Tag Archives: clients

Reflections on start-up life: Week 46

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Deep breath.

What a week.  Every now and again I have a week like this one just gone where I think, wow, that's some kind of turning point.
  • We launched Distlr
  • We signed World Vision Australia as a client for Tribalytic for 12 months.
  • We had another major client in our pipeline come back and confirm they want to sign up this week.
We are getting a better (more realistic) handle now on our pipeline – most importantly we are beginning to understand how long it takes to close a deal.  Despite being "Software as a Service" offering, Tribalytic is clearly an enterprise sales problem.

I remember saying to someone early on that pre-revenue is like skiing downhill, you're flying and having fun.  Then when you make your first sale, it suddenly quantifies just HOW far down the hill you've come.  We are clawing our way back up that hill and are very close to cresting it now.

On to Distlr (previously known as Project X)!  We set ourself a goal to try and promote and launch Distlr with the AFL Grand Final replay.  It was a huge effort, but we got there.  Shipping product is about the hardest thing you can do.  We could of sat back, polished it more, been more cautious or any number of things, but we'd just be wasting time.  There was enough product to learn some lessons and we have.

What did the Distlr launch teach us?
  1. There's some interest out there.  With what was really quite a poor PR campaign (mostly because we left it until 2 hours before which was when we were sure we'd actually have a product!), we managed to get 70 registered users and some 300+ observers.  24 hours later, people were still using it to watch the #aflgf.
  2. People who do use it get much more engaged with an event.
  3. There are still several features we are missing to really nail the client experience we want.
  4. It didn't teach us this, but Internet Explorer sucks (cross browser support for Firefox / Chrome designed in, picked up Safari (and iPhone / iPad without even testing on it) then Alex spent several hours debugging IE specific issues).
We had a very early business development meeting for Distlr – yes, there is a potential business model behind it, but I'll keep that under my hat for the moment.  Suffice to say it went well and we have a follow up meeting already which is great.

On the lighter side, now we have a little bit of cash in the bank, we have to decide how to spend it.  It's not that much yet, but here's a few things we could do with it.

Alex and I have already had a brief discussion about a new monitor and chair for him, something he's hesitant to spend money on.  From my perspective if we can get him a better development environment (a fast desktop PC with a decent monitor so he can test offline and a chair to keep him comfortable) that ~$2,000 is a significant investment in our core production capacity.  If he's even 15% more effective, that's an extra months programming a year! Yup, I'm a slave driver :-)

With Daylight Savings started now, Alex and I are now three hours apart instead of two, so that's something else that's changing – at least it's still not too bad.

Highlights

  • The adrenaline rush of the deadline and getting Distlr out the door.
  • Signing World Vision
  • Another customer confirming they want to buy
  • Distlr business development meetings.
  • Meeting Doris after a months absence – I really enjoy these sessions with her.  Having someone know your business but sit outside it is really useful.

Lessons Learned

  • Need to get our Credit Card payments sorted out.  We had to get our startup friends Event Arc to help us out as we couldn't process the money from World Vision at the speed they wanted to pay.
  • New shiny things are really distracting. But sometimes it's worth it – I feel that we took a risk on the Distlr idea, but it also really re-invigorated us, gave us new ideas, taught us some new things and has shown another way forward which was interesting.

Goal this week – Engineering

  • Push the latest release of Tribalytic
  • Refactor Distlr

Goal this week – Customers
  • Sign new client
  • Shake up the pipeline
  • Review Distlr with people who used it (Survey most likely).

Reflections on Start-Up life: Week 40

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Tribalytic-release

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 start-up life: Week 21

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Firstly a big thank you to everyone that has been reading this blog and sending their encouragement.  I love to get feedback that people out there are listening and  I'm not just talking to myself, so thank you.

San Francisco, the major event that has been looming now for several weeks, starts tomorrow.  That's it – there's no time left for preparation.  We are as ready as we can be, however good that is.  I strictly speaking shouldn't be writing this post (other priority things to do), but the commitment to a Monday post is so strong now I don't want to let it slide.

So we've finally managed to get Tribalytic out the door.  It's here http://tribalytic.com – feel free to go and register for a beta invite.  We are being restrictive at the moment, mostly because we haven't got the time to focus on it that we'd like because of the San Francisco thing so we don't want it to go too nuts while we can't pay attention.  If you sign up we WILL gradually release more over the next couple of weeks.

It's felt so good in this last week to actually start demonstrating Tribalytic to people.  Your rate of learning goes through the roof when you start talking with real potential customers.  It's been a great mix of formal presentations, some casual demos (sat down at the social melbourne breakfast and just showed interested people) and even a few different industries.

The feedback has been really strong in a few areas – the interface is easy to understand (once people figure out the Google control), they love the dynamic nature of it, the related keywords is proving very popular.

There are also a few holes too that need some attention.  Now that people can see we can deliver the information, the feedback is turning specifically to how it's delivered.  Ultimately for businesses, a tool they can use to explore data is nice, but somewhere up the line, there is a boss or a client of some description who wants a monthly report.  If we can deliver useful information in a pre-formatted way that saves time, that's real business value right there.

The lesson is that getting out there and talking about it uncovers these things.  In every demo, the message is loud and clear that reporting is important.  Equally, while Facebook integration is something we've considered a problem because we don't have it, the feedback has generally been that as long as our analysis is good enough, they'd prefer a tool that does Twitter really well, than one that does everything in a mediocre way.

Of course with every step, another dozen steps becomes clear.  It always feels like there is plenty to do.  The classic now is that because we actually have a product, focus has to be taken from the core technical aspect of it to implement some structure around the experience – a user sign up, beta invites etc. etc.  While many of these processes are manual, there is enough there to still take a bit of time to do (and will be needed anyway when we launch for real).

Plugging all the elements together is also invaluable in teaching you how it's all going.  The funniest bug so far is searching for "bunnings" at the moment shows correlations with Easter, Bun, Hot, Cross, Hardware etc.  You can see where this is going! We stem the words (reduce the to their common base) before indexing for several reasons (speed, space, generally better search results etc.) but in some instances, it's a little too agressive.  Bunnings (the major Hardware store in Australia) has been stored as Bun, and therefore we get all the interesting correlations with Easter!

Highlights

  • Showing working product to people.
  • Spending time with generous individuals willing to look at our product and give us great feedback.
  • Feeling like we are really getting somewhere.  The light at the end of this tunnel is starting to brighten.
  • Finally getting something out the door and loving it!

Lowlights
  • Never ending drive to be ready and feeling like we aren't quite there.  We'll go anyway.
  • Always more to be done and not quite getting on top of it.
  • Realising there are a few issues in the engine to be resolved still.  Not unexpected, or a major problem, but engine work is generally slow.

Goal this week
  • San Francisco and Chirp here we come!