Tag Archives: twendly

Reflections on start-up life: Week 18

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I woke up Tuesday morning last week to see that Twendly had suddenly gone “nuts”.  Since our launch of Twendly we’ve been studiously ignoring it, not wanting to get distracted from the main goal – it taught us a lot but we didn’t want to waste more time on it in the short-term.

It’s no surprise that while it’s actually held some traffic, it’s generally been declining week on week in search numbers.  People still use it, but without any changes to the site or promotion, they drift off.  So it was a massive surprise to see that suddenly 80 new users had signed up and we had some 200 – 250 mentions on Twitter in one night.  For the most part, they were all in French so I spent a bit of time in Google Translate to understand what was going on.

I learnt a LOT of new french phrases for interesting sexual practices.  Someone mentioned Chat Roulette and Twendly in the same Tweet and all of a sudden we picked up all this cross-traffic.  Our number one search on Twendly last week (by a massive amount) was for L’ejaque Faciele.  I’ll let you run that through Google Translate yourself.

On the one hand I’m really pleased that something we developed is getting use and proving popular, on the other hand our contribution seems to (inadvertently) help the world of adult porn.  It’s not exactly solving cancer or anything is it?  As Fenn said to me the other day, ‘The Internet, it all trends towards cocks’.

On a more serious note, we again made significant steps forward last week, to the point where we are getting our separate code streams integrated back together (some minor hiccups with that but now resolved) and this week should see us actually producing the prototype and integrating with the UI.

I think it’s important for both of us to get out of the technical tunnels that we’ve been delving in, pull it all together and just see where we are at.  It’s too easy to become concerned about things that we know will be issues eventually, but at the same time, we don’t know if they are critical right now.  They certainly won’t stop us showing people the experience we are building.

Highlights?

  • A burst of usage in Twendly
  • Processing pipeline framework in place and seeing the stages working (handing off to the next process in the pipeline).
  • Generally an “up” week with the feeling that we are continuing to emerge from the rabbit warrens we’ve been in.

Lowlights?

  • Never get as much done as we’d like.
  • Concern about performance which is annoying both of us and will take discipline to put it aside for now to focus on showing the capability – speed can come later if people like what we can do.  If they don’t like what we can do with the data, the speed at which we can do it will be irrelevant.

Goal this week?

  • Integration – a fairly ambitious stretch goal, but to get the elements of Tribalytic plugged together and working so we can let people experience an early (non-performant) beta.

 

Reflections on start-up life: Week 14

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Well the first week with Alex back in China and us working remotely has passed remarkably smoothly.  With Skype at hand, we can easily keep in touch and communicating which is great.  We've also successfully split our work paths such that we can move on fairly independently from each other without any major delays.  No doubt this may change as we get further along, but for now it's been easy.

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.

A couple of people suggested I should of kept the mail addresses because they are an asset, but I also received a more positive response to that email than previous ones which makes me think I did the right thing.


Highlights?

  • Meeting new people.
  • Getting geocoding working.
  • Updating website and integrating the mail list management.
Lowlights?
  • Just the slow grind of progress, nothing bad, just feel like we are moving through molasses at the moment.


Goal this week?

Same as last week – get that first prototype out the door ASAP.

Reflections on start-up life: Week 10

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== This one was posted a week late – I sent it, but for some reason there was a Posterous fail and it didn't end up on the blog.  Only noticed it now! ==

Last week was very interrupted for a number of reasons – family events and then a HDD failure on my main PC which stopped me dead in my tracks.  This turned out to be a blessing in disguise as I'd been putting off moving to Ubuntu, so this was my opportunity.  Fortunately I lost only time as all our data and code is well backed up – DropBox is a blessing for documents as well.

I won't rave about the Ubuntu install other than to say it took me around 1 hour to get a functioning Ubuntu machine up and running – almost 8 hours for the Vista re-build (patch, reboot, patch, reboot all day).

So the last weekend wasn't as relaxing as I would of liked, mostly consisting of building new machines (2 boot images on my main desktop and I also purchased a new MSI X340 laptop I installed with Ubuntu as well).

The reflection this week for me is that decision leads to opportunity.  Being decisive about things opens doors and provides more information – sometimes it might be that the decision was wrong, which is still good information, but it does lead to action.  Indecision kills start-ups. 

Having decided to focus on the consumer play we found that we could start to do a number of things:

  1. Write a pitch deck and circulate for feedback.
  2. Act on the feedback to refine and define what we are doing.
  3. Have more focus in our meetings.
  4. A clearer idea on what we "want" when we meet with someone, and exactly what it is that we have to offer them.
  5. Actually forecast a plan for two weeks in advance.

Technically not much happened from my perspective (although Alex has been doing a lot of planning on his side), but from a business perspective we made some major steps forward.

We will be in Sydney all week next week – if you're following this blog and interested in catching up, let me know – we are there to pitch to potential investors, but we would love to meet with anyone who is interested in what we are up to.

Twendly continues to do very well and is gaining some real evangelists for the service.  Again, doing leads to learning – without a real live demo like Twendly we could never have learnt as much as a we have about our HiveMind engine and how it works in the real world.

Highlights?
  • Moving to Ubuntu.
  • First pitch out to various mentors.
  • Some great meetings with some really helpful people.
Lowlights?
  • Wasted time rebuilding PCs.
  • Still not enough time on the business plan as is needed.
  • Hating the touchpad on the MSI – need to get the proper driver for it so I can turn off the stupid touch to click.  Why anyone would think this is a good default behaviour is beyond me.  I constantly brush it with my thumbs on it when typing and end up typing somewhere else in my document.
Goal this week?

Refine and rework the business pitch so we are good to go for Sydney next week.

Reflections on start-up life: Week 9

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You develop a thick skin pretty quickly.  The first two emails were upsetting, but by the 10th, you just apologise and move on.  Moving forwards seems to mean stepping on toes, sometimes no matter how careful you are.

The BIG news entering this week is that we've moved from indecision at the start of last week to focus by Wednesday very quickly and smoothly.  The catalyst was this article in TheNextWeb/AU which talked about Twendly and kicked off a significant leap in traffic (at it's peak around %18,000).  I like percentages, they sound much more interesting!  This was picked up globally and resulted in a significant increase in traffic as well as a lot more chatter and talk about Twendly on Twitter.  People were generally finding it useful and interesting and on the whole, surprised that it works as well as it does (there were some negative comments, but the positive far outweighed them).

This is the "pull" that we've been looking for and so we've decided to focus 100% now on the internet play which has quickly brought a lot of things into focus.  We're now an Internet Search Engine (albeit a slightly different one for sure) and we now need investment and funding to grow and prove the business.  Now there are twice as many things to do, and twice the urgency (we are now inside a month of Alex leaving AU), but it's great to reach this first point where we are ready to take on the world! 

Ultimately we've decided to play the high-stakes game – the pay back for the Internet play is significant, but of course the challenge and the risk are a lot higher.  It's also a lot more fun!

So as Twendly started to get a lot more traffic, we started chasing our tail.  Our second server came online this weekend, giving us increased processing capacity, we caught up with the surge of signups, only to find just as many there waiting for us and we started to reach the limits of the current technology.  We also managed to upset people, for lots of different reasons (only a few, but they were vocal).  Some didn't like the way we sent our messages, some didn't like where they were ranked by Twendly, some thought we were hackers.  Now customer relationships have come to the fore – this is fine, but the thick skin has developed quite quickly.  It's not that there isn't valid feedback, there often is, but you have to separate the attitude from the message at times (and also appreciate that 95% of people didn't have an issue).  In many ways, much of this is great because it shows that people care and have a need – far worse for them to be saying nothing!

It's also been an interesting weekend because I've had my family here so have taken two days (Friday and Monday) off (kind of).  I'm champing at the bit to get back to work and get things done.  Speaking of which, I have to go set the table and it's my sons eighth birthday so I better get it done!

Highlights?
  • TheNextWeb AU article, 500+ retweets about Twendly and the overwhelming positive feedback
  • Gaining the much needed focus.
Lowlights?
  • Trying to catch up with the surge in sign-ups.
  • That you can't please all of the people all the time.
  • Not being able to spend the time I wanted when I felt it was needed.
  • You can be as trustworthy as you like with people you know, but on the internet the default position is often intense scepticism and distrust.

Goal this week?
  • Road test the business pitch and terms sheet and get some investor meetings lined up (a consequence of focus – we now know we will need financing to make the vision happen)

Reflections on start-up life: Week 8

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Where do we stand?

Eight weeks completed and I can safely say we are now starting to gain traction – we might not be moving forwards, but the tires are starting to bite.  We have several conversations starting with different businesses – and more business returning from holidays, so I expect (hope) to see more contacts this week.  This week we turn to starting to address the requirements from these conversations and target delivering the first real beta that companies can implement.

Twendly is going well too – it's not yet set the world on fire, but it's fulfilling everything I'd hoped for it at the moment and is demonstrating value.  People that use it are recommending it to others and seem to be regularly coming back to use it again.  There is also some initial interest and conversations with others on how they might use the data we are beginning to aggregate – there are promising signs in this direction as well.

With the beginnings of traction however becomes what I see as our next biggest challenge – we are trying to play two hands at once and not yet fully focussed.  It's counter to all the advice we've received but I don't think either Alex or I are ready to commit to just one direction just yet.  Most of the robust discussions between us are really dealing with this core issue – how do we balance the effort on both sides of these initiatives.

The problem is that while the core engine is the same between the consumer and enterprise sides of the HiveMind application, the implementations are increasingly looking to be quite different. For example, on the consumer side, Alex has already invested significant time into an anti-spam engine to deal with Twitter spammers, while I've spent much of my effort on the loading portion dealing with the difficulties of talking to an Internet application that won't always respond and needs a lot of error handling and checking.

On the enterprise, some of these problems just don't exist, but of course there are other different ones – for example, the range of sources is a lot more diverse inside the Enterprise as opposed to on the consumer side where we largely define them ourselves.

As Alex and I develop our relationship I think we are getting better at having good discussions about what we are doing.  One of the hardest things to do early on was to actually have the challenging discussion, I think initially we spent more time worrying about "is the other person happy" than actually having a robust discussion about some of the difficult decisions we seem to increasingly face about where we spend our time.  Now that we are getting into this it isn't always comfortable, but I think it is much healthier.  It's interesting that even with all the experience both of us have, the basic laws of group dynamics don't change much – Forming, Norming, Storming and then Performing.  I know that between the two of us we are bringing a lot to the table and that if we commit together, we've got a great chance of success.

This last weekend is the first one that I've not really done anything for BinaryPlex due to family commitments, while I face today feeling that I'm not "caught up" it is nice to come at things feeling refreshed and having had a good break.

Highlights?
  • Growing Twendly to 140+ sign-ups, 120K+ users indexed and over 115M tweets indexed.
  • A new interface design up
  • Lots of great feedback
  • Good conversations with people – always easier to have a conversation when there is something to show.
Lowlights?
  • Again, not much – we've kept reasonably well focussed and I think achieved largely what we set out to do last week.

Goal this week?
  • Put Twendly into a largely "automated" mode – there is a fair bit of regular maintenance we currently do that we want to run by itself to free us time to focus on other things.
  • Get the first round of Enterprise beta ready to ship to a few customers and start engaging the Enterprise clients.

Reflections on start-up life: Week Seven

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Last week was very productive – I think there is a lesson in there about focus, although it’s also the inevitable issue of everyone else but us being on leave so we didn’t have anything to do BUT product development!

The first release of  http://twendly.com was very interesting; interesting enough that it was an itch we’ve had to scratch a bit further.  Our major highlight last week was implementing a series of features into Twendly which allowed it to index a lot more data and therefore become more useful.  If you’re looking for people, searching a pool of 16,000 which we are now is a lot better than a pool of 35 (our original release).

This has lead to all sorts of technical challenges, not least that when we are now processing almost 20,000,000 rows of data there is a good chance that that a “1 in a million” condition occurs about 20 times every time you process.  I’m pleased I’m paranoid about error handling, every single line of code to handle errors that I wrote (usually with a comment like “This is highly theoretical, should never happen”) actually executed (ie. the error did occur).

To quote Terry Pratchett, “One in a million chances occur nine times out of ten.”

It’s been fairly intense and now that http://twendly.com is live and starting to get a little bit of usage (there are a fair few searches going through, even if not everyone searching registers) there is a new feeling of pressure.  It’s great to have a showcase, it’s now problematic if that showcase isn’t working as well as it could, the site goes down etc. etc.  The data also comes at a price – we can’t just “blow it away” and start over either.

Anyway for those who are wondering just what we’ve been up to and what “people search” is really about, the three attached pictures sum it up pretty well I think.  I’ve done three searches using exactly the same terms “Lotus Connections”.

TwittersearchGooglesearchTwendlysearch

The first is a search for “Lotus Connections” in Twitter – you get the current tweets that mention Lotus Connections, however there is no way to know or understand which of these people talksmost frequently about this – it may be that this was the very first time they ever mentioned it.

The second image shows a search in Google.  This takes you to some great information about Lotus Connections, but these are largely all documents – technical or sales information about the Lotus Connections product, useful, but not people you can have a conversation with. Only one link will really lead you to a person (the Lotus Connections Blog link) if that’s what you were after.

Finally we have a search in Twendly.  Of these, 8 out of 10 are people and 7 of the Top 10 are actually a great match for this search.  There is quite a bit we can do to further refine and improve this (for example I could manually refine the search to exclude web links which I know improves the results even more but would be cheating for this demonstration where I’ve used exactly the same terms for each), but I think this is still very successful in demonstrating the value of the HiveMind engine as a different type of search engine – looking for people and not documents.

Highlights?
  • Getting back into it
  • Having a nice focus for the week
  • Getting a more useful version of Twendly up – excitement that it’s all going so well.
  • Seeing things come together in production.
Lowlights?
  • Feeling the pressure now with a live site
  • Not much really, a very productive week that I was proud of.
Goal this week?
  • Not sure – will start with a review of where we think Twendly is at and a decision on wether we put some more time in it

Launch of Twendly

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Yesterday we launched http://twendly.com which is the Twitter people search implementing a version of the HiveMind engine we have been working on.

It's still very much a preview of the concept, but if you've been following and are interested in what we are up to, then I invite you to take the time to go to the site and sign in using Twitter (yes, we are only supporting Twitter just at the moment).

Even if you don't have a Twitter account you can still search and play with it – you'll get the basics of the concept very quickly, but if you do have a Twitter account, we'd love you to sign up and let us index all your tweets to add more users into the database and make the demonstration more meaningful.  We'd love to get a couple of hundred people signed up over the Christmas period, so feel free to invite and encourage your friends to join in too.

Thanks!

Reflections on start-up life: Week Five

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Round, like a circle in a spiral, in a wheel within a wheel…

After the aborted launch of our demo site the week before, come Monday we felt remarkably positive and picked up the pieces and moved forwards.  We felt it was important to get something up regardless so we chunked things down and pushed to get a site up with the HiveMind engine indexing “stuff”.

After the experiences the week before, we were better placed to move into production and the deployment scripts are maturing to the point that they actually seem to save time rather than cost us time, so it was a lot smoother to get our new demo up and running.  Although largely we had it finished on Tuesday, we still took a couple of days before we were happy to push the button and say go.

Well, what a difference it feels like now having something to show.  It’s strange as the demo is somewhat “underwhelming” in the sense that when you look at it, you might wonder what we’ve been up to for five weeks, but we know that the problem isn’t an easy one to solve.  What has been really pleasing is the very positive support from people now that we have something to actually demonstrate.

It’s such a worth-while exercise, demo early and demo often is a great motto.  Once people see and experience what we’ve been doing, a few things happen.  Sometimes people who “got it” now don’t.  Sometimes people who didn’t “get it” now do!  Best of all, people now have lots of different ideas and use cases for us to explore.

Now we have a live server, we can index lots more content which means we can begin to properly test and tune the engine.  Things also come to a close better (and new beginnings in support too) – once we push something live, we have an “end” to the cycle we were in which is a positive thing.

Why I say it’s a bit like the windmills in your mind is that we’ve ended up a hairs breadth away from what we intended to launch the previous Friday and backed off from.  In my mind this shows we are pretty focussed on the core “root” problem of expertise location and that the use cases are similar in many regards.

This “live customer test bed” is just so crucial – we’ve made a major step forwards in our lifecycle as we are no longer listening to the windmills inside our own minds, instead we are being blown by the breeze of feedback which is an altogether more beneficial thing to do.

Highlights?
  • Christmas lunch with our wives – a nice break and nice to share some time out with them.
  • Getting the website up and sending the first few closed invites out to a very few people.
  • Some great meetings discussing and demoing the site and doing lots of listening to the things people have to say.
  • Discovery that the site works quite well on the iPhone – it took a beating as a demo machine.
  • Setting some big challenges late on a Friday and *almost* getting there – only some test iterations to go Monday and we are done.
Lowlights?
  • Paper work – even when we aren’t making money it just never seems to quite end.
  • Inevitable reality, things starting to slow up – it’s harder to talk to people at the moment because of break coming up and many of them will be off for a while now.

 

Goal this week?
  • An open launch on Monday then holidays for a week.

We are taking a break next week due to Christmas, so we’ll be back in the New Year with our continued adventures with BinaryPlex.  It may only be five weeks but as I said to Karina (my wife) last week – I’ve not had this much fun in a long time.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all.