Tim Bull

Reflections on start-up life: Week 12

I'm not sure when the official "it's been three months is" but this feels pretty close - 12 weeks in.

Last week was a big one.  After three months of trialling and experimenting with different ideas, we packed up our plans and put them on show to potential investors.

The goal of our Sydney visit was threefold:

1. Gain an understanding of the investment market in Australia by talking with Angels and VCs.
2. Test some of our thoughts on target markets by gaining feedback from investors.  Is our problem "big enough"?
   
3. Make connections and contacts.
   

I think the best analogy is that we knew we had a house of cards, let's expose it to the elements and see how it stands up.  After something like 11 meetings, several rounds of opinions and modifications to the business model as we went through the week, we reached a point where we now know how our house of cards holds up - some of it was a lot further a long than we realised, while other parts of it were a bit shakier.

While it's always a judgement call, I think that we've shaved about four weeks off our runway by undertaking this exercise - we have some very clear and consistent advice on the areas we need to improve in and also some appreciation for the things we've done well.

So how did it go? The outcome of meetings ranged everywhere between "I think you guys have got something here, send me some more information and I promise you an answer by March" to "You might find a dumb dentist or doctor with money who doesn't know what they are doing that will give it to you."  Many people described what we were doing as a "feature" not a "product" and http://twendly.com was equally helpful (to those who could see a path from Twendly to a commercial offering) and a distraction (to those who couldn't make that link).

The most consistent advice that we've taken to heart is that no matter what our next step is (Organic, Angel or VC), we are best served by demonstrating a real product, aligned with a business model with a few customers to validate that it's genuine.  It's not that we didn't "know" this, but the week helped quickly evolve what we are doing to a point that we can now address this directly.

Before Sydney we were an interesting technology with many potential applications, now we have a clear(ish) vision for a product built on an interesting and differentiating technology.  Our goal is to sit down in front of potential customers as early as next week with a prototype.

Everyone we met was incredibly helpful and their willingness to call it as they see it was always appreciated (I relate the dumb dentist story not to discredit the person who said it, while disheartening at the time, it is better to face some brutal realities early on).  In particular Brian Menzies was a super star, working his network hard to get us meetings with a wide range of people who've left us better focussed and more educated than we were at the start of the week.

The other people we should thank are the team at http://mob-labs.com who gave us a home base for the week.  With hot weather and high humidity we looked forward to the time we spent in their office and also really appreciate the support and the advice they provided too.  It's great to see a community of tech companies willing to help each other out.  Thanks Alex and Rob for your great advice, friendly support, cool air-conditioning and free internet.

Get the first prototype done ready to start showing real customers next week (or even this week if we go well).

Reflections on start-up life: Week 11

It's always great to look back at the goal from last week and realise you achieved it (refine and rework business pitch ready for Sydney).  It's not so great when you realise that's the only thing you've done!

I was reflecting this morning that even now, as a two person, "pre-revenue" company (the fancy way of saying broke), we have enough work to employ at least another two people and keep them productive and busy.  One would be a full-time engineer to help Alex as he's started down the design path for the real engine - between that and a half a dozen other small programming jobs (tweak some features in Twendly to validate the business model, update the BinaryPlex website), they would stay very busy.

The second person while I'm dreaming would be a marketing / sales person.  They'd be busy researching the market, doing competitor analysis (look, progress - we have competitors now and we even know who they are!), helping out with pitch slides, and starting to utilize their extensive knowledge and contacts to find us some early sales.

As you might gather, there is still only the two of us and work for about four.  By Friday I began to feel that even if we hadn't "caught up", we at least had our heads above the water again.

This week is a significant one, we are taking our idea on the road to Sydney.  This has been a bit of an act of faith (but what isn't in start-up land); we picked a week, said we'd be in Sydney and started trying to get slots with different people to hear our idea.  So far the first three days are quite full now, Thursday and Friday we have some time if anyone wants to catch up and say hi.

The most significant lesson I think I'm continuing to learn and have reinforced is it's never too early.  If you're not sure your ready, go for it anyway and the feedback will get you to the next stage quicker than you otherwise would of.

Should be a lot of fun.

• My Nan passing away and the funeral.
  
• Getting bored and fed up with countless revisions to slide decks.

Make some great contacts in Sydney and really road test our idea with investors.

Reflections on start-up life: Week 10

== This one was posted a week late - I sent it, but for some reason there was a Posterous fail and it didn't end up on the blog.  Only noticed it now! ==

Last week was very interrupted for a number of reasons - family events and then a HDD failure on my main PC which stopped me dead in my tracks.  This turned out to be a blessing in disguise as I'd been putting off moving to Ubuntu, so this was my opportunity.  Fortunately I lost only time as all our data and code is well backed up - DropBox is a blessing for documents as well.

I won't rave about the Ubuntu install other than to say it took me around 1 hour to get a functioning Ubuntu machine up and running - almost 8 hours for the Vista re-build (patch, reboot, patch, reboot all day).

So the last weekend wasn't as relaxing as I would of liked, mostly consisting of building new machines (2 boot images on my main desktop and I also purchased a new MSI X340 laptop I installed with Ubuntu as well).

The reflection this week for me is that decision leads to opportunity.  Being decisive about things opens doors and provides more information - sometimes it might be that the decision was wrong, which is still good information, but it does lead to action.  Indecision kills start-ups. 

Having decided to focus on the consumer play we found that we could start to do a number of things:

1. Write a pitch deck and circulate for feedback.
2. Act on the feedback to refine and define what we are doing.
3. Have more focus in our meetings.
4. A clearer idea on what we "want" when we meet with someone, and exactly what it is that we have to offer them.
5. Actually forecast a plan for two weeks in advance.

Technically not much happened from my perspective (although Alex has been doing a lot of planning on his side), but from a business perspective we made some major steps forward.

We will be in Sydney all week next week - if you're following this blog and interested in catching up, let me know - we are there to pitch to potential investors, but we would love to meet with anyone who is interested in what we are up to.

Twendly continues to do very well and is gaining some real evangelists for the service.  Again, doing leads to learning - without a real live demo like Twendly we could never have learnt as much as a we have about our HiveMind engine and how it works in the real world.

• Wasted time rebuilding PCs.
• Still not enough time on the business plan as is needed.
• Hating the touchpad on the MSI - need to get the proper driver for it so I can turn off the stupid touch to click.  Why anyone would think this is a good default behaviour is beyond me.  I constantly brush it with my thumbs on it when typing and end up typing somewhere else in my document.
  

Refine and rework the business pitch so we are good to go for Sydney next week.

Reflections on start-up life: Week 9

You develop a thick skin pretty quickly.  The first two emails were upsetting, but by the 10th, you just apologise and move on.  Moving forwards seems to mean stepping on toes, sometimes no matter how careful you are.

The BIG news entering this week is that we've moved from indecision at the start of last week to focus by Wednesday very quickly and smoothly.  The catalyst was this article in TheNextWeb/AU which talked about Twendly and kicked off a significant leap in traffic (at it's peak around %18,000).  I like percentages, they sound much more interesting!  This was picked up globally and resulted in a significant increase in traffic as well as a lot more chatter and talk about Twendly on Twitter.  People were generally finding it useful and interesting and on the whole, surprised that it works as well as it does (there were some negative comments, but the positive far outweighed them).

This is the "pull" that we've been looking for and so we've decided to focus 100% now on the internet play which has quickly brought a lot of things into focus.  We're now an Internet Search Engine (albeit a slightly different one for sure) and we now need investment and funding to grow and prove the business.  Now there are twice as many things to do, and twice the urgency (we are now inside a month of Alex leaving AU), but it's great to reach this first point where we are ready to take on the world! 

Ultimately we've decided to play the high-stakes game - the pay back for the Internet play is significant, but of course the challenge and the risk are a lot higher.  It's also a lot more fun!

So as Twendly started to get a lot more traffic, we started chasing our tail.  Our second server came online this weekend, giving us increased processing capacity, we caught up with the surge of signups, only to find just as many there waiting for us and we started to reach the limits of the current technology.  We also managed to upset people, for lots of different reasons (only a few, but they were vocal).  Some didn't like the way we sent our messages, some didn't like where they were ranked by Twendly, some thought we were hackers.  Now customer relationships have come to the fore - this is fine, but the thick skin has developed quite quickly.  It's not that there isn't valid feedback, there often is, but you have to separate the attitude from the message at times (and also appreciate that 95% of people didn't have an issue).  In many ways, much of this is great because it shows that people care and have a need - far worse for them to be saying nothing!

It's also been an interesting weekend because I've had my family here so have taken two days (Friday and Monday) off (kind of).  I'm champing at the bit to get back to work and get things done.  Speaking of which, I have to go set the table and it's my sons eighth birthday so I better get it done!

• Trying to catch up with the surge in sign-ups.
• That you can't please all of the people all the time.
• Not being able to spend the time I wanted when I felt it was needed.
• You can be as trustworthy as you like with people you know, but on the internet the default position is often intense scepticism and distrust.
  

• Road test the business pitch and terms sheet and get some investor meetings lined up (a consequence of focus - we now know we will need financing to make the vision happen)

Reflections on start-up life: Week 8

Where do we stand?

Eight weeks completed and I can safely say we are now starting to gain traction - we might not be moving forwards, but the tires are starting to bite.  We have several conversations starting with different businesses - and more business returning from holidays, so I expect (hope) to see more contacts this week.  This week we turn to starting to address the requirements from these conversations and target delivering the first real beta that companies can implement.

Twendly is going well too - it's not yet set the world on fire, but it's fulfilling everything I'd hoped for it at the moment and is demonstrating value.  People that use it are recommending it to others and seem to be regularly coming back to use it again.  There is also some initial interest and conversations with others on how they might use the data we are beginning to aggregate - there are promising signs in this direction as well.

With the beginnings of traction however becomes what I see as our next biggest challenge - we are trying to play two hands at once and not yet fully focussed.  It's counter to all the advice we've received but I don't think either Alex or I are ready to commit to just one direction just yet.  Most of the robust discussions between us are really dealing with this core issue - how do we balance the effort on both sides of these initiatives.

The problem is that while the core engine is the same between the consumer and enterprise sides of the HiveMind application, the implementations are increasingly looking to be quite different. For example, on the consumer side, Alex has already invested significant time into an anti-spam engine to deal with Twitter spammers, while I've spent much of my effort on the loading portion dealing with the difficulties of talking to an Internet application that won't always respond and needs a lot of error handling and checking.

On the enterprise, some of these problems just don't exist, but of course there are other different ones - for example, the range of sources is a lot more diverse inside the Enterprise as opposed to on the consumer side where we largely define them ourselves.

As Alex and I develop our relationship I think we are getting better at having good discussions about what we are doing.  One of the hardest things to do early on was to actually have the challenging discussion, I think initially we spent more time worrying about "is the other person happy" than actually having a robust discussion about some of the difficult decisions we seem to increasingly face about where we spend our time.  Now that we are getting into this it isn't always comfortable, but I think it is much healthier.  It's interesting that even with all the experience both of us have, the basic laws of group dynamics don't change much - Forming, Norming, Storming and then Performing.  I know that between the two of us we are bringing a lot to the table and that if we commit together, we've got a great chance of success.

This last weekend is the first one that I've not really done anything for BinaryPlex due to family commitments, while I face today feeling that I'm not "caught up" it is nice to come at things feeling refreshed and having had a good break.

• Again, not much - we've kept reasonably well focussed and I think achieved largely what we set out to do last week.
  

• Put Twendly into a largely "automated" mode - there is a fair bit of regular maintenance we currently do that we want to run by itself to free us time to focus on other things.
  
• Get the first round of Enterprise beta ready to ship to a few customers and start engaging the Enterprise clients.
  

Reflections on start-up life: Week Seven

Last week was very productive - I think there is a lesson in there about focus, although it's also the inevitable issue of everyone else but us being on leave so we didn't have anything to do BUT product development!

The first release of  http://twendly.com was very interesting; interesting enough that it was an itch we've had to scratch a bit further.  Our major highlight last week was implementing a series of features into Twendly which allowed it to index a lot more data and therefore become more useful.  If you're looking for people, searching a pool of 16,000 which we are now is a lot better than a pool of 35 (our original release).

This has lead to all sorts of technical challenges, not least that when we are now processing almost 20,000,000 rows of data there is a good chance that that a "1 in a million" condition occurs about 20 times every time you process.  I'm pleased I'm paranoid about error handling, every single line of code to handle errors that I wrote (usually with a comment like "This is highly theoretical, should never happen") actually executed (ie. the error did occur).

To quote Terry Pratchett, "One in a million chances occur nine times out of ten."

It's been fairly intense and now that http://twendly.com is live and starting to get a little bit of usage (there are a fair few searches going through, even if not everyone searching registers) there is a new feeling of pressure.  It's great to have a showcase, it's now problematic if that show case isn't working as well as it could, the site goes down etc. etc.  The data also comes at a price - we can't just "blow it away" and start over either.

Anyway for those who are wondering just what we've been up to and what "people search" is really about, the three attached pictures sum it up pretty well I think.  I've done three searches using exactly the same terms "Lotus Connections".

The first is a search for "Lotus Connections" in Twitter - you get the current tweets that mention Lotus Connections, however there is no way to know or understand which of these people talks most frequently about this - it may be that this was the very first time they ever mentioned it.

The second image shows a search in Google.  This takes you to some great information about Lotus Connections, but these are largely all documents - technical or sales information about the Lotus Connections product, useful, but not people you can have a conversation with. Only one link will really lead you to a person (the Lotus Connections Blog link) if that's what you were after.

Finally we have a search in Twendly.  Of these, 8 out of 10 are people and 7 of the Top 10 are actually a great match for this search.  There is quite a bit we can do to further refine and improve this (for example I could manually refine the search to exclude web links which I know improves the results even more but would be cheating for this demonstration where I've used exactly the same terms for each), but I think this is still very successful in demonstrating the value of the HiveMind engine as a different type of search engine - looking for people and not documents.

• Feeling the pressure now with a live site
• Not much really, a very productive week that I was proud of.

• Not sure - will start with a review of where we think Twendly is at and a decision on wether we put some more time in it

Reflections on start-up life: Week Six

This last week was a very quiet one as we decided to take a break for a few days.  Having gone straight from PwC to BinaryPlex, I needed the down time and Christmas is as good as any to do it.

It's strange though how different it feels on your own.  The thought of the next challenge is never quite out of your mind.  We agreed to come back and start work from this Monday which only yesterday someone pointed out to me was a public holiday - the thought never even occured.  When you work from home, time is generally divided between "working" and "not working" - things like a public holiday seem almost obscure when it's just the two of us anyway.

We launched http://twendly.com to the world on Monday with a goal of 30 sign-ups by this Monday, which we achieved by Christmas Day.  It feels good to have finally shared what we are doing with the world, even though it's still a small part of the overall vision.

Other than that, a quiet and family focussed week.  It does however feel like we've crossed some bridge - we are now into our 6 month count-down proper, the time window to explore and find the "right" thing is closing -- we need to focus pretty quickly on one thing and do it.  The challenge of course, everyone is away on leave so the opportunity to get feedback is extremely limited to non-existent, especially this week coming up between Christmas and New Year where in Australia at least, everything shuts down.

We've also continued to talk to people and each other (yes, even over our "holiday!).  I've decided that startup life is clearly related to physics:

• For every opinion there is an equal and opposite opinion.
• If something makes you feel up, there will be someone who can make you feel down about it (and vice versa).
• You might feel like you're working at the speed of light - that just means that everyone got old and died on the idea (perhaps metaphorically) while you were busy shooting off around the place.

Having taken a break has been very good for one thing - if you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  Having built an engine, we've been treating a lot of problems like a nail lately and with some distance it's been good to question this approach - we want to be sure that we are focussed on the problems for which we are the right tool for the job (or alternatively build a different tool perhaps).

Wishing everyone that is reading this blog, and especially those who've taken the time to comment and provide support a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Launch of Twendly

Yesterday we launched http://twendly.com which is the Twitter people search implementing a version of the HiveMind engine we have been working on.

It's still very much a preview of the concept, but if you've been following and are interested in what we are up to, then I invite you to take the time to go to the site and sign in using Twitter (yes, we are only supporting Twitter just at the moment).

Even if you don't have a Twitter account you can still search and play with it - you'll get the basics of the concept very quickly, but if you do have a Twitter account, we'd love you to sign up and let us index all your tweets to add more users into the database and make the demonstration more meaningful.  We'd love to get a couple of hundred people signed up over the Christmas period, so feel free to invite and encourage your friends to join in too.

Thanks!

Reflections on start-up life: Week Five

Round, like a circle in a spiral, in a wheel within a wheel...

After the aborted launch of our demo site the week before, come Monday we felt remarkably positive and picked up the pieces and moved forwards.  We felt it was important to get something up regardless so we chunked things down and pushed to get a site up with the HiveMind engine indexing "stuff".

After the experiences the week before, we were better placed to move into production and the deployment scripts are maturing to the point that they actually seem to save time rather than cost us time, so it was a lot smoother to get our new demo up and running.  Although largely we had it finished on Tuesday, we still took a couple of days before we were happy to push the button and say go.

Well, what a difference it feels like now having something to show.  It's strange as the demo is somewhat "underwhelming" in the sense that when you look at it, you might wonder what we've been up to for five weeks, but we know that the problem isn't an easy one to solve.  What has been really pleasing is the very positive support from people now that we have something to actually demonstrate.

It's such a worth-while exercise, demo early and demo often is a great motto.  Once people see and experience what we've been doing, a few things happen.  Sometimes people who "got it" now don't.  Sometimes people who didn't "get it" now do!  Best of all, people now have lots of different ideas and use cases for us to explore.

Now we have a live server, we can index lots more content which means we can begin to properly test and tune the engine.  Things also come to a close better (and new beginnings in support too) - once we push something live, we have an "end" to the cycle we were in which is a positive thing.

Why I say it's a bit like the windmills in your mind is that we've ended up a hairs breadth away from what we intended to launch the previous Friday and backed off from.  In my mind this shows we are pretty focussed on the core "root" problem of expertise location and that the use cases are similar in many regards.

This "live customer test bed" is just so crucial - we've made a major step forwards in our lifecycle as we are no longer listening to the windmills inside our own minds, instead we are being blown by the breeze of feedback which is an altogether more beneficial thing to do.

• Paper work - even when we aren't making money it just never seems to quite end.
• Inevitable reality, things starting to slow up - it's harder to talk to people at the moment because of break coming up and many of them will be off for a while now.

 

• An open launch on Monday then holidays for a week.

We are taking a break next week due to Christmas, so we'll be back in the New Year with our continued adventures with BinaryPlex.  It may only be five weeks but as I said to Karina (my wife) last week - I've not had this much fun in a long time.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all.

Reflections on start-up life: Week Four

10... 9... 8... 7... 6... 5... 4... 3... 2... abort, abort - Houston, we have a problem.

That's pretty much how close we got to launching "Twendly" our automated Twitter list bot, this last week before pulling the plug.

We decided to divert our attention into this tool for a few reasons you might recall.

1. Proves the engine in a production like environment.
2. Provides a hands on demo customers can actually see it working.
3. Lets us access the taxonomies that people build to see how the actually use the Engine.
4. Done right, should lead people back to our site - it's broadly targetted, but we know a lot of E2.0 types are on Twitter and may be interested in HiveMind.

These were (and still are) good reasons for doing it, but as we got closer to launch we realised that we had become fully diverted from problems to do with expertise location and instead were becoming fully focussed on engineering problems that had everything to do with Twitter.  After a long hard discussion, we decided that there was nothing to be gained by solving the Twitter problems, because we could not deliver a tool that effectively show-cased what we were doing because of these limitations.  At about 80+% done, we terminated the project and pushed it aside to get back and focus. 

For those that are interested, the fundamental problem is that to do effective expertise location we need a complete set of experts, otherwise we report incorrectly - we either had to "swallow Twitter whole" or resort to sampling with it's attendant statistical problems to really show we could solve the problem.  Our solution was to limit the input based on selection criteria, but in effect we were becoming "you show us the experts and we'll tell you if they're an expert" - not what the core engine is about at all.

Still, it's not a complete waste, although the timing was probably off!  The biggest lessons came from trying to productionise the engine.  Over the course of the proceeding three weeks we'd managed to create an environment that was too complex to actually replicate easily and needs some simplification / reengineering efforts.  We'd also confused the core engine and the implementation - in our rush to get Twendly up, we'd hacked in Twitter code which we need to take out and properly modularise.  So the act of doing (trying to shift the site into production) taught us a lot on where we actually are.

We also let our integration efforts slip which caused problems as I began to get roadblocked because I couldn't test the site effectively and it no longer ran on Windows (rectifiable but we didn't want to bother in the heat of the moment) and we had no integration environment.

We've also gained a lot more clarity on the problem of expertise location.  By driving an actual implementation of the engine, the theoretical niceties were exposed and the core of what it really does is actually a lot simpler than some of the "fluff" we started adding around the outside.

Actually we are more excited than ever about the core engine and we've already got our next iteration scheduled and planned (we spent Friday afteroon doing this instead of waiting until Monday).  So the Alphington release was a bust, but the Fairfield release is already underway and brings us back on track in the week before Christmas to having a real tool we can show people and seek their feedback -- this time we think it's a more realistic proposition that may put us on a path to revenue shorter than we might otherwise of found.

• Server problems - frustrations that were largely outside of our control.
• Nagging feeling all week that Twendly wasn't going to work, but not being able to nail it.
• Finally putting Twendly down on Friday and the nagging feeling we'd just wasted a chunk of time (actually this has diminished as I started the Fairfield sprint over the weekend - we've learnt a LOT and the next cycle is screaming along already).