Tag Archives: press

Reflections on Start-Up life: Week 44

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It was a short week, I worked Monday and Tuesday then from Wednesday I've been off on leave. It's been a great holiday so far. Much needed, yet I can't shake the feeling I'm “cheating” on myself – this is time to be putting in, not taking off.

Still, the start-up world never stops, it just slows down. I can't confess to fully stepping away from the laptop (or the iPhone and email!).

I've been keeping up with my reading and researching. Two big pieces of news happened last week. Brizzly.com, a web based Twitter client announced a deal to sell to AOL. Then on Wednesday the big news was that Twitter launched the “New Twitter” website. So guess what our big idea (Project X) is – yeah, a Twitter client.

You can't beat that for timing! We think we'll play with a radical new Twitter client idea on Monday, and on Wednesday Twitter launch a radical new Twitter client. Does it change the plan, not really – the idea we have is sufficiently niche and differentiated that the new Twitter client and what we have in mind don't compete. It does however potentially change the investment landscape. As we read “you won't find an investor now willing to touch anything with the words 140 or Twitter in the pitch”.

Still, even post the New Twitter announcement, Alex has continued to talk and pitch with Angels and the Angel Community and the interest is still there. What's clear is that there is a major proof point for this idea which is “will people switch to use our client in the niche we are after”. If yes, we have a winner. If no, it may as well die now.

So Alex continues with the prototype, and I continue lining up some meetings while on leave for when I get back to see how this can play out.

Perhaps the highlight of the holiday (from a work perspective) so far was a phone call I received on Thursday. I was sitting enjoying lunch at Wet 'N Wild when I noticed a missed call. Turns out that our press release had made it's way to the desk of the right person inside The Australian and they wanted to write about us for an article published today here http://bit.ly/9o8jRS

I rang them back and did an on the spot “interview” covering the key points of Tribalytic while surrounded by the sounds of screaming kids having fun. It was great! What's pleasing now is that our press release has yielded some decent online coverage and some good contacts for the next time now – we have contacts with the right people who cover our type of product and marketplace.

The right contacts are critical – if you want a “big bang” then you need to let people know well ahead of time and co-ordinate. Not knowing who to talk to makes this hard and you end up with a “spray and pray”. My advice though, it's worth it. If you don't know who to tell, tell everyone and hope, it's better than doing nothing. I doubt we will do such a broad and general press release of this sort however again now we have some contacts.

I had an opportunity to apply for a contract before we left. It was an interesting decision process. On the one hand, we could make some good money that would help us out for several months. On the other, it would put everything on hold for 3 – 6 months. It was a tough call, but we (Alex and I) decided to stick with our start-up guns – you have to be in the game to play the game. We are not ready to step back yet.

Perhaps the interesting part of the this process is the regard we have for each other. I think that sometimes we try and second guess each other too much – it's a natural human instinct, we are both “nice guys” and we don't want to see either of us get burnt in this start-up process. Yet it's not always what's best for BinaryPlex. We need to be a lot more ruthless about asking “What's best for the business” not “What's best for Tim or Alex”.

That doesn't mean we have to be horrible to each other at all – quite the opposite in fact (that would be bad for business). But when we worry about each other too much, we break down an important balance. If I'm making my decision in part based on what's best for me, then I rely on Alex providing a perspective purely on what's best for BinaryPlex. This makes sure we have a balanced decision process and I can sound off my own personal objectives against his reasoned view on what's right for the company.  

We have another shorter term opportunity which is better aligned for which we also need to make a hard decision on very shortly. The positive here is that there is work (consulting / contracting) around, the challenge – when do we have to take it. And will it be there when we need it if we don't?

Our SEO efforts of several weeks ago are paying off, although we are ranking too high in some areas perhaps unintentionally. I had a very strange meeting with someone who had rung us up and against my better judgement I went to meet him, not sure what he was wanting. Turns out he thought we were experts in something because he found our site, while we thought he wanted to buy Tribalytic. After 15 minutes we had this “aha” moment where we realised neither of us was who we thought. We politely ended the meeting in record time and left.

For me the rest of the week is keeping things bubbling over while also enjoying my break. Lots of interesting things to keep working on and thinking about. For now, Australia zoo and Bindy the Jungle girl beckon.

Highlights

  • Holidays and lots of time with the family
  • Interview with The Australian

Lessons Learnt

  • Calypso Bay at Wet and Wild not best place to do an interview
  • What you write in your press release and what the journalist runs prove to be two different things.  The press release so far seems to be more a teaser to get an interview rather than something that's used as written (I'm sure that happens, but so far they've been what's baited the hook, not the outcome).
  • Even on holidays you can't stop. Not that I really wanted to.

Goal this week

  • Few more theme parks
  • Start lining up meetings for next week so I can hit the road running when I get back.

Reflection on start-up life: Week Three

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I can’t believe three weeks has gone already and what do we have to show for it. Quite a bit really, but not much in other ways.

It’s really interesting to reflect back on the thoughts I wrote for the end of Week Two.  Self-doubt creeping in – check, here in spades this week.  The daunting size of the challenge? Check, it gets bigger the more we learn about it. Re-focus for a hands on version? Yes, did that too.

One thing I’ve already come to value is our Monday mornings.  We spend a good couple of hours talking and thinking strategically about what we are up to, planning the week and the milestones.  It’s a great time to do it actually because on the weekends, we usually manage to step away from the computer for a bit and reflect, so come Monday we are full of questions and ideas.  It’s good to tackle these and get on with things.

This weekend the self-doubt appears to be back again.  There are two crucial questions – will the Engine work and even if it works, does it do anything people really want?  Of course the answer during the week when you’re wheeling and dealing, coding like a demon and focussing full-time on it is “absolutely”, but at 3AM in the morning a small door opens up in the mind and you really wonder what you’re doing and why.

Last week, the Monday session attempted to tackle this by taking the Darebin milestone and re-focussing it towards something that people could “get their hands on”.  We’ve decided to build an automated Twitter List bot – it uses HiveMind to work out who demonstrates the expertise you want to build your list around and maintains it automatically.  I know this sounds a bit of a tangent, but it does deliver a few things we think are important.

  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.

Interestingly a lot of people are excited about this idea so it will be fun to see where it goes.

We also met with a lot of people this week and did a few social events as well.  It was exciting to sit down and talk with people about HiveMind.  The analogy on where we are at however is it’s somewhat like a car salesman talking to people about a cool engine (which is what we’ve got), unfortunately most of the customers buy cars (which we are still trying to decide exactly what car we put our engine into).  That said, we’ve now got one customer willing to hot rod HiveMind himself and another who’s taking us to meet their developers soon.  Maybe you can sell an engine without a car?

It’s this point that leads to the self-doubt however – engines are hard work, but to be blunt, the car (in this case the website that sits around the outside) is even harder and needs a lot of things (security, rights, permissions etc.) which aren’t really core to the engine at all.  We’ve asked around a lot and got a lot of validation on the vision, at some point there is a leap of faith needed to just build the car.  Still for now we are continuing the market research and trials a bit further.

Perhaps the biggest highlight of the week was the blog article on NextWebAU http://thenextweb.com/au/2009/12/03/hivemind-revolutionary-expertise-discovery-engine-enters-closed-beta that was a significant milestone and one that drove around 40 beta sign-ups since it was released.  We certainly saw a bit of interest from around the globe.  It drives the need for us to get our own look and feel now which has been on the to do list bit we haven’t hit the go button yet.

Alex and I have fallen naturally into some different roles and I think are working very well together.  He’s the gun engineer and churns out code like crazy, constantly re-factoring the engine and improving it and the things around it.  To let him do this, I seem to be getting the “curly” questions – given I have to research pretty much everything I do on the technical side anyway (my coding abilities being a lot weaker than Alex’s, although I’m improving) I may as well research the problems that are going to hold us up.  This has good and bad sides.  I feel like I’m contributing, but if you give me a technical problem, I get like a dog with a bone.  I can’t give it up and get sucked down the rabbit hole.

Let’s just say the problem I hit this week was solved with detailed reading of at least two Internet protocol specifications, a HTTP packet sniffer, reverse engineering calls to another site, a LOT of reading and eventually re-writing the third-party library I’d picked up from scratch myself.  Boy did I feel good when I nailed it this morning though!

Stress (I think it was the bugs) got a bit out of hand, although I think the cold contributed too, I woke at 3AM on Friday and worked from 4AM till 9.30ish, then again on Saturday, woke at 1AM and managed to stay in bed until 6AM, but slept very poorly.  Tonight however, it’s time for me to hit the sack and having squashed the bug, I feel great.  A bit of exercise yesterday and today really helped clear my head too.

I wrote this on Sunday evening so Alex could read this as well (he only checks feeds once a week – he’s very good at staying focussed), but I think I might have it a bit late, he’s also more disciplined about going to bed earlier!

Highlights?
  • Kicking off the Alphington sprint and feeling like we might soon have a product around the engine that people can interact with.
  • Meetings with lots of great people who have all contributed a lot to our thinking and knowledge.
  • First commitment to test the engine in a live customer environment.
  • Press release and the surge in beta signups.
Lowlights?
  • Don’t talk to me about Open Auth protocols (OAuth).
  • Don’t talk to me about HTTP Verbs and bad library implementations.
  • Being awake at 3AM two mornings in a row.
  • Wasting too much time – not “letting things go” and moving on quick enough some times.
  • Lack of time to do everything we’d like to do as well as we’d like to do it.
If I could change on thing / goal this week?
  • Focus on the bare minimum to get the Twendly / Alphington release out the door and live to customers.