Tag Archives: reflections

Reflections on start-up life: Week 10

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== 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.

Highlights?
  • Moving to Ubuntu.
  • First pitch out to various mentors.
  • Some great meetings with some really helpful people.
Lowlights?
  • 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.
Goal this week?

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

Reflections on start-up life: Week Six

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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!

Reflections on start-up life: Week Five

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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.

Highlights?
  • Christmas lunch with our wives – a nice break and nice to share some time out with them.
  • Getting the website up and sending the first few closed invites out to a very few people.
  • Some great meetings discussing and demoing the site and doing lots of listening to the things people have to say.
  • Discovery that the site works quite well on the iPhone – it took a beating as a demo machine.
  • Setting some big challenges late on a Friday and *almost* getting there – only some test iterations to go Monday and we are done.
Lowlights?
  • 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.

 

Goal this week?
  • 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.

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.

Reflections on start-up life week two

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So the beginning of week three.  Last week started with a bang, we were charged up and excited after an excellent first week.  Unfortunately it didn’t stay that way.  It wasn’t a bad week at all, but I think the size of the challenge ahead is becoming a bit more obvious.

The technical side has had its challenges, but on the whole has progressed smoothly.  The decision to implement an AMQP Messaging bus will pay dividends in the long run, but has cost us time at the moment.  De-bugging a-synchronous message queues in a distributed architecture turns out to be harder than you’d think.  Ironically I’m now considering removing it anyway because the focus should be on getting the product into peoples hands, not Enterprise scale implementations – something others have tried to tell me but I think I’m just beginning to realise now.

Networking events also seem to be a bit hit and miss – I don’t mind them for the social side of things, but our customers often aren’t there.  The lesson here is go to these because you want to, not to “have” to meet anyone and you won’t be dissappointed.  A lot of events are now winding up anyway in the lead up to Christmas so it will be interesting to see how these play out next year.

One meeting that was excellent was to catch up with Mike Casey from Grad Connections who was down here in Melbourne – he’s got his own start-up with a couple of other business partners (http://www.gradconnections.com.au) and is very interesting to us because although in a different area, he’s also trying to sell to Enterprises as well so there is a lot to learn from him.  We had a good coffee in the city and he really challenged my thinking on a few things – ultimately the conclusion was we were going along pretty well for the second week, but we should really be doing more to speak with customers.

This led to me spending most of Thursday afternoon putting together a calling list and much of Friday cold-calling people. 

What did I learn from this?  Contact names are crucial, you need to know who you want to speak to.  Some organisations really need our product based on conversations with receptionists who had no idea about who would do “Knowledge Management” inside their organisation.  Speaking to IT is “easier” but not as productive – easier to reach them, but they aren’t interested unless the business tell them they need it (fair enough).

What’s interesting is how small setbacks (or even just things not going as well as they did) quickly turn into self-doubt about your product and idea.  It’s not helped by the many conversations about HiveMind that we have where people say “Oh, you could use this to xxx”, which is often true if we decided to veer left or right at this early stage.  What is the balance between tilting at windmills Vs. listening to people telling you how they want to use your product?

I always thought that this time of year would be a good one to start as it gives us a couple of months to get things developed during the quiet period of Christmas / New Years in Australia, however I wonder if this is wise now as the people we need to provide us feedback and guidance may be harder and harder to reach.

Roll on week three! Lots of interesting conversations scheduled – we are planning to use this time to reflect and gather feedback on the Darebin sprint and plan how we move forwards with the next Alphington sprint.

Highlights?
  • Meeting our commitment to the three week Darebin sprint with a week to spare.
  • Meeting with Mike Casey from Graduate Connections, it was really useful to share ideas and seek advice from someone who’s been there and done that.

 

Lowlights?
  • The daunting size of the challenge
  • Experiencing cold calling for the first time.
  • Self-doubt creeping in for the first time – is this a product that people really need?
  • Minor frustration with iPhone battery life – really the only thing about it I don’t like.  It does amazing things, however the minute you do any of them, it lasts about half a day before needing a re-charge.  It’s certainly different from the BlackBerry Bold – with the iPhone you need to keep it on the charger most of the time so you can get 6 – 8 hours out of it “on-the-road”.

 

If I could change on thing / goal this week?
  • Re-focus for the next sprint on a “hands on” version of HiveMind.

Reflections on start-up life week one

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I have been a little busy lately, what with finishing up at PwC and now launching into BinaryPlex.  I make no promises, but I’d like to try and make this a weekly habit, to review the progress and what’s happened.

Firstly, to reflect on leaving PwC after 15 years – it was nothing like what I expected.  I thought I’d feel more… emotional I guess.  But it turns out that walking out the door and saying good bye was an easy transition.  With all the preparation that we’ve been doing over the last month or two, it was simply a major milestone down allowing the new adventure to begin.    I’ll miss the people but that’s the great thing about people, you don’t have to say good bye to them just because you’ve left the building.

The weekend was pretty relaxed before the first day of BinaryPlex.  One thing that’s very clear to me is that this is a marathon, not a sprint — burning myself and my family out before I even start won’t cut it.  That’s not to say I don’t work on the weekends either (I spent a fair bit of time coding yesterday while it was wet outside), but on weekends it’s not to the exclusion of the family.

Monday came and we got straight into it.  The first item for the day was a massive sprint planning session, working out the first set of milestones on the way to our beta release.  We’ve really challenged ourselves (well we think we have anyway!) to heed the lessons we learnt from those who’ve been before us and shared at BootUp Camp.  The lesson we are listening to the most at the moment is “Focus” (Mick Liubinskas of Pollenizer).

We went through all our photo-shopped designs and tried to get it back to the one critical screen (it turned in to two) that we needed for the Darebin sprint (note on the sprint names in a moment).  This was a fantastic exercise and we took a long time (almost four hours) to complete and categorise all the functionality and place it into the release.  Even after three to four months in planning, we still learnt lots through this process on what is critical to HiveMind and its operation and goes to show that you can’t replace face to face.

As far as sprint names go, I like a good name for a project – it’s more memorable, you don’t get confused about Sprint 2 vs. Sprint 3 (or 26 vs. 27) but you don’t want to waste time thinking of them either.  We are naming ours after the train stations on my train line, starting with Darebin (my station) and working back to Melbourne.  The only minor concern as an AFL fan is that we can’t finish on the Collingwood sprint, I just can’t do it.

Tuesday was architecture day.  Perhaps it depends on how you think, but I’m very visual and creating a block architecture of HiveMind went a LONG way to even further clarifying what we are trying to achieve and sped up the communication between Alex and I as we could point to the components we meant.  It gave us a common vocabulary to discuss and understand the components.  From this, the modules for HiveMind were then laid out and the testing framework setup.  Not too bad by Tuesday afternoon.  It also became apparent early on that we’d need a Message Queuing architecture as well and this has been factored in now.

Alex then pushed ahead with the coding, throwing out the prototype work that had been done and now re-writing that into production code.  The vast majority of the core engine was completed by Friday (don’t get excited though – there is a lot around the edges).

There’s also been marketing and administration tasks continuing as well – we’ve met with the accountants and have almost finished signing off the various documentation needed.  I continue to read widely, looking for people doing similar things, learning and contributing to blogs (one of the most effective ways to get sign-ups on our beta page http://www.binaryplex.com is to make a meaningful comment on a related post).

We’ve managed to get along to a couple of events too, one I really enjoyed was attending the Securus Global christmas party in Melbourne.  I’m friends with and worked with their founder Drazen in Sydney many years ago (almost 15 – when I first joined PwC!) but we’d lost contact until we recently re-connected through Twitter.  It was great to meet some real tech brains (security geeks tend to be like that), practice pitching HiveMind in a friendly environment to people that have a strong bull-shit detector and of course catch up with Drazen as well.

To help move our timelines forwards, we’ve been looking into out-sourcing our designs to take the photoshop work and turn it into both a unique look and feel and get the HTML / CSS done while we keep moving on the Engine.  This has meant briefing and talking to a few design agencies as well.

So it was an action packed and extremely productive first week.

Highlights?
  • Freedom to make decisions and move fast.  
  • Ability to “do it right” – we haven’t skimped on testing or process, but we’ve picked the best ones for the job we are doing.
  • Excitement about getting started.
  • Securus christmas party and meeting some great people.
  • My new iPhone – yes an indulgence but I’m in love with it.  After missing my BlackBerry it’s great to be back on air again while on the go.

Lowlights?
  • Wasting my time going to Hive on Tuesday when it had been cancelled.  My fault for not reading the updates correctly, but too much to do to waste time going to an event that wasn’t on.
  • Telstra cancelling my mobile phone number in error.  It was an incredibly stressful couple of hours running around to get it re-instated.  Lesson learnt – ring them, don’t go to the Telstra Shop (waste of time and no help at all).

If I could change on thing / goal this week?
  • Not enough focus on customers last week – some networking but we need to get around to our beta sign-ups and start communicating.