Insatiably Curious (Page 33)

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Reflections on startup life: Week 73

Product Management Triangle. 10 weeks ago now (wow that went fast!) I wrote about how we tackle priority management. Something related to that which I’ve been asked a couple of times since is how do we tackle product management? How do we decide what features are in and out?

Reflections on startup life: Week 72

The value of free. Despite the fact that they are hard work, stressful, at times soul destroying, frequently the worst financial decision you’ll ever make in your life and never end, people still think that working for a startup could be fun! OK, it can actually be that too,

Reflections on startup life: Week 71

From data to instinct. As a personal note, I really want to remember this last month. There’s an important lesson brewing here, I just haven’t quite put my finger on it. We are now in what I loosely think of as “The Valley of Death”. Charging forwards with

Reflections on startup life: Week 70

Somewhere between waking up and sitting down at my PC with a coffee this morning and now, we moved some servers around, which consequently took the search offline and while I personally didn’t do much, I was online with Alex, trying to bounce ideas and test while we worked

Reflections on startup life: Week 69

As I started drafting this post, it occurs to me that frustration is largely a matter of perspective. Am I a glass half empty or a glass half full type of person? Last week was full of frustration; my immediate thought was to document all the “bad” things here (self

40th birthday present — restored 1939 phone from my grandmothers phone exchange…

My Uncle collected this when the exchange was automated (40 years ago??) and stored it. Around 20 years ago he decided to he would have it restored and give it to me for my 40th birthday. I’ve got a lot to learn about thinking ahead! Very touched and honored

Analysis of a server downtime and lessons learnt

Hi Mum, this post isn’t for you — if you’re not interested in the gory details of our near server disaster last night, then please look away now. If you are, read on! Background Last night we managed to break several components on two of our servers — our Database

Reflections on startup life: Week 67

There’s not a great deal to say about the last week — plugging away at features, working hard, keeping on with the networking. You know, startup life as per usual. A couple of things of note however. For those that don’t know, the .ly part of trunk.ly is

Reflection on startup life: Week 66

Am I moving fast enough? Despite the best intentions of being agile, there are times when one week just isn’t enough to deliver a new feature. Sometimes things take two or three. When you’re addicted to delivery (which I think is the best way to describe how we

Just finished decorating Jaspers birthday cake for 9th birthday

You’ll never guess which show he’s a fan of!

Dumb programming techniques to avoid…

This is somewhat of a post in frustration while I wait for my computer to finish what’s turned out to be a far more technically challenging problem than I thought! In Trunk.ly we want to add several new features, but the ones I’m working on are “public”

Reflections on startup life: Week 65

Analysis Paralysis — or a little bit of stats can go a long way. We didn’t “turn on” the viral thing after all — instead we just enabled the feature for everyone. Why? Well as we thought more about it, we realised that we still don’t really understand why people

Reflections on startup life: Week 64

I had such a great response to the post from last week — thank you! In the last week we’ve been really focussed on behaviour, metrics and measurement. I’ve taken the opportunity at a few social events to quiz some people about Trunk.ly and how they are using

Reflections on startup life: Week 63

Wasn’t I here yesterday? One question every startup asks themselves is “Is this the most important thing I could be doing?” This is equally true of corporates as well, but as a startup, the answer to this question sometimes feels like it changes 30 times a day. Sometimes that

Reflections on startup life: Week 62

It’s been 62 weekly posts and although this one is now really pushing the boundaries of “a week”, I’m not going to let it go past. I’m mentally saving a couple of things for next week (ie. in two days time…) so I’ll make this more

Reflections on startup life: Week 61

Wow, I’m not sure what happened this week — the weekly reflection completely slipped my mind! I mentioned last week that we had to take a break. It’s been so good for us! Although we haven’t pushed a lot of visible features in the last week, we’ve

Reflections on startup life: Week 60

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

Reflections on startup life: Week 59

Please excuse the typos, for once I can blame my iPhone and not my rushed typing. I’m quietly pleased to look back at last weeks goals of New Servers implemented and Social Features done and realize that we’ve done that and much more. Honestly, it can feel like

Trunkly-links-page

New feature: See who else has shared the same link…

One thing you’ve probably noticed and has perhaps frustrated you is that when you’re reviewing your links, you could only see 5 of the people who shared the same link as you. Trunk.ly would tell you that there was others that had also shared it, but you

Reflections on startup life: Week 58

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

Reflection on startup life: Week 57

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

Trunkly-homepage

Trunk.ly update — what an awesome afternoon

It’s been a fairly insane afternoon — with the rumor that Delicious is going to be shut down, everyone was talking about links. If only we knew someone who had a link service… oh, wait! That would be us. We poked a few ants nest to stir up some interest

Reflections on startup life: Week 56

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

Reflection on startup life: Week 55

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

Reflections on startup life: Week 54

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