Tag Archives: release

Reflections on startup life: Week 47

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Another week and another major new client.  Here's hoping I can say the same again next week too!

After a slow burn, we've hit a few runs with clients recently which is very re-assuring.  So much so we have some "key" clients we'll start advertising on our home page now.

Last week I said one goal with Distlr was to "Review Distlr with the people who used it (Survey most likely)".  Those rash few words lead to a lot of angst.  I sent multiple messages to registered users from the Distlr account which ended up in Twitter suspending it for spam, this put Distlr on hold until it was finally resolved later in the week.

We spent a bit of time on the Distlr pitch, testing it with a few advisors and rounding it out – it's getting there and most importantly we know exactly which gaps we need to close.  I think the only way to get better at pitching is to keep pitching, and coming into this the third time around we are progressing it so much faster and more smoothly too.

On the Tribalytic front, there was a new release over the weekend which adds export capability and an API into the tool, which will help people to help themselves a lot better.  What's worthy of note about this is that it represents the first time we've actually split a feature set by account – this is only available for the team account or higher. There are lots of reasons why, but ultimately it's part of the ongoing recognition and learning about where the value is and where the users are taking us.

Daylight savings and the three hour time difference is a shame – it is that little bit harder for Alex and I to work together.  I'm considering looking at something different this week – perhaps not starting quite as early as I typically do and instead do some exercise in the morning when it's nice and cool.

There's so much to do which is really exciting, loving the challenges and what's laid out in front of us.

Highlights

  • New release of Tribalytic
  • New client signed
  • Distlr pitch completed

Lessons Learned

  • Don't survey people from your Twitter account.

Goal this week – Engineering

  • Streaming and multi-channel support for Distlr – allow people to register their own channels.

Goal this week – Customers

  • Build a sales focussed Distlr deck (we only have an investment focussed one)
  • Set up meetings around Distlr and test the idea with Brands and Broadcasters (interested – let me know tim.bull@binaryplex.com)
  • Keep working the pipeline and trying to acquire customers for Tribalytic.

Reflections on start-up life: Week 41

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Wow! Two releases in two weeks.  That's right, we shipped a new release again over this weekend just gone.  It includes two important new features – a share of voice measure and an hourly average.

This changed plans slightly as we decided not to heavily push the last release, knowing that we would have a second one so shortly.  No point in spamming people with information.  As one of our PR consultants told us "keep your powder dry".

Now however, we are ready to go off with a bang.

Way back in Week 12, we traveled to Sydney and spent time in the offices of Mob-Labs with Alex and Rob.  They were really hospitable and had lots of great advice.  So this week, when I heard Rob was in Melbourne, I gate crashed a meeting to say hi.  He's also recently trialled Tribalytic as well and I was keen to get some feedback.  Rob had been instrumental in helping us shape our thinking at the time about what we'd do with Twendly coming off the Sydney visit so it was really pleasing to hear him describe Tribalytic as looking like a "really polished product now".  Far more than "the feature" it was described as in the past.

We also a review of our metrics and it looks like we are hitting the targets, but we aren't pushing enough people into top end of the funnel yet.  It's been a deliberate decision in many ways – iterate on the product and test it "softly" with people face to face to work out what key messaging is working and what we need to hit.  I think we have that now, we know what we are, what we aren't and can strongly articulate our value.  Now we have to be able to do this on the website and push volume through to test it.

It feels like a milestone – we've released a version that we are really happy with, that performs exceptionally well and delivers core value that is unique and differentiated from other tools on the market.  So now it's time to really start making a sing and dance about it.

Highlights
  • New release
  • Follow up with people
  • Demonstrating the new release features and getting very positive responses
Lessons Learnt
  • Keep iterating
  • Keep at it
  • It's worth stopping to review where the weaknesses are – they change from week to week as you strengthen some and neglect others.
Goal – All week
  • Publicity, publicity, publicity – let people know about what we are doing

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 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.