Tag Archives: consulting

Reflection on startup life: Week 51

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Because these posts are after the completion of the week, I can't help but think ahead a little.  It's now a year since… (ok, I'll save this for next week).

Last week was a short week and having blogged on Thursday, there's not a great deal to say.  Let's see… our new project is almost ready to take the covers off, the consulting work is going well and we are starting on a new development project for another client today.  Yup, I think that's where we were at.

Our friends at HyperTable (which is a key part of what makes Tribalytic saw freakin' fast) want to feature us on their home page, so we are happy to represent – we love HyperTable.

To be fair, we do have a very polygamous relationship with Databases – we love HyperTable, we lust after Redis and I think we're on our second marriage with MongoDB after a brief divorce.  MySQL is like an old girl friend that we can't quite dump – we feel comfortable with each other, but I'm not sure if long term we are right for one another.  For the types of problems we are solving with Tribalytic though, HyperTable is brilliant.

I was called this morning by Brian Menzies who was one of the mentors at BootUp Camp where Alex and I first met.  He's in town at the moment and I'm looking forward to catching up with him this morning – Brian has been a great supporter, putting us in touch with his network in Sydney, reviewing our San Francisco investment pitches and generally helping us out whenever we've asked.  Will be great to catch up.

Despite the fact that we haven't yet taken the covers off the new project, it's in fact already debuted at Girl 2.0 in Shanghai.  Alex was approached to go in the lightening pitch demonstration, so he pitched there in front of a panel of Angel Investors, including Dave McClure of 500 Startups fame.  By all accounts it went well.  Given it's so early in the product cycle (we haven't launched it to any customers yet), our expectations weren't high, but it's great to know that after batting backwards and forwards with the Angels, Alex was pleased to say they didn't come up with anything we hadn't really thought of already and nothing that would change the direction we are taking.

So while we haven't taken the covers off, there's 300 people in China who've heard about it!

I was thinking about this experience and how well it went for Alex, and it made me think back to this post http://timbull.com/reflections-on-start-up-life-week-26 which was a summary of the half way point.  So many of these points which are lessons we've been learning were reflected in getting the opportunity to pitch:

  1. Point 1: Networking – Alex has been building his network in Shanghai since moving there from Beijing; it's directly lead to this opportunity
  2. Point 3: Getting out there to pitch helps confirm the track we are on and make the pitch better for when we a really ready.
  3. Point 4: Never to early to share (OK, I know I'm not sharing here yet – but there's a reason, I know that you guys will all go try sign up and we haven't got the signup form working yet so you can let us know you want in on the beta…)
  4. Point 5: We've been working on the elevator pitch since before we even cut a line of code.  Although we did give it a LOT more focus in the lead up to the Girl 2.0 event.
  5. Point 6: Brutal feedback – far better to hear it's a dog now before wasting more time (the fact we didn't hear that is a bonus).
  6. Point 10: If you've got to go, you've got to go – Alex could of bowed out of the event, but opportunities like that don't come along that often and the more you do, the more they come along.
Right, well there's heaps to do this week, I've got three jobs on (Consulting, Dev Contract and BinaryPlex) and two products (Tribalytic and the new project) so can't spend too much more time reflecting at the moment…

Highlights
  • Working with new people and new problems to think about.  Challenged to think in some different ways.
  • A general feeling of being on the upswing at the moment.
Lessons Learned
  • All this documenting and reflecting is not only good for the soul, it's great to see progress and see that we've actually learnt one or two of these lessons!
Goals this week
  • Launch that new project to a few people
  • Meetings with the accountants – we now have enough money in the bank that we need to work out the best way to actually take some of it out and start paying ourselves.  It's not much, but it's another milestone and progress (in 12 months we've not taken out any cash for us – just reimbursed a few expenses).
  • Catch up with some blog writing
  • Consulting
  • Development Project
PS – I've used the new project three times in writing this blog post – unbelievably useful… if you ever blog (and refer to past links) you'll love it…

Reflections on Startup life: Week 50

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Did you miss me? It's been bugging me all week that I haven't yet done my weekly post.  Let's just all pretend this is Monday and move on :-)

After 50 weeks of this, I think it's only the second time I haven't posted on Monday yet.  The excuse is a good one.  I went camping with the family up in Buchan.  Turns out that there are places in Victoria which DON'T GET THE INTERNET! Not even mobile reception (unless you're with Tel$tra).  So that was up until Tuesday, when we came home (Melbourne Cup day).

On Wednesday I had to get up early to return the hire car, then it was straight into the city for something new.  For the next few weeks I'm working with Sustainability Victoria on some Social Media Analysis work, so I didn't get a chance yesterday (was going to bash it out on the train, but battery was flat).  So here I am, Thursday morning, writing Monday morning's post.

So what's going on around here – last weeks post was pretty brief.  I think this is because we are getting busier.

We've just signed a couple of contracts – the consulting gig I'm working on at the moment with Sustainability Victoria and a development project with SportsGeek.  We always thought we'd have to do some consulting work to help "keep the boat afloat", but we also want to carefully select what we do – is it aligned to our values and interests, can we do a great job, do we like the people and is the work building the portfolio of experience for BinaryPlex?  Both of these projects are fantastic in that they meet these criteria for us.

It's something Alex and I have always spoken about.  The reality is we've known for a while that we would need to do some consulting work, but we don't want to "be" consultants.  We're an internet startup, it's core to our DNA (and actually something I think we are getting MUCH better at being).  The way to manage this is to make sure that the consulting work we do isn't just a cash cow, but rather it grows and develops us and is aligned to our core expertise.  We think that's good for us, and good for our clients.

To help understand this – we've resisted opportunities to project manage, to do IT architecture work, or develop anything not aligned to social for money.  While we still have some choice (ie. cash runway left) then we can afford to exercise this discretion.  What I love about what we are doing is that we are passionate about it – I can't think of anything more I'd rather be doing than what I'm working on in BinaryPlex; if we're going to consult, then we retain our startup values by selecting work that we can be just as passionate about.

So on to startup related things – our newest project is coming along really well.  One measure of success for any small team must be that you really want to use you're own tool.  With our new super secret project that will enter a limited closed beta this week, we've hit on something that we both desperately want to use.  Every day we find new ways that it would be of use to us.  Something <a href="http://startup.alexdong.com/cut-the-rope-fast-and-eat-our-own-dog-food/ Continue reading →