Ella is 11

Ella is 11

Ella is 11

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RSOL94: Business planning and contracting

ROSL94 — Reflections on startup life, week 94 Wasn’t I here five minutes ago? I can’t even recall what happened in Week 93, suffice to say I was probably busy, but it was last week (week 94) that really crunched time. So what’s been happening? It’s been

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ROSL93: This post left intentionally blank

ROSL93 — Reflections on startup life, week 93 Well it was bound to happen sooner or later. I missed a week! Suffice to say, I was busy — the Internet had things it wanted me to see :-) So rather than break the chain, I’ll post this to note the week

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ROSL92: A call to action — let’s launch #corphack

ROSL92 — Reflections on startup life, week 92. On Saturday I dropped into the Melbourne Start-up hackathon which was part of entrepreneurs week. I’d been asked to come along and give a talk to the (mostly students) who’d at that stage been up all night hacking away on their

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ROSL91: Hello Monday!

ROSL91 — Reflections on startup life, week 91 I loved this tweet from Alex this morning: Had a walk through the botanic garden before going to work. Despite the money issue, life is really good. — Alex Dong (@alexdong) August 7, 2011 “Had a walk through the botanic garden before going to

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ROSL90: What was I thinking when…

ROSL90 — Reflections on startup life, week 90 Good progress was made last week with the new connectors page finished and launched, as well as a new Quora connector (held up by some debugging, but almost ready to go) and another two connectors in the works that should launch this week.

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Fighting back: ROSL89

ROSL89 — Reflections on startup life, week 89 Last week was very productive, not so much on the coding front, but on a number of business development opportunities, some angel pitching and finding some short-term contract work to help with the cash flow. Alex was delayed getting back from Beijing — he

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Roadblocks: ROSL88

ROSL88 — Reflections on startup life, week 88 Last weeks post got a huge reaction and a much broader readership than typical. Thanks everyone for your comments and support. Although actually less than I expected, it’s still interesting how the reaction of some people is “you should have done this,

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Adventures with Venture Capital outside the Valley (or how to get screwed): ROSL87

ROSL87: Reflections on startup life, week 87 This is one of the hardest posts I’ve had to write. Not least because it’s a personal, painful series of events. But I’ve tried to remain open and honest about our journey thus far, so within the bounds of what’

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Time in the game: ROSL86

ROSL86 — Reflections on startup life, week 86 For those who’ve been following for a while, you’ll remember that prior to iterating to do Trunk.ly, Alex and I had built a product called Tribalytic. After launching it (about 12 months ago now) we acquired a few customers we

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Slowing down hurts : ROSL85

ROSL85 — Reflections on startup life, week 85 There’s no end of things that keep me awake at night, but one current observation is that we are slowing down our release speed. I think there’s a few reasons: Code quality and performance When you start, you build features at

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Co-working and maintenance: ROSL84

ROSL84 — Reflections on startup life, week 84 I’m not sure if it’s just the winter setting in — cold days, not getting light until late and dark early, but things continue to just feel hard at the moment. It’s a real slog. One thing I’m doing to

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Tough decisions in real time: ROSL83

ROSL83 — Reflections on startup life, week 83 I don’t think I ever expected that among the many skills I would acquire, that being a tight rope artist would also be one. Turns out that startups are the worlds greatest balancing act. We are constantly bombarded with decisions and often

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The grind and the faith: ROSL82

ROSL82 Reflections on startup life — Week 82 The grind and the faith Another week where “nothing happened”. We released some changes, we networked, we experimented with some new features, we kept our nose to the grind stone. The “TechCrunch” perspective of the world is exciting things happening every day, but

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Building Networks: ROSL81

ROSL81 — Reflections on startup life: week 81 General news We had a huge day overnight Wednesday / Thursday — our biggest single day of sign ups since back on the 26th of January (which was when we were on the tail end of our launch press). Was feeling pretty good about it,

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Maintenance: ROSL80

ROSL80: Reflections on startup life: Week 80 Maintenance will eat you alive! In the last week, we’ve hit an interesting inflection point — the site is now big enough and has been running long enough (processing over 1 million links per day now) that some maintenance has become inevitable — in

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Measuring success: ROSL 79

ROSL79 — Reflections on startup life 79 Measuring Success This seems to be a bit of a theme from our last week, in particular with the new Group feature which we’ve released as a prototype. Alex and I spent quite a bit of time before we released it discussing what

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Strategy: ROSL78

ROSL77 — Reflections On Startup Life Week 78 Strategy It’s great to be back home. It’s been a really exhausting two weeks. Essential, but tiring. There’s not much of a reflection this week, other than a need to reflect! A valuable lesson has been learnt — you cannot spend

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The similarities between Engineers and Coffee: ROSL77

ROSL77 — Reflections On Startup Life Week 77 Face to face strategy We’re still here in San Francisco for the rest of the week. Post the disappointment of not getting into Y-Combinator, we push on as always. Working side by side with Alex has been great — in some respects there

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Reflections on startup life: Week 76 (Y Combinator Interview)

YC Interview Sorry I missed yesterdays regular post, but Alex and I were in the air travelling to San Francisco. I’ve been a little obscure on what we are planning to do here, now is the time for the big reveal. Rather than bash out a post yesterday I

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New profile pictures

It doesn’t happen a lot, but every now and again Alex and I have been asked to provide profile pictures for a news article. Much to the annoyance of web editors everywhere, the best we’ve provided have never been good enough because the quality was too low. My

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Reflections on startup life: Week 75

It’s been another busy week. Alex has progressed significantly with the new index and we are days, if not hours away from releasing it. There’s another change banked up behind this one already (allowing you to login in to Trunk.ly with Twitter) and a feeling of excitement

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Reflections on startup life: Week 74

We’ve finally moved the new release into user testing. What a relief. The mood has instantly picked up and we are steaming ahead. On the down side, some of the initial feedback hasn’t been as enthusiastic as we’d hoped, which I think is really confirmation that releasing