Tim Bull

• Article in the Australian
• Generating some interest with our analysis
• Invite to the ALTA conference
• Meeting a market researcher looking for a tool - we have a meeting planned next week to see how we can coordinate and work together.

• Keep at it.  I can never pick which "thing" we do will generate the interest, but I'm convinced that it's not a "one off".  Consistency leads to recognition, not the individual post itself.

• Knuckle down and refine our messaging - the BinaryPlex website is not really doing our brand any good, it needs to be better aligned with the Tribalytic one now.
• Launch new engine to customers
• Follow ups

• Ship the new release

• 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.

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

• We charge ~$100 per month for access to Tribalytic.
• Let's assume that (because some people have bought us and returned) we deliver more than this in value.  The question is, how much more? More importantly, for who?
• I think realistically, the value we generate is currently at best a borderline amount. Why?  All our existing customers have other benefits - relationships, early adopters, a really specific business problem, that the more general customers don't.

• Vision - excitement despite the challenges.
• Finding a good niche where we can really help (but can we make money there... more on this in the future).

• Matching your activity to the mode you're actually in really works.  Direct sales time.
• Continually challenge and critique why you're doing what you're doing BUT stay focussed too.

• More meetings and setting up more for next week.
• Explore the idea we've come up with and see what the appetite for it really is.

• Fingers crossed, an early test release of the new improved engine ready for launch next week.

1. Having closed one deal, it's motivated us to try close more - there is one person out there who believes in the value we offer to the point they'll pay for it, there must be others.  Prior to this it was all a bit "hypothetical" as to if we could sell even one.
2. We've changed the nature of the beta.  Where it was "open" we now close it out after seven days.  We can't give away for free what someone is paying for and also we need to be able to bring beta customers to an action point, to measure their demand and convert them to paid customers.
3. Prior to signing our first customer, we were very much skiing down hill, having a good old time.  That first money through the door is like someone tapping you on the shoulder and pointing out that "Hey, this is all good fun, but you have to get back up that hill".  Again, it's not that we didn't know it, but now it quantifies it.  We need to do this another 100 times to get back to the top, and in the meantime we are still heading down the hill quite quickly.

While it's not yet true validation (there isn't any money down) we did confirm that what we are doing looks useful, is unique in some aspects and should be able to find a market.  Enough confirmation for us to proceed to the next phase - building a working prototype, pulling together the engineering and the design work to get to a functional product.

The lesson learnt from this?  Well in this case it was more a lesson confirmed - have printed copies of your screens.  I have a clear presentation folder that I keep presentations in, covering 6 slides.  1 title slide, 1 problem slide, 1 positioning slide, 2 detailed screens (with call outs to describe salient features) and 1 end slide (with contact details).

While I could demonstrate something on a laptop, the printed slides are brilliant.  I simply pull out the presentation folder and I can talk people through what we are doing around a table, on the steps outside a cafe, walking across southbank, in the full sun, in the wet - you name it.  

With them being reasonably structured, I can also target the page I want very quickly so I keep moving through to what is relevant at the time. I also keep a couple of extra copies so when people are really interested I can leave on behind.

Listening for feedback on screen design is a real art (and one that I haven't perfected at all) but something that was really useful is taking things away.  We found that when you show people a screen with some element on it, they can be fairly non-committal about it, but when you show them the same thing with the element missing, they become really vocal.

On the engineering side, we are champing at the bit to actually build the prototype out now, but we are back into that conflicting zone where getting on the road seems really important, but needs to be balanced with actually delivering what we are talking about as well!

Also, thank to everyone who's been reading these posts.  I'm always amused when people ask me "so what week is this", it's great to get feedback that there are people following along with the journey.

Highlights?

• Iterating through screen designs
  
• Lots of great people being very generous with their time and helping us to get to the core feature set
  
• Meeting a few people for the first time after lots of emails over the last few months
  
• Approaching our core "minimum functional product" such that we can at least start building now.
  

• Feeling the pressure of time conflicts again.
  

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.
  

• Still no product, but one is in sight now.
  

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.
  

• Continuing slow grind of progress.
• A week at home with no external contact gets lonely.  Got to keep the social side up too.

Progress remains slow.  I like to think that this is because finally we've set on the right challenge.  If what we are doing was too easy (i.e. we could knock it over inside a week or two), then we might be setting the bar too low.  We ARE progressing however and expect the new engine to be mostly complete early this week, which then leads to data transition tasks.

Something I spent a few days on which I enjoyed was working with the Yahoo Geo Coding APIs to locate take data from Twitter and locate people, an important part of our value proposition.  It proved to be an interesting challenge.  The stats are very promising - generally speaking real people (as opposed to bots or corporate accounts) provide good data about where they are.

Twendly continues to gather interest - it's great to see it still hanging in there without us really having done anything on it for several weeks now.   Even this morning we picked up a mention in a German marketing blog. I think they like us - my German is almost non-existent and I don't trust everything Google Translate says!

As has been hinted for a while, we formally "wound up" Hivemind and have now focused firmly on our new product, Tribalytic.  The best summary I've come up with is that with HiveMind there was clearly a business model, but we were clearly going to struggle being able to reach the market, with Twendly, we had a market, but there really wasn't a business model.  Finally with Tribalytic, we think we are on the right track - a tool for which there is both a market and a business model!

I had a great meeting with Michael Sampson from New Zealand about our change in direction and talking about what Enterprise can learn from the Internet, then a lunch with someone (big secret for now) who we've invited to be our first formal advisor (and still hoping they say yes).  So that was good progress in retrospect.

Having decided to switch directions I had to update our website and reflect our new direction.  I also needed to email our list of beta users and update them on what we are up to.  I chose to actually unsubscribe all these people from the list for a couple of reasons:

1. We are clearly doing something different now than what they signed up for, so it seems most ethical to actually tell them that and stop tracking their email address.
2. Early experiences showed that a "call to action" from a mailing list is a big challenge, so starting clean with people who at least WANT to be on the list is a useful thing.

Highlights?

• Meeting new people.
  
• Getting geocoding working.
• Updating website and integrating the mail list management.

• Just the slow grind of progress, nothing bad, just feel like we are moving through molasses at the moment.
  

• Playing with new (for me) technologies like MongoDB
• Lunch with Anne and Stephen Bartlett-Bragg.  Always a pleasure and always a good sounding board.
• Sitting by the Yarra for my final "face to face" meeting with Alex for a while on Thursday afternoon, reflecting on what we've achieved and what's to go.  Indulging in a bit of "what-if" and thinking out to June / July (something I generally try hard NOT to do).

• Low level gripes at myself for not getting as much done as I'd like.  Generally feeling tired all week.