Reflections on start-up life: Week 41

Wow! Two releases in two weeks. That’s right, we shipped a new release again over this weekend just gone. It includes two important new features — a share of voice measure and an hourly average.

This changed plans slightly as we decided not to heavily push the last release, knowing that we would have a second one so shortly. No point in spamming people with information. As one of our PR consultants told us “keep your powder dry”.

Now however, we are ready to go off with a bang.

Way back in Week 12, we traveled to Sydney and spent time in the offices of Mob-Labs with Alex and Rob. They were really hospitable and had lots of great advice. So this week, when I heard Rob was in Melbourne, I gate crashed a meeting to say hi. He’s also recently trialled Tribalytic as well and I was keen to get some feedback. Rob had been instrumental in helping us shape our thinking at the time about what we’d do with Twendly coming off the Sydney visit so it was really pleasing to hear him describe Tribalytic as looking like a “really polished product now”. Far more than “the feature” it was described as in the past.

We also a review of our metrics and it looks like we are hitting the targets, but we aren’t pushing enough people into top end of the funnel yet. It’s been a deliberate decision in many ways — iterate on the product and test it “softly” with people face to face to work out what key messaging is working and what we need to hit. I think we have that now, we know what we are, what we aren’t and can strongly articulate our value. Now we have to be able to do this on the website and push volume through to test it.

It feels like a milestone — we’ve released a version that we are really happy with, that performs exceptionally well and delivers core value that is unique and differentiated from other tools on the market. So now it’s time to really start making a sing and dance about it.

Highlights

• New release
• Follow up with people
• Demonstrating the new release features and getting very positive responses

Lessons Learnt

• Keep iterating
• Keep at it
• It’s worth stopping to review where the weaknesses are — they change from week to week as you strengthen some and neglect others.

Goal — All week

• Publicity, publicity, publicity — let people know about what we are doing