ROSL

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,

ROSL

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

ROSL

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

ROSL

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

ROSL

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

ROSL

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

ROSL

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

ROSL

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

ROSL

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

ROSL

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?

ROSL

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,

ROSL

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

ROSL

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

ROSL

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

Rockbeare

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

Musings

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

ROSL

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

ROSL

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

Rockbeare

Just finished decorating Jaspers birthday cake for 9th birthday

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

ROSL

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”

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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

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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

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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

ROSL

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

ROSL

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