Tag Archives: startup

Reflections on startup life: Week 54

Leave a reply

Last week was a cracker – lots done, both of our contracts have had substantial progress and are 80% – 90% done now.

The great news is we freed up some time to focus on our new, now not so super-secret project.  For the curious, it's called http://trunk.ly and it's a social bookmark and curation service.  If you share inks via social media, and frequently click on "like this" buttons on websites that link back to Facebook, Trunk.ly collects all the links you share and stores them for you.  You can then search the links and filter them to quickly and easily find a link you've shared again.  Contact me if you're interested in a beta invite (or sign up on the website, but we aren't releasing new invites generally at the moment).

What's interesting on reflection is that Trunk.ly represents a lot of our learning over the last 12 months.  There are many things we are doing with Trunk.ly for the first time which reflect what we've learnt and experienced:

  1. Finally we've found a consumer facing business model (we haven't implemented it yet, but Trunk.ly will not be a B2B proposition in it's early phases).
  2. Scarcity.  I think in the past we've thrown things too open too soon.  It's made it hard to asses and value what's happening.  With scarcity, we can have a balance between getting feedback (critical) but also using it to iterate and measure impact and differences.
  3. Measurement. We have detailed measurement of everything people do on the site.  This is a big change from previous products.  Google Analytics is NOT enough – we need to know exactly how people use the site, what features they click on and how often.  Our custom metrics are probably the thing we look at the most.
  4. Profiling:  A result of the metrics, but we have some customer profiles now and are already beginning to understand how different people use Trunk.ly and are able to react accordingly.
The contract work (and consequent money in the bank) has also given us a slightly longer term view of projects.  We can afford to iterate ideas and test them.  If you get measurement right, then you really are well placed to ask and answer questions by trying things, not pontificating about them.

Highlights

  • Progress with Trunk.ly and with contracts.

Lessons Learned

  • It's easy to over-commit! No harm is done to our projects by putting them on the back burner for a week or two, no matter how hard that is for us emotionally.

Goal this week

  • Lots of Trunk.ly iterations.
  • Talking at Ignite Melbourne this week (Ignite is a fixed format presentation – 5 minute talk, 20 slides, auto advancing every 15 seconds).
  • Complete the contracts

Reflections on startup life: Week 53

Leave a reply
I admit to some nagging thoughts in the back of my mind.

Last week was busy – we are delivering two contracts between Alex and I, continuing to operate Tribalytic and work on our own projects.  But that's not exceptional or even interesting, lots of people are very busy.  For us the novelty is perhaps that whilst we are very busy, we are actually being paid this time around.  But that's not exceptional or even interesting, lots of people get paid for the work they do (just not us normally!).

I did attend a networking event (Hive Melbourne) which had an excellent talk by Nathan from Inspire9 which I largely agreed with – about doing work your passionate about.  This is something I believe strongly in – doing work aligned to what you know and love.

So if we're being paid, doing work that aligns with our goals and in areas that are interesting to us, why does it nag at me?

I worry that we will slip into the lure of the lucre.  It's very easy to be tempted by making some cash, and it's essential that we do – we both have bills to pay and families to contribute to and feed.

But if we do contract after contract, we'll end up a contracting company and won't be a startup anymore.  So at the heart of what's bothering me this week is how do we take what I think will work well for us (bit of contract, work on startup, another contract, work on startup) and find that equilibrium that lets us do a great job for clients, but also lets us be 100% focussed on our own projects.

I guess I'll just have to wait and find out – with these two contracts almost completed we'll have money in the back to see us through the Christmas period until end of January and at least 6- 8 weeks of work on our own projects.

Highlights
  • 1st draft report done on one contract
  • Testing of new release of super-secret-project which I should announce to all here in the next day or so.
  • Networking at Hive
Lessons Learned
  • When you're at your most stressed and busiest, exercise is the LAST thing you should drop, not the first.
  • Even when things are going well in a startup you can find things to worry about!
Goal this week
  • Announce super-secret project to more people.
  • Finish first contract off.
  • Near-completion of second contract.

Reflections on Startup life: Week 50

Leave a reply

Did you miss me? It's been bugging me all week that I haven't yet done my weekly post.  Let's just all pretend this is Monday and move on :-)

After 50 weeks of this, I think it's only the second time I haven't posted on Monday yet.  The excuse is a good one.  I went camping with the family up in Buchan.  Turns out that there are places in Victoria which DON'T GET THE INTERNET! Not even mobile reception (unless you're with Tel$tra).  So that was up until Tuesday, when we came home (Melbourne Cup day).

On Wednesday I had to get up early to return the hire car, then it was straight into the city for something new.  For the next few weeks I'm working with Sustainability Victoria on some Social Media Analysis work, so I didn't get a chance yesterday (was going to bash it out on the train, but battery was flat).  So here I am, Thursday morning, writing Monday morning's post.

So what's going on around here – last weeks post was pretty brief.  I think this is because we are getting busier.

We've just signed a couple of contracts – the consulting gig I'm working on at the moment with Sustainability Victoria and a development project with SportsGeek.  We always thought we'd have to do some consulting work to help "keep the boat afloat", but we also want to carefully select what we do – is it aligned to our values and interests, can we do a great job, do we like the people and is the work building the portfolio of experience for BinaryPlex?  Both of these projects are fantastic in that they meet these criteria for us.

It's something Alex and I have always spoken about.  The reality is we've known for a while that we would need to do some consulting work, but we don't want to "be" consultants.  We're an internet startup, it's core to our DNA (and actually something I think we are getting MUCH better at being).  The way to manage this is to make sure that the consulting work we do isn't just a cash cow, but rather it grows and develops us and is aligned to our core expertise.  We think that's good for us, and good for our clients.

To help understand this – we've resisted opportunities to project manage, to do IT architecture work, or develop anything not aligned to social for money.  While we still have some choice (ie. cash runway left) then we can afford to exercise this discretion.  What I love about what we are doing is that we are passionate about it – I can't think of anything more I'd rather be doing than what I'm working on in BinaryPlex; if we're going to consult, then we retain our startup values by selecting work that we can be just as passionate about.

So on to startup related things – our newest project is coming along really well.  One measure of success for any small team must be that you really want to use you're own tool.  With our new super secret project that will enter a limited closed beta this week, we've hit on something that we both desperately want to use.  Every day we find new ways that it would be of use to us.  Something <a href="http://startup.alexdong.com/cut-the-rope-fast-and-eat-our-own-dog-food/ Continue reading →

Reflection on startup life: Week 48

Leave a reply

Too much to do, to little time to write, but after 48 weeks I can't stop now.  So a collection of loose thoughts.

  1. Everyone needs a cofounder.  More importantly you need a cofounder with a different perspective.  How else can you have hard discussions.
  2. You're not pivoting as fast as you could be. We weren't.
  3. Ideas need time to gestate.  That doesn't mean you sit around and waiting to see what hatches – do something else in the mean time.
  4. Excellent ideas can still be excellent ideas with a very small addressable market.  It makes them no less excellent, it does however make them a poor business decision.
  5. If you don't know the addressable market, guess. Then divide by 1000.  If it still looks attractive then maybe.
  6. Keep moving forwards.
  7. Ideas seed in unexpected ways.  But you have to keep seeding ideas.
  8. You can always change your mind later.
  9. From the time you say – lets meet with some potential customers to the time that actually happens is 2 – 3 weeks minimum.
  10. All of this is an excuse to avoid cold calling.
Highlights
  • Money in the bank
  • Good discussions
  • Feels like lots of things are sparking around the place.
Lessons Learned
  • I think point 3 above sums it up well.
Goal this week
  • Client meetings
  • Keep moving forwards

Reflections on startup life: Week 47

Leave a reply
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 startup life: Week 45

Leave a reply

The rest of the holiday cruised by very nicely.  I took one day "off" to work (love the iPhone and tethering for keeping me online wherever I go).  Aside from that, plenty of theme parks and generally a good time.

Still, I was itching to get home.  It's great to be back in the office and at the PC with something more intellectual to do than psyching myself up for the next thrill ride with a fearless 10 year old.

We got back Saturday and on Sunday morning, I headed off early to Trampoline (http://trampolineday.com).  It's a fantastic un-conference where the content is directed / created by the attendees.  I did a session on Internet Privacy called "Stalking Lara" where I demonstrated how much I could find out about Lara from her online presence.  I had a lot of fun and it seemed well received.

From a start-up perspective, there were lots of reflections from my time off.  Top of mind thought are:
  1. Our new project still has a lot of potential, BUT is it a "hole" that Twitter might fill. Or is it a Killer App.  I think it's a Killer App, but then I'm an eternal optimist or I wouldn't be in a startup at all!
  2. Are we "crossing the chasm" with Tribalytic at the moment? If so, what are the activities we need to do differently.
Media_httpuploadwikim_qrubf

There are new challenges this week – a quote to prepare for an interesting side project which we are keen to do (money in the bank now is a good thing at the moment).  It's ideal because it's a) aligned to our skills and what we are about b) relatively short (couple of weeks) so we don't get side tracked too much.

The big decision today is around the repeat of the AFL Grand Final – it's an ideal chance to trial our new project.  IF we decide to go for it, then we have a great opportunity to reach out and get it in front of a really strong local audience.  The timing of the Grand Final was just a little tight, but with it being repeated a week later, there's a great opportunity – thank goodness for the draw.

Finally, a thank you to everyone I caught up with at Trampoline and in particular to those of you who mentioned this blog.  It's always great to hear from people reading it.  It prompted me to go back and look at the stats – perhaps strangely to you reading this, I still largely think of this as a relatively private conversation between Alex and I.  Last weeks post had over 3,000 reads.

At this rate we might make more money embedding Ad Words into my blog about the startup than the startup itself! (kidding – I hope).

Highlights

  • Playing with and thinking about the new project – shiny new ideas are attractive.
  • Trampoline – shiny new ideas are attractive.

Lessons Learnt

  • A reflection on this blog in a way.  Keeping at something gets it out there.  The same is true for Tribalytic.  One impact of the holiday is a drop off in the sign up rate.  We stopped pushing the Tribalytic blog and we've stopped getting organic sign ups.  Might be back to blogging this week a bit.
  • Holidays are good.  I read with interest yesterday Dave McClure's latest on Why NOT to do a startup.  I fail already because I DO love my wife more than my startup, hence we had a holiday! That said, I'd challenge Dave (who's way more experienced than me about start-ups) and say I learnt a long time ago (and Alex agrees with this) that anything worth doing is a marathon, not a sprint.  Nothing wrong with recharging the batteries.  I doubt there's many several-years-in-the-making-overnight-successes out there who would begrudge anyone some days off once a year.
Goals this week

  • TBA!

Reflections on startup life: Week 39

Leave a reply
We haven't shipped the new release, however it has passed a few significant milestones entering into integration and now "live" and able to be tested.

Unfortunately once we started wrapping everything back up together (integrating the engine into the website), the speed performances we thought we had gained have tailed off. We need some more research to properly understand where we are at and what we can do.  The good news is that regardless it is still much more scalable – we should be able to throw more users at this engine without losing performance.  So we might not of reached our "sub second" goal, we are able to do some of the critical deliverables regardless.

From a market development point of view, things are going well.  I invested time in creating a Social Network Analysis of the Australian Election commentary.  It took around a day and a half to complete properly, but was very educational and turned into our most successful blog post to date, generating a lot of comment on Twitter.  Even better, I was called up by a journalist from The Weekend Australian to answer some questions about the post and these quotes made it into an article in the weekend paper.  It's always nice to get our name out there broader than just online.  It's strange how our psyche is still wired to feel that seeing something in print provide more "validity" – or at least it does for me!

We are continuing to build our presence and I think slowly migrating from a "purist" tools company to a strategy and tools offering.

I was also invited to speak at the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA) to make a short presentation about how we use text analysis and natural language processing technology tools.  This was a pleasant surprise as well and I'm looking forward to sharing with people researching in this area how we use this for business purposes.  This happens in December.

Alex has taken four days off – it's been a while since we've really had a proper break and something we've come back to again and again is that this journey is a marathon, not a sprint – stopping to refresh and recharge is essential.  The positive news is I didn't break the servers (yet) while he was away so that's a good thing.

Overall?  I continue to feel that the pressure of interest is building.  It hasn't broken yet, but the dice will start to fall our way – there is plenty of validation that we are doing "the right things", if just keep at it, things will come together over the next month or two.

Highlights

  • 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.
Lessons Learnt

  • 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.
Goal this week – Customers

  • 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
Goal this week – Engineering

  • Ship the new release

Alex’s contribution to the startup blog world

Leave a reply

Just realised I neglected to mention this here.

Alex has now started his own startup blog – if you're enjoying reading this one, then you might like to read Alex's which balances out both sides of the view on what's happening.

His latest post on product strategy and two mistakes we've made is very thought provoking:

At this stage of our startup, what we need is a product that will wow people not by good usabilities, but by solid, ground-breaking data analytics that people wouldn’t even consider a possibility before.

…last year, someone talked that there are “core features, support features and craps”.  Looking back, I think lots of the craps looks actually quite beautiful while the core features will usually be clumsy, unintuitive and lack of basic polish.

Enjoy! 

Reflections on startup life: Week 38

Leave a reply

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 37

Leave a reply

Typically we know how to do whatever it is that we need to do (we may not always be the best at it, but we know the mechanics on how to go about it), but we sometimes don't do it because of blind spots in our thinking.

The realisation I spoke about last week, that we are in a direct sales model, really opened up my eyes to a range of things we should be doing that we weren't.  Monday I was "out of the blocks" in a rush and tried hard to focus on getting back in touch with lots of different people and contacts that I hadn't been chasing for a variety of reasons.

While it hasn't generated more sales (no, I didn't meet my target of 4, or even 1), it has generated a lot more meetings which I hope lead to sales or at the very least, more knowledge about why we are struggling to sell.

It's beginning to get very frustrating this "pause" in sales.  The first few went by in such a rush it was misleading in many ways.  It's turned out to be a very lean month.

On the engineering side, Alex is kicking goals – the performance release is coming on very well.  The new HyperTable implementation has already improved speed substantially and now he's ironing out other bottlenecks which mean we should meet our performance goal (of sub second searches).  He's also found other places we could improve even further which would enable us in the future to improve performance by 10x or more.  This is important for us in so many ways, although we can live without the future performance improvements for now.  I'll return to performance in a moment.

As well as the "usual" activities (coding, blogging, meeting, emailing, accounting etc.) that go on, we had a hard think about product value.  Sooner or later (in our case 3 – 4 weeks since the last sale) you have to ask yourself if the product is worth it.  I keep meeting people that love what we are doing (they love it, the get it, they think it's a great idea) but that won't pay for it, or at least won't pay for it yet.

So what does this mean?  I think it just means we aren't a must have product yet.  We don't yet have our MVP and need to continue to pivot.  It's a bit like a game of "hot or cold" – we are getting good warmer signals, but we aren't hot yet.

Here's where we now think we are at.
  • 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.
This is OK, because it shapes our thinking on what the "next thing" we should do is.  The short answer is "something that generates more unique value and that customers want".

It has to be both of these.  For example, reports are desired, but don't generate unique value (of course something like reports may have retention value which is also worth considering however it's a different problem).  Although we may not necessarily change the price of the tool, another way of answering this question is "if we did X, could we charge more for what we do?"

We think we have it.  Something that takes advantage of what we think is our Unique Selling Proposition and delivers significant added value that will support the way customers are using Tribalytic and turn it from something that's "a convenience – we do it better than you could do it yourself but you still could if you had to" into something where we deliver something you couldn't do.  For perhaps obvious reasons, we plan to sit on this idea for a bit until we work it through, but I think this was the week were we saw how to pivot into something that isn't just useful, but that certain companies and marketing agencies will really want to pay for.

Highlights

  • 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).
Lessons Learned
  • 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.
Goal this week – Customers
  • 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.
Goal this week – Engineering
  • Fingers crossed, an early test release of the new improved engine ready for launch next week.