Tag Archives: trunkly

Reflections on startup life: Week 60

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By the end of last week both Alex and I were tired.  We were pushing through, getting things done and stuffing up along the way.  With the exception of Christmas Day and a little bit on New Years Eve, we've both been putting in anywhere from 12 – 16+ hours per day, trying to implement new features, fix bugs and generally "catch up".

Poor me.  Actually that's not really the point, the reflection is on what that was doing to us.  We were pushing features with bugs because we hadn't tested them and causing ourselves to have to chase around and fix things that were broken because we broke them.

So Friday evening around 8PM we called it quits – this weekend just gone, we both stepped away and gave ourselves some time off.  Yup, there's all that stuff about spending time with my family (which was great) and I don't want to trivialise that, but what I found really interesting is the time it gave me to actually THINK.

I've been so buried in the trenches that I haven't actually given myself time and space to think about where we are going.  Of course we didn't leave Trunk.ly completely alone, I still monitor the feedback, follow up on things people say and deliver some customer support, but I didn't code and focus on a single problem.

By walking away, I feel like not only did I recharge the batteries a bit and get some well needed rest, but more importantly, I gained the time and space needed to get some perspective on where things are at and consider features and priorities not in terms of the next fire that needs to be put out, but more strategically in terms of where we are heading overall.

Highlights

* New connectors and major features
* Big blog post in China which drove usage and sign ups

Lessons Learnt

* From the department of the obvious, tired people make silly mistakes.  Better to take a break sometimes.

Goals this week

* For me personally, a little bit more time on the strategy of what we are doing and building the roadmap.
* Admin catch up
* PR related activities.

Reflections on startup life: Week 58

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Not quite sure where I'm at!

Things have been incredibly hectic still, thankfully Christmas hit and slowed things up for a bit.  We are gradually making the changes we need to focus 100% on Trunk.ly for the next month or two (or more).  We've had to let go one of the contracts we were working on just to get the time we needed to get things done.

It remains very flat out.  Finally though, we've caught up on the absolutely critical issues and now only have the critical issues left and everything else left.  I guess what this means is that by and large everything that is currently in Trunk.ly is now working properly – sure there's lots more to do, but what we've got it doing what it's supposed to.

Managed to take Christmas day off which was nice, didn't even Tweet – the only time I got near the PC was to help my daughter setup her new iPod shuffle.  I did check my mail on the iPad a couple of times, we still had visitors and people logging issues with the user site 24 * 7!

Trying to take it a little easier this week, which means keeping it to 8 hour days where possible and finding some time to spend with the family while they are all on holidays.  

It's definitely slowed down a lot with the Christmas / New Year break and we are already starting to think about how we can kick start that wave again after the break and also how we can get some chargeable features into the site to start trying to make some revenue.

Highlights
  • New servers.
  • A breather.
  • Getting some of the most critical features in.
Lessons Learned
  • A lot of things we did that made sense at a few hundred users just don't make sense anymore.  The best example of this is email – signing up with mail chimp and integrating seemed like a really good idea, but the reality is that we have enough users now that it begins to cost us to send mail to to people and hence the integration no longer makes sense as we are incredibly unlikely to actually send messages now!  This is a consistent experience – at any level of success beyond a few hundred – 1000 users, you'll have to start paying to make it possible.  
  • There are lots of ways of doing things for free, but when you're time constrained, it makes a lot more sense to pay $30 per month to make it happen now and not worry about it.
Goals this week
  • New servers implemented.
  • Follow and social features improved.

Reflection on startup life: Week 57

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Sorry, no time this week.  Suffice to say the wave finally hit.  We got Trunk.ly out the door (much earlier than we intended) and we've been chasing our tails ever since.  We've caught the wave and we are surfing it for all we are worth.

16+ hour days the last 5 days straight, but we are getting on top of things and stabilising it, now we have to get the missing features in and keep the customers happy.

SEOmoz picked us up, then Delicious threatened to close, then Read Write Web wrote about us… those three things gave us the kick start we needed.  We've well and truly gone viral, let's see how long it sustains.

Cheers,

Tim

Reflections on startup life: Week 56

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When I consider that last week I touched on 5 out of 5 projects, started learning a new language and framework, plus spoke at the Australian Language Technology Association conference on Thursday afternoon, I think I know why I feel like I'm doing about 10 jobs.

The vast majority of the week (40+) was on the new Rails Challenge project.  This has been interesting, not least because as we've tracked through it, it's quickly apparent (as we expected to some extent) that it's less and less about technology and more and more about scope, documentaton, design, architecture and so forth.  While in theory I've always understood this, it's a neat trick to try something completely new and see how far that gets you.

For Tribalytic we discovered it's allergic to Christmas.  More specifically a carefully constructed search term will crash a process and grind the server to a halt (no, I'm not telling you what it is and no, I don't want you to try find more!).  Will be fixed shortly and in any case, it's only happened a couple of times in 6 months.

We are feeling comfortable enough with Trunk.ly now that we added a wide range of new users.  We launched to a new round of 150 beta testers, which if they all sign up (unlikely), will take us to close to 200 users testing it for us.

The best thing about this time of year though is all the end of year catch up and parties.  I've made some great new friends this year and it's fun to catch up with them all, enjoy a drink or two and share thoughts on what's been a crazy (but fun) year.

Highlights
  • New Trunk.ly users invited on board.
  • Exploring and learning Ruby and Rails.
  • Speaking at ALTA and networking with several academics who heavily research and develop the type of tools we "plug in".
Lessons Learned
  • If you're going to be body-shopping, you need to track your time. Yes, we've started some basic time-sheets so we can measure how much work we are putting into contracts.
  • Sometimes those things you "put off" because they'll take a long time actually don't.  Could of saved a heap of effort this year with some basic integration work that I did manually for far too long.
Goals this week
  • Deliver a working Rails prototype.

Reflection on startup life: Week 55

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The way in which people use product is endlessly fascinating.  For example, with Trunk.ly (which collects links from multiple sources) one of the very first features that most people requested was to filter links by source.  So we added this in.  A week after launch, no one is using it.  So does that make it invalid? ie. Should we “not” deliver that function?  

I think the question is more complicated than that – sometimes there are things that people want in the first 5 minutes that’s very different from what they need once they experience the product.  One premise of Trunk.ly is that it collects and indexes links from multiple sources.  Allowing a user to filter by source is a first five minutes experience that helps them quickly confirm the promise of the product.

It’s something that Twitter and Facebook spend a lot of time on, yet most people don’t see it.  If you register a new Twitter account there’s virtually an entire application around helping you get started and get connected that’s something you only use in the first five minutes.  I’ve registered a lot of Twitter accounts this last 12 months and that experience is continually changing and enhancing (to the point that as an “experienced” Twitter account creator it’s annoying, but I am a minority I suspect).  Yet if you registered your account more than 6 months ago, you’ll never have experienced any of this substantial amount of screen design and effort on Twitter’s part.

We launched a new version of Trunk.ly which went smoothly enough.  There were lots of minor bugs in there, but we fixed them quickly enough.  We continue to get a lot of interest in Trunk.ly and increasing numbers of people registering for access which is exciting.  It’s still a little way from opening it up more broadly, but it’s getting there.

Unfortunately it looks like Trunk.ly will have to remain on the back burner for the next few weeks.

Last week was very focussed on making sure we got one of our projects for SportsGeek finished – fingers crossed the minor bug I fixed this morning sees that project now complete. I won’t spoil Sean’s fun by saying what the project is, but Alex and I are both pretty excited that the first client Sean has signed up and will be launching with is an NBA team.

This week we launch into a Ruby on Rails project.  For those playing along at home, you might have a WTF moment… as of course we are primarily a Python / Django shop. 

To cut a long story very short, we had a series of really interesting email conversations around a potential project, the end result of which was “let’s do this”.  We were all on a similar wavelength and were excited about working together, but right at the end realised that Python / Django wasn’t going to suit this customer as a Ruby on Rails shop.  We needed to find a creative way to make it work – so we’ve committed to a pilot in Ruby on Rails.  Over a couple of weeks we’ll develop some of the core components, mostly on our time as we are learning as we go with a new language.  At the end of that we’ll submit it for review and if it’s good enough, we’ll negotiate from there.  Once we suggested this, they agreed and then proposed some funding to ensure we are compensated at least a little for our time (these guys are awesome – really fair, above board and straight shooters – the kind of clients you want to work with).

Of course there’s lots we need to do that we DO already know – front end, HTML, JavaScript, Twitter API and how to work with it robustly etc.  I’ve programmed to some degree with C64 Basic, Fortran, Pascal, FoxPro, Visual Basic for DOS, VB4, C#, C, C++, SQL Server Scripting, Python / Django and now Ruby.  It’s safe to say I’ve forgotten more than I remember!  Ruby / Rails is just another step on the road.

I thought as part of this “challenge” I’ll make it entertaining and for the next couple of weeks I’m going to geek out here on the transition from Python / Django to Ruby / Rails by posting daily updates. I think I’ll call it “Rails Challenge” so feel free to ignore these if you’re not into languages.

Highlights
  • Ignite talk on Wednesday – great event and well run by Mark Mansour.
  • SportsGeek project done
  • New Trunk.ly launch
Lessons Learned
  • Billing is a pain – especially when your bank stuffs up transactions and you can’t even tell if its you or them!
  • Creative persistence is worthwhile.
Goals this week
  • Learn Ruby on Rails and cut some code!

Reflections on startup life: Week 54

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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