but nothing big has happened yet. Like so many things we dive into, there seems to be some magic sauce we are missing. Turns out that just writing articles isn't all that it takes to have people falling over themselves to publish them (OK, that's very tongue in cheek - I didn't really expect that). But turns out PR professionals do have a role in this space after all :-)
Time kills us. It takes longer to write an article than we think (especially when targeting a niche publication and we want to make sure it's really good), or we try to put together a general release that reads like self-indulgent crap that I'd never read anyway, so why would anyone else. So there lots of effort for what with the benefit of hindsight is a very uncertain return. Then in conversation with my Dad whose been involved sales and marketing for years he describes PR as "the soft stuff". And he's right - it's still not tackling the direct problem head on which is we've got a product, you've got some money, how is our product meeting your need such that you'd pay us to help you with it.
It's weird. People from the UK write to us and say " This is an amazing tool! Is Tribalytic planned to be available for the UK?" but we can't seem to drive new sign ups in Australia.
Twendly had peaked after a few weeks at something like around 8,000 people on one day searching for people talking about things, yet as a product it did only one very very small slice of what Tribalytic can do.
The big difference? Twendly was global and free.
So how much of a barrier to entry is a paid sign up? Things I want Alex and I to ponder this week.
- We stepped away from an Enterprise Play to be a Consumer Play (http://timbull.com/reflections-on-start-up-life-week-9) Are we back at being an Enterprise Play and if so, are the reasons we stepped away from it the first time still valid?
- For a consumer play, scale matters - at least "all" of AU or a lot more of a global market. How can we tackle this (for example, should we get on to the Twitter sample hoses, scale out and go nuts). The reasons why we wouldn't do this in the past might still be the same now however (money, time).
- How married to the pricing model that we have are we? What's more important, a few premium paying customers or lots of cheaper paying customers? Have we actually tested the cheaper consumer model yet? Should we. Are we even at a premium price yet? Maybe we are too cheap!
At one level nothing changes, keep at it, keep trying to build the publicity, keep trying to meet with people - but sooner or later I think we need to acknowledge that this current approach is not optimal yet. We need to tune it, and I think we need to do more than tweak, we need to try something very different in our approach to market. It could be a different way of selling (start cold-calling) or a different pricing point, or a different target client market or any number of things, but I don't want to get to next week without having tweaked one of the dials all the way around and see what happens.
As Alex said in his last post "Be patient and persistent". In this roller-coaster that is a start-up, perhaps the most amazing thing is how I can completely agree on Wednesday morning, but by Friday night feel frustrated that things aren't moving fast enough and quite convinced that we need to do something radically different.
On a positive note, our Techfluff.tv article went up on The Next Web - here's the interview.
Highlights
- Next Web Article
- Some nice positive comments about Tribalytic from paying users and also others interested in it
Lessons Learnt
- It's always harder than you think, even when you think it's going to be hard:-)
- More a pondering... are we repeating some earlier mistakes?
Goal this week
- Keep pushing the PR angle
- Review and reconsider the business model / pricing plans - implement any necessary changes.
Reflections on start-up life: Week 41
Wow! Two releases in two weeks. That's right, we shipped a new release again over this weekend just gone. It includes two important new features - a share of voice measure and an hourly average.
This changed plans slightly as we decided not to heavily push the last release, knowing that we would have a second one so shortly. No point in spamming people with information. As one of our PR consultants told us "keep your powder dry".
Now however, we are ready to go off with a bang.
Way back in Week 12, we traveled to Sydney and spent time in the offices of Mob-Labs with Alex and Rob. They were really hospitable and had lots of great advice. So this week, when I heard Rob was in Melbourne, I gate crashed a meeting to say hi. He's also recently trialled Tribalytic as well and I was keen to get some feedback. Rob had been instrumental in helping us shape our thinking at the time about what we'd do with Twendly coming off the Sydney visit so it was really pleasing to hear him describe Tribalytic as looking like a "really polished product now". Far more than "the feature" it was described as in the past.
We also a review of our metrics and it looks like we are hitting the targets, but we aren't pushing enough people into top end of the funnel yet. It's been a deliberate decision in many ways - iterate on the product and test it "softly" with people face to face to work out what key messaging is working and what we need to hit. I think we have that now, we know what we are, what we aren't and can strongly articulate our value. Now we have to be able to do this on the website and push volume through to test it.
It feels like a milestone - we've released a version that we are really happy with, that performs exceptionally well and delivers core value that is unique and differentiated from other tools on the market. So now it's time to really start making a sing and dance about it.
Highlights
- New release
- Follow up with people
- Demonstrating the new release features and getting very positive responses
Lessons Learnt
- Keep iterating
- Keep at it
- It's worth stopping to review where the weaknesses are - they change from week to week as you strengthen some and neglect others.
Goal - All week
- Publicity, publicity, publicity - let people know about what we are doing
Reflections on Start-Up life: Week 40
The awesome news this week is that we have released the new version of Tribalytic!
It's been a hard road and has involved Alex re-writing the engine almost from the ground up. We've got a new database, new index structures, large amounts of codes re-written into C++ (much faster than Python), changes in the way content is handled in memory and so forth to deliver the performance increase we are after.
We're now around 100x faster and most queries are essentially sub-second. This is a critical step - we can now immediately deliver more business benefit by tracking more users, but also we can start on the new road map features. We should move a lot faster now with more frequent releases as well.
The other change is we've significantly improved the way in which we manage the related keywords which are one the key ways you get into understanding the related topics of conversation. From 15 keywords we now show 52 (why the strange number? So the 3 columns have the same number in them). We've also added in the volumes of these keywords and we've changed the algorithm to identify them in a way we believe is more useful.
There'll be more updates on this shortly on our Tribalytic blog, but back to the start-up world.
The reflection this week is around differentiation. It's timely as we move forwards into the new features we can now enable.
In the last few weeks the interesting thing that's happened is we are now much more strongly able to articulate what we are not. It's lead to much more focussed an engaging conversations. If you don't know what you're not, it's hard to articulate to people what you are.
Knowing what you're not means you can also stop wasting time trying to target to people when you aren't their appropriate solution.
I wonder if this is the problem with the election in Australia (hung parliament) both parties spent so much time trying to be everything to everyone that at the end, no-one could make a choice.
Knowing what you're not and what your brand really stands for is powerful.
Highlights
- Shipping the new release.
- Developing and testing our new strategy model and getting good feedback.
- Sharing thoughts with Guaruav and
Lessons Learnt
- A simple reflection on the power of differentiation.
- Getting a firmer and clearer view of the market and how underdeveloped it is here in Australia for what we are doing - lots of opportunity, but short term challenges.
Goal - Customers
- Publicise the new release
- Currently sitting in a workshop right now that I'm talking at shortly
- Planning meetings for some more workshops
Goal - Engineering
- Stabilise
- Planning for new features
Reflections on startup life: Week 39
We haven't shipped the new release, however it has passed a few significant milestones entering into integration and now "live" and able to be tested.
Unfortunately once we started wrapping everything back up together (integrating the engine into the website), the speed performances we thought we had gained have tailed off. We need some more research to properly understand where we are at and what we can do. The good news is that regardless it is still much more scalable - we should be able to throw more users at this engine without losing performance. So we might not of reached our "sub second" goal, we are able to do some of the critical deliverables regardless.
From a market development point of view, things are going well. I invested time in creating a Social Network Analysis of the Australian Election commentary. It took around a day and a half to complete properly, but was very educational and turned into our most successful blog post to date, generating a lot of comment on Twitter. Even better, I was called up by a journalist from The Weekend Australian to answer some questions about the post and these quotes made it into an article in the weekend paper. It's always nice to get our name out there broader than just online. It's strange how our psyche is still wired to feel that seeing something in print provide more "validity" - or at least it does for me!
We are continuing to build our presence and I think slowly migrating from a "purist" tools company to a strategy and tools offering.
I was also invited to speak at the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA) to make a short presentation about how we use text analysis and natural language processing technology tools. This was a pleasant surprise as well and I'm looking forward to sharing with people researching in this area how we use this for business purposes. This happens in December.
Alex has taken four days off - it's been a while since we've really had a proper break and something we've come back to again and again is that this journey is a marathon, not a sprint - stopping to refresh and recharge is essential. The positive news is I didn't break the servers (yet) while he was away so that's a good thing.
Overall? I continue to feel that the pressure of interest is building. It hasn't broken yet, but the dice will start to fall our way - there is plenty of validation that we are doing "the right things", if just keep at it, things will come together over the next month or two.
Highlights
- Article in the Australian
- Generating some interest with our analysis
- Invite to the ALTA conference
- Meeting a market researcher looking for a tool - we have a meeting planned next week to see how we can coordinate and work together.
Lessons Learnt
- Keep at it. I can never pick which "thing" we do will generate the interest, but I'm convinced that it's not a "one off". Consistency leads to recognition, not the individual post itself.
Goal this week - Customers
- Knuckle down and refine our messaging - the BinaryPlex website is not really doing our brand any good, it needs to be better aligned with the Tribalytic one now.
- Launch new engine to customers
- Follow ups
Goal this week - Engineering
- Ship the new release
Tim Bull
Co-Founder of BinaryPlex. Building Tribalytic. I'm located in Melbourne, Australia.
An ecletic IT architect, social media junkie and coffee addict. Passionate about family, building smarter software and the cool stuff you can learn if you crunch enough data.
