Tag Archives: progress

Reflections on startup life: Week 38

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With a new release on the immediate horizon, the mood is picking up again.  All the work and frustration over the last few weeks is starting to gel together with a clearer idea on where we are going,  a much better understanding of the market and some strong ideas on bridging the gap.

As I’ve said to a couple of people, I’m now confident that we are on the right track, it’s just that we might be on the slow train and need to do something about that!

I’m constantly grateful for peoples generosity. So many helpful people have given their time and advice which has helped us shape our thoughts about where we are going over the next couple of weeks.  If there is a startup lesson hear it’s basically 100% agreement with the idea that you should surround yourself with good advisors.

I think most critical is having someone who understands your business. You need an independent ear who is involved and understands what you’ve been doing and has a history with you.  My regular meetings with Doris are very useful in this regard, I don’t need to explain our vision each time, we get right to talking about how we are going to get there.

As far as specialist, industry advisors go, we’ve been fortunate in that we’ve met these people as we need to. People always seem willing to listen and support entrepreneurs and generally have admiration for our endeavor, they have always been willing to share thoughts for an hour or two over a coffee.  Perhaps this is one advantage of Melbourne over Silicon Valley.  Tech startups here are few enough that people are interested and want to help as opposed to being so frequent on the ground that you have to defend yourself against them!

On the marketing front, a few things moved with a bang – did a blog interview to be published soon on TechFluff.tv and spent some time with a freelance journalist who is hoping to develop a story around us (or is it us hoping – I can never tell anymore).

This coincides with the new release which we should launch this week and will push more broadly now we will have the performance to meet the interest. Yes, Alex has achieved our goal of sub-second for every query and it’s in the final stages of integration. It’s a massive improvement – basically the new engine which he has completely rewritten is around 500x faster.

What this lets us do is move forward on some important issues – for example, reports are needed but previously were taking about 10 – 15 minutes to produce because of the performance (if you have 20 queries at 30 seconds each in a report, that’s 10 minutes).  So we had to have an offline reporting system, which meant we needed batch control, which meant…. and so on.  Painful.  Now the same report can be produced in around 20 seconds on the screen directly because each query is around 1 second with the new engine.

Highlights

  • Meetings with some really generous people with their time, thoughts and expertise.
  • Good client meetings
  • Another repeat customer – repeat customers are great.
  • Decisions and moving forwards.
Lessons Learnt

  • Keep at it and bounce ideas and thoughts widely, there are talented experts out there who are generous with their time if they know you have a problem.

Goal this week – Customers

  • Refine our inbound marketing messages
  • Reach out to everyone who has used Tribalytic to promote the new release

Goal this week – Engineering
  • New release

 

Reflections on start-up life: Week 30

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Tribalytic-clinkers-paternity

Still waiting for the hockey stick – after signing the first customer the second, third and fourth are still “in the pipeline”.  With a new release over the weekend, we have something to go back to a few people now and try close some deals.

We pushed the Victoria Park release out the door after a huge amount of effort from Alex in particular.  It adds several new features as well as a few bug fixes and behaviour changes:
  1. Share link – people who have an account can share the findings with anyone, even if the person they are sharing with doesn’t have an account.  As well as being really useful, we believe this will give a more viral component to Tribalytic (you find something, share it with a client, they sign up and so forth).  Still a lot more optimisation to go, but the feature is there and working now.  Here’s my current favourite search - http://tribalytic.com/s/h/
  2. Reports – From any search you can click and create a new report which gives a four week comparison.  It’s not complete as released, but it does let you produce and print the reports – the next milestone will let you have these generated as a PDF and emailed to you.  Get the feature out early and let people experience and feedback on it is our motto.
  3. Saved Search – Found something interesting (or have lots of filters to exclude unrelated information)? Save it to come back to it.
  4. Inline help – popups to describe the various features.
Technically 1 2 and 3 are all closely related under the hood, so it makes sense to push them at the same time (the Share Link feature for example is really a direct link to a Saved Search, but Anonymous users lose some features).

The breadth of activity in a startup is what makes this all so enjoyable (and frustrating).  In the last week I’ve coded, prepared and delivered a sales presentation, blogged, scripted a video, drew the artwork for the video, provided support, managed the design process for the new home page, networked and done more coding.  I haven’t done any one of around fifty other things I could be doing, notably the “books” which need a bit of attention and I haven’t touched since before San Francisco.

The design process of the new homepage which we outsourced has been one of the scariest things we’ve done.  It’s got a lot to do with three things:
  1. It’s the first thing we both knew we COULDN’T do ourselves to the level of professionalism we require.
  2. It’s really important to us, so it’s been a struggle to let someone else do this piece.
  3. It’s spending money that we don’t have.
I’m pleased to say that we do have a result now that we are happy with, I think the designers weren’t expecting the level of theory and analysis we brought to the process, and they’ve learnt a bit too.  One thing out of all this I’ve appreciated is a great community of startups here in Melbourne who’ve provided feedback along the way – after looking at something for the last few weeks, it’s hard to be objective about it.

Finally – for those that don’t read it, you might like to check out http://blog.tribalytic.com which is where I blog a couple of times a week on insights and things we are uncovering with Tribalytic.  I’m still struggling with what gets a reaction here – other than typically the things I think are most interesting generally resonate less.

Highlights
  • Next release out the door.
  • Blogging happening on a more regular basis.
  • Inbound marketing site design completed, now to be implemented.
  • Presentation to a potential client – I love getting out of the office into the City and sharing what we are up to.
Lowlights
  • Nothing really.  More a reflection this week – we need to push more changes, more frequently in smaller increments.  Still run a two week iteration, but we should push individual components sooner where we can.
Goal this week
  • Customers, final cut of the video, market the new features.

Reflections on start-up life: Week 19

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Two weeks now until we head off to San Francisco so the pressure is rapidly increasing with every day we spend working on getting the prototype "out the door".

The challenge is that we perhaps underestimated just how complex the actual web interface would be.  It's not just rendering back-end content, but delivers a fully cached local data store with many elements to make it a dynamic client experience.  It's not a web site, it's a web application.  That said, it's now partially complete and working, with some more elements to go.

On the very positive front, we are really pleased to welcome Doris Spielthenner as our first formal advisor.  Doris was a managing partner at FAS.research in the US and has her own data analytics company here in Melbourne, http://www.idu-consult.com.  She's described as "one of the world's leading experts and practitioners in applying social network analysis to real-world problems" by former colleagues and with her extensive list of publications and research papers along with her experience in the field of data and social analytics she's a great person for us to have on board and to keep us on the straight and narrow!

Not everything was highly beneficial – I attended a talk on the Commercialisation Australia Grant which was very dull.  I did enjoy catching up with Mark Mansour for a coffee afterwards though.

Thursday was very entertaining. First a good mornings work, then off to lunch with Fenn from Adioso and chatting about AMQP / RabbitMQ / Celery implementations followed by a "super secret" developers workshop in the afternoon (can't yet tell you what for, it's under NDA but no doubt it will come up later).

On Friday I met with John Barratt who developed http://www.trendmaps.com and is off to the Twitter conference in San Francisco as well.  It was great to meet up with a local twitter developer and share thoughts (well, me pick his brains really) on geo-locating tweets.

Finally the processing pipeline finally went live which was great.  It's needed a few tweaks, but generally is working really well.  I'm now cranking up the various components to make it much more aggressive about refreshing and location users for us.

We are now at around 17,000 Australian Twitter users fully indexed and up to date – I want to grow this to around 50,000 by next Monday.

Highlights?

  • Doris agreeing to come on board as our first advisor.
  • A partial prototype.
  • The processing pipeline fired up and working.  Very impressed with the quality and robustness of AMQP, RabbitMQ and Celery in combination.
  • Getting the pipeline up and running in production.

Lowlights?

  • Too easy – Commercialisation Australia Talk.  Shoot me before I agree to any more government talks.
  • Too much to do, too little time.

Goal this week?

  • Complete to a point that we can start showing the prototype to people.
  • Index, index and index more Australian Twitter users.

Reflections on start-up life: Week 16

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There is something about actually visualising output that feels like progress for me.  Never mind that we'd spent 4 weeks crunching the numbers and doing all the "heavy lifting" to get to the point we could start working on the icing, but that last 2 days of effort where we could see and "touch" data at the end of it felt like progress in a way that the proceeding time didn't.

Yes, we finally managed to get the first cut of our prototype done and it felt great! Now of course there is a lot more to do, further revision, further modification and lots of market conversations with different parties, but we are moving forwards, and more importantly it feels mentally to me like we are moving forwards.

The lesson here is that fast iterations are critical for well being.  Even though I occasionally advocate for the long road (some tasks you can't just bite off in a day), there is no doubt that mentally I feel better when we are on the fast iteration path.  It's also the challenge of living on the bleeding edge with technology; progress can tend to be very lumpy.  For every day you progress ten times faster than others could because of your technology choices, there are occasional weeks where the learning curve can overwhelm you for a while.

Highlights?

  • Playing with real data out of the engine
  • Finishing the message queue architecture
  • Working with the prototype screens and thinking about how people use the data.
  • Some great meetings with a couple of potential clients who really "got" the value of what we are doing.
Lowlights?
  • Still no product, but one is in sight now.


Goal this week?

Yay! A new goal – iterate on the prototype and start to show it to people and seek feedback.

Reflections on start-up life: Week 15

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This last week get very close to a repeat of week four.  The reasons were similar (scale of problem becoming clearer and a real challenge), but this time we decided to keep pushing through.  The opportunity delivered by solving the engine problems are too great to ignore. 

It should be said that it's not all doom and gloom – the current version of the new engine can already deliver very similar functionality to Twendly in a fraction of the time with significant scalability, so that's one significant engineering challenge down.

I guess the doubt creeps in because the longer we get from the decision point "we need a new engine" the more we really feel we are flying blind.  At the time we made the decision, there was a lot of clarity on why we needed it, but we also thought it would take a couple of weeks.  Four weeks in, the decision point is fading and we now start to feel like we are not sure why we are doing it.  On the other hand, taking time off to go back and reconnect to re-clarify, while probably a good thing, just pushes the engine out further.  In the end it comes down to trusting that the people Alex and I were four weeks ago when we made the decision haven't fundamentally changed – we could waste a lot of time second guessing ourselves or revisiting, but I think we need to accept that we were right and get the job done.  (Of course maybe the Tim and Alex of four weeks ago thought the Tim and Alex now would be a lot smarter than we are, but then I thought they would of left better documentation too.)

One downside of only having two people in your start-up is you've only got yourself to blame and it does seem to skirt close to insanity :-)

With that out the way, I do think some breakthroughs happened over the weekend – as Alex succinctly puts it "We've been confusing the scalability and the algorithm problems". 

Without trying to get too technical here, the problem is that the scalable solution we are building uses technology that is very fixed in its use cases – the way you design the data structures dictates how you'll use them.  We've been trying to build to much of this end use case into the data, instead of dealing with it in a less aggregated format that we can get at really fast, then using live processing power to aggregate further.  This might just let us be more flexible (and give us other scaling challenges down the path, but we are happy to have those if we get there!).

The other significant technical milestone has been a lot of work on my part in message queuing systems.  While it's again taken longer than it I would of liked, we've actually now got some really solid design and test cases for a very robust and scalable processing pipeline.  This lets us handle more complex solutions a lot better, but now requires some rewriting of core modules from complex sets of instructions to simpler tasks.

We keep pushing forwards and I have my fingers crossed that we'll have made some much more visual progress by next week.

Highlights?

  • Message queuing working properly.
  • An inkling of light at the end of the engine tunnel.
  • Catching up with a few mates on the phone.
Lowlights?
  • Continuing slow grind of progress.
  • A week at home with no external contact gets lonely.  Got to keep the social side up too.


Goal this week?

Same as last week – get that first prototype out the door ASAP.