Reflections on start-up life: Week 10

== 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.