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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 46

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Deep breath.

What a week.  Every now and again I have a week like this one just gone where I think, wow, that's some kind of turning point.
  • We launched Distlr
  • We signed World Vision Australia as a client for Tribalytic for 12 months.
  • We had another major client in our pipeline come back and confirm they want to sign up this week.
We are getting a better (more realistic) handle now on our pipeline – most importantly we are beginning to understand how long it takes to close a deal.  Despite being "Software as a Service" offering, Tribalytic is clearly an enterprise sales problem.

I remember saying to someone early on that pre-revenue is like skiing downhill, you're flying and having fun.  Then when you make your first sale, it suddenly quantifies just HOW far down the hill you've come.  We are clawing our way back up that hill and are very close to cresting it now.

On to Distlr (previously known as Project X)!  We set ourself a goal to try and promote and launch Distlr with the AFL Grand Final replay.  It was a huge effort, but we got there.  Shipping product is about the hardest thing you can do.  We could of sat back, polished it more, been more cautious or any number of things, but we'd just be wasting time.  There was enough product to learn some lessons and we have.

What did the Distlr launch teach us?
  1. There's some interest out there.  With what was really quite a poor PR campaign (mostly because we left it until 2 hours before which was when we were sure we'd actually have a product!), we managed to get 70 registered users and some 300+ observers.  24 hours later, people were still using it to watch the #aflgf.
  2. People who do use it get much more engaged with an event.
  3. There are still several features we are missing to really nail the client experience we want.
  4. It didn't teach us this, but Internet Explorer sucks (cross browser support for Firefox / Chrome designed in, picked up Safari (and iPhone / iPad without even testing on it) then Alex spent several hours debugging IE specific issues).
We had a very early business development meeting for Distlr – yes, there is a potential business model behind it, but I'll keep that under my hat for the moment.  Suffice to say it went well and we have a follow up meeting already which is great.

On the lighter side, now we have a little bit of cash in the bank, we have to decide how to spend it.  It's not that much yet, but here's a few things we could do with it.

Alex and I have already had a brief discussion about a new monitor and chair for him, something he's hesitant to spend money on.  From my perspective if we can get him a better development environment (a fast desktop PC with a decent monitor so he can test offline and a chair to keep him comfortable) that ~$2,000 is a significant investment in our core production capacity.  If he's even 15% more effective, that's an extra months programming a year! Yup, I'm a slave driver :-)

With Daylight Savings started now, Alex and I are now three hours apart instead of two, so that's something else that's changing – at least it's still not too bad.

Highlights

  • The adrenaline rush of the deadline and getting Distlr out the door.
  • Signing World Vision
  • Another customer confirming they want to buy
  • Distlr business development meetings.
  • Meeting Doris after a months absence – I really enjoy these sessions with her.  Having someone know your business but sit outside it is really useful.

Lessons Learned

  • Need to get our Credit Card payments sorted out.  We had to get our startup friends Event Arc to help us out as we couldn't process the money from World Vision at the speed they wanted to pay.
  • New shiny things are really distracting. But sometimes it's worth it – I feel that we took a risk on the Distlr idea, but it also really re-invigorated us, gave us new ideas, taught us some new things and has shown another way forward which was interesting.

Goal this week – Engineering

  • Push the latest release of Tribalytic
  • Refactor Distlr

Goal this week – Customers
  • Sign new client
  • Shake up the pipeline
  • Review Distlr with people who used it (Survey most likely).

Reflections on startup life: Week 45

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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.
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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 start-up life: Week 42

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This is one of those "it's easier to write you're going to do it than it is to do it posts".

Last week the focus was public relations.  Well we have set the wheels in motion, but nothing big has happened yet.  Like so many things we dive into, there seems to be some magic sauce we are missing.  Turns out that just writing articles isn't all that it takes to have people falling over themselves to publish them (OK, that's very tongue in cheek – I didn't really expect that).   But turns out PR professionals do have a role in this space after all :-)

Time kills us.  It takes longer to write an article than we think (especially when targeting a niche publication and we want to make sure it's really good), or we try to put together a general release that reads like self-indulgent crap that I'd never read anyway, so why would anyone else.  So there lots of effort for what with the benefit of hindsight is a very uncertain return.  Then in conversation with my Dad whose been involved sales and marketing for years he describes PR as "the soft stuff". And he's right – it's still not tackling the direct problem head on which is we've got a product, you've got some money, how is our product meeting your need such that you'd pay us to help you with it.

It's weird.  People from the UK write to us and say " This is an amazing tool! Is Tribalytic planned to be available for the UK?" but we can't seem to drive new sign ups in Australia.

Twendly had peaked after a few weeks at something like around 8,000 people on one day searching for people talking about things, yet as a product it did only one very very small slice of what Tribalytic can do.

The big difference?  Twendly was global and free.

So how much of a barrier to entry is a paid sign up? Things I want Alex and I to ponder this week.
  1. We stepped away from an Enterprise Play to be a Consumer Play (http://timbull.com/reflections-on-start-up-life-week-9) Are we back at being an Enterprise Play and if so, are the reasons we stepped away from it the first time still valid?
  2. For a consumer play, scale matters – at least "all" of AU or a lot more of a global market.  How can we tackle this (for example, should we get on to the Twitter sample hoses, scale out and go nuts).  The reasons why we wouldn't do this in the past might still be the same now however (money, time).
  3. How married to the pricing model that we have are we?  What's more important, a few premium paying customers or lots of cheaper paying customers?  Have we actually tested the cheaper consumer model yet? Should we.  Are we even at a premium price yet? Maybe we are too cheap!
At one level nothing changes, keep at it, keep trying to build the publicity, keep trying to meet with people – but sooner or later I think we need to acknowledge that this current approach is not optimal yet.  We need to tune it, and I think we need to do more than tweak, we need to try something very different in our approach to market.  It could be a different way of selling (start cold-calling) or a different pricing point, or a different target client market or any number of things, but I don't want to get to next week without having tweaked one of the dials all the way around and see what happens.

As Alex said in his last post "Be patient and persistent".  In this roller-coaster that is a start-up, perhaps the most amazing thing is how I can completely agree on Wednesday morning, but by Friday night feel frustrated that things aren't moving fast enough and quite convinced that we need to do something radically different.

On a positive note, our Techfluff.tv article went up on The Next Web – here's the interview.

Highlights

  • Next Web Article
  • Some nice positive comments about Tribalytic from paying users and also others interested in it
Lessons Learnt
  • It's always harder than you think, even when you think it's going to be hard:-)
  • More a pondering… are we repeating some earlier mistakes?
Goal this week
  • Keep pushing the PR angle
  • Review and reconsider the business model / pricing plans – implement any necessary changes.

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 start-up life: Week 36

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It was a confronting week in a number of different ways.  Definitely not quite back on an upward swing yet!  Under pinning all this is a personal milestone this week – a switch from money set aside for this venture, to now starting to eat into personal savings.

Really in a lot of ways there isn't very much to say about last week other than it really felt like a grind.  Nothing exciting, nothing bad, just a need to keep at it, keep pushing forwards and not lose momentum.

If I stop and reflect, I think it's got a lot to do with being an adrenalin junkie.  When things are going really well, or really badly there is the rush of energy and enthusiasm – there are tight deadlines, there's pressure to get things done, or there is immediate reward.  When things are just going "OK", everything actually feels a bit flat.  No disasters, but no highs either.

We spent a bit of time focusing on our internal strategy and several things came out of that:

  1. Performance is crucial.  To effectively do many of the next round of deliverables (effective reports, index more users, dynamically indexed results, micro sites, API access etc.) we really need to improve the database performance.  We've "bitten" the bullet and we are now moving on to a database performance sprint.  The goal – sub 1 second for every query (for comparison, queries for some really popular topics like iPad can take around a minute at the moment).
  2. There is lots of opportunity for our SEO – this has meant me learning to write content for search engines as well as people (i.e. make it attractive to both) and we have also redesigned and integrated our blog now with several improvements.  It's a longer term goal, but good content helps build and demonstrate our relevance and expertise for the future.
The most confronting thing was a realisation after a chat with our advisor and a separate one with a business consultant friend that we are in the wrong sales mode at the moment.   Regardless of where we want to be at (people finding and self-serving themselves on the site), the reality today is we are a direct sales model.  We have to go and find people and sell it to them.

The other related topic was some challenge to us to think about our product offering – should we be a tool (which is our current focus) or should we package up more services (tool and training) for example.  Again, we really see ourselves focussed on the first, but there is lots of evidence that what the market wants is the second.  Lots of things to think about.

Highlights

  • New blog template up.
  • Really a pretty slow week.
Lessons learned

  • Lots to think about – it's worth stopping and considering where you are and challenging assumptions, even if it does make you feel uncomfortable.
Goal this week – Customers

  • Aim to get out 8 or so high quality posts and in particular focus less on the "entertainment" side of the data and more on the educational side.
  • Lots of customer meetings and follow up – I want to get 4 sales this week.
Goal this week – Engineering

  • 2 week sprint to implement HyperTable – we feel the need for speed.
  • Minor enhancements while the HyperTable implementation is going on.

Reflections on start-up life: Week 35

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How do you keep going when confronted with cresting the top of a hill to achieve a goal and only to realise that there is another bigger hill in front of you again?

The crest this week was pushing out the latest release of Tribalytic.  This was the major focus of our efforts last week.  While we will probably always be in continual “beta” and pushing new features, this represents internally at least “Version 1″.  It’s the version that’s the most polished.  No longer is it a product without a wrapper, but it’s polished, wrapped up and ready to put on the shelf.

Ah ha! And there is the next hill.  How to get it to the shelf?

Of course I never thought it would “stop” once we pushed the latest release.  The way to manage the continual hills is to realise that it’s OK to take a breather.  Running a marathon like a sprint is always a bad idea.

Of course a start-ups definition of a breather might be a little different from others! Alex spent a good portion of his Friday night doing maintenance on the servers in what we hope will become a regular “Sysop Friday Fortnight”.  Think of it like a massage for an athlete.  The servers had become scary for a number of different reasons, but primarily because one of them had been up continually for 213 days, the other 168 days and we KNEW that if we rebooted, at least one of them would not restart without physical intervention.

Given our servers are in the US, physical intervention in this instance means logging a help desk call and waiting for the hosting guys in LA to get into the data centre and resolve the issue.  

While the focus has been on getting the product up and out the door, we’d left a lot of server maintenance activities aside – after all with no product, there’d be nothing to maintain, but as we’ve acquired a few customers it’s become more critical that we have control over the hardware and know it will come back if it goes down.

It turns out neither server came back from the reboot (for technically inclined, they were looking for a splash screen image they couldn’t find and wanted a keypress!), but the hosting centre was on the ball and because we’d planned the outage, there was no customer impact.  Now we have them behaving properly and have also cleaned up a lot of old software etc. meaning that we dedicate more of our resource to running Tribalytic.

On the customer front, some of the networking activity over the last few weeks paid off in terms of meetings that have lead to some introductions which is always handy.  This segues nicely back to getting the product on the shelf.  We’ve achieved some significant milestones – 1st customer, first 5 customers and now a recurring customer with the first customer we had (that we thought we’d lost) returning to re-subscribe for another month.  The defining feature of all these however is they are relationship style sales.  People are buying because they know me and have met me.  It’s not yet scaleable.

This is a classic start-up problem.  Having proven that the product is minimally viable (some people will purchase it) and wrappered it for the shelf, we need to get it there.  Given our business model, we need more people than just I can meet using Tribalytic for us to be successful.  So the next major focus is on search and content optimisation – making sure that when people look for products like ours or for solutions to problems that we can solve, we have a presence.

So how do you keep going? I guess it’s knowing that it doesn’t end.  Always be prepared for the next hill.  If you’re climbing the mountain, it’s realising that there a lot of foot hills along the way that you haven’t seen yet and when you finally get to the top, there will be more mountains to climb.  For me it’s actually part of what this blog is about, it encourages me to stop, take a breather and look back down at the view – there may still be many mountains to go, but I think we’ve already climbed a few too.

Highlights

  • Pushing the major new version.
  • A resubscribing customer.
  • Very enjoyable conversations with several knowledgeable people in the Market Research and Retail industries.
Lessons Learnt

  • Complexity kills.  If you’re a startup, I can’t reiterate this enough. Complexity kills.  Don’t go there before you have to.  I think that we are about right, however consider that the current release pushed us from:
    • 3 screens to around 10, only 1 of which delivered substantial new functionality, the others are things like Pricing, Terms, Privacy policy etc.
    • Now four “modes” of interaction with our system (anonymous user, trial user, paid user, expired user)
    • Combined, this all means testing of a new release is SIGNIFICANTLY more complex than it has been previously.
  • I don’t think this changes what we do that much, but it’s something to keep an eye out for – if you push features too fast, your product will become more complex than your ability to maintain it very quickly.
Goal this week – Customers

  • Keep setting up meetings and trying to close some of the expressed interest.
  • Start the inbound activities (blogging etc.) to help customers find us themselves.
Goal this week – Development

  • SEO
  • Reports
  • Start crawling again – it’s clear that more Australian users is of high value to our customers, performance issues have stabilized and latest release is out, so let’s go get them!

Reflections on start-up life: Week 33

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I'll say up front that this last week has been one of the toughest.  Some of the best highs and the lowest lows to date.  It's perhaps the most challenging post to write as well – I've always wanted to keep this an open dialog yet I find some topics this week a bit sensitive.  Here it goes anyway. 

Ultimately this week has been about performance.  Our performance with clients, the performance of the server and even the performance of the DJ.

For the first time we've hit significant performance issues.  It's compounded by a range of factors, but ultimately in trying to improve the speed with which we gather data it caused our site to fail.  Multiple times.  Every time we thought we'd fixed it, the problems would appear in a different area – it's like forcing more water down a pipe, ultimately the whole pipe has to be bigger, not just the opening.

This was annoying at first and then over time, more and more stressful.  We decided to significantly change the approach which finally looks like it's fixed things for now.  I suspect that as we grow and scale, this will be a recurring theme, but I think we've bought ourselves a couple of months breathing space.

In doing this, we dropped all the other items on the plate – this became issue number one.

As far as clients go, we've signed more clients last week than before, but we also lost one as well.  The lesson we take away is our renewal processes need a lot of improvement.  I don't believe the issue was related to the product per se, but the way we approached the license renewal was not good enough.  I'll leave that one alone – it's like a scab I keep coming back and picking – what if I'd done this instead of this? What's done is done, we can only do it better next time.

The DJ's performance on the other hand was awesome!  We sponsored our first event – International Social Media day.  Kate Kendall approached us to ask if we'd like to sponsor the DJ and we leapt at the chance.  I'm increasingly finding when I speak to people that they feel they've heard of us before, regardless of if they have or not, having a presence is on the whole a good thing.

The whole social media meetup night was great fun, good networking, great people, great entertainment, but my overall favourite moment was when someone asked me about Product Camp (which was on Saturday and I'd said I was attending).  They asked if I was going to speak, or if I'd be sending one of my staff.  I don't know if we ever will have staff, but it's nice people think we might!

Product Camp was really great.  I need to get out and do more events like this one – there is just so much to learn and listening to, talking with and presenting to people who do product management as a profession was so useful.  There is a big difference between a start-up and a large business of course, but that made it all the more interesting too.  Imagine taking 3 months to survey customers and analyse opinions to decide what features to schedule for the next 6 months development! Inconceivable!

Highlights

  • Sponsoring our first event.
  • Signing new customers and great indications for a couple of others.
  • People "getting it"
  • Vision for the future – Alex's email about a new reporting approach was just what I needed to lift my head out of the trenches and look at what might be in a month or two.  Exciting.
Lessons Learned

  • So much more to do – there are two ends to a funnel and you have to work on both.
  • I really don't like performance issues.

Goal this week – customer

  • Met some great people and have some interesting conversations to follow up on.  Lots of leads.

Goal this week – engineering

  • We are close to resolving all the performance issues – pipeline is back up and running, but a few niggly little things left to do to make sure we don't need to look at this again for a while.

Reflections on start-up life: Week 32

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We closed two more sales this week, one of them three months up front (end of financial year special).  Officially we’ve now taken more money through the door this month than we’ve spent. A nice feeling.  Now we just need to make enough to start paying ourselves.

I think we are starting to see the chasm ahead of us.  We’ve got a few early sales and there are several more in the pipeline, but which one(s) of these is going to build us the bridge to get to the other side?  Although we are getting a much better idea of what our “ideal” customer looks like, we still have a way to go.

I often find that we invest a lot of mental energy in things that we already know the answer to.  Usually our gut tells us one thing, but our head is over-rationalising and trying to find some smart way out of a situation.  One feature we’ve had strong feedback on is white labelling (an unbranded version of Tribalytic).  Logically this makes sense (Agencies want to deliver their customers the Tribalytic experience but under their own logo / brand).  The problem for us is that when we added the sharing features, we envisaged this as viral component to what we do and white labelling removes this.

The quote that sums it up went something like this “I would love to share this information with my clients, but I don’t want them signing up directly with you once they see how easy it is.”  Do we change our iteration plans now to White Label, or do we hang back and make sure there is a enough to build a bridge to the other side before we rush on in.  The head is desperately trying to rationalise doing it for the money, the gut says no.

Truth be told, we ended up unintentionally dodging the issue – the relevant decision makers are all heading off on holidays for a few weeks (this seems common across a few agencies at the moment) which has brought us a few weeks to have a better answer.  How do we get a better answer?  Well, it means we need to really access the size of the agency market – if that’s going to be our niche, we need to get a few more on board and also have a much better idea on how large that eventual market really is.  Then we’ll be in a position to start building features, customising and targeting that niche.

Pricing has also been a topic we’ve debated on back and forward.  It’s a balancing act between needing to be flexible again (testing different markets and price points), but it gets more complicated as we sign customers.  Ultimately we needed to settle on something, even if just for a few weeks.  We’ve made a decision early on to largely target the same set of features in different product tiers because it greatly simplifies the tool at this point in time, however this become problematic in creating price tiers – how to make them look different?

In the end we’ve gone with three differentiators – accounts (tier up and get more accounts for less), reports (tier up to be able to generate more reports) and custom reports.  The custom reports one is interesting – right now we really want to build more reports into Tribalytic, and we want to do it with customer input – we need to know what’s valuable rather than just try guess.  By explicitly pricing this in, we are actually articulating that value up front to customers in a way that we weren’t before.  It didn’t change anything we were going to do, but it does help the customer understand the value.  

Once I started thinking about it like that, lots of things we do have a customer value that we can explicitly express.  So my challenge for you is this – what are you doing as a “matter of course” that is actually something with a tangible customer value – should you be pulling this out and listing it? For example, if you’re developing on two week iterations, is “New features monthly” something that your customer will value?

On an engineering perspective, we eased off the accelerator.  We’ve pushed our release back a week – sometimes you wake up and realise you’re burning the candle at both ends.  It’s a marathon and not a sprint, making sure you cruise and conserve energy every now and again is critical.

Highlights

  • Two more customers.
  • New branded design coming together.
  • Good client meetings with potential new customers.
Lessons Learned

  • Think more about dates up front!  We lost a day with the leadership spill which highlighted (because it was so short and sharp) that we were a few hours out on our time handling (to do with having a server in LA, storing some things in LA time, some things in UTC and displaying them in Melbourne).  All resolved now, but has highlighted some engineering challenges for the future when we expand our market.
  • Go with your gut more often.  Don’t try over-rationalise your way out of something if your gut feel says you were right first time.  Otherwise known as “learn to say No and take the tough decisions”.
Goal this week – Customer

  • Preparation and then a significant pitch to a major “brand name” key client – if we get this one, we’ll be well on our way.
Goal this week – Engineering

  • Continuing to implement the new look and feel and inbound site design.  Hopefully launch towards end of this week.