Reflections on startup life: Week 39

We haven’t shipped the new release, however it has passed a few significant milestones entering into integration and now “live” and able to be tested.

Unfortunately once we started wrapping everything back up together (integrating the engine into the website), the speed performances we thought we had gained have tailed off. We need some more research to properly understand where we are at and what we can do. The good news is that regardless it is still much more scalable — we should be able to throw more users at this engine without losing performance. So we might not of reached our “sub second” goal, we are able to do some of the critical deliverables regardless.

From a market development point of view, things are going well. I invested time in creating a Social Network Analysis of the Australian Election commentary. It took around a day and a half to complete properly, but was very educational and turned into our most successful blog post to date, generating a lot of comment on Twitter. Even better, I was called up by a journalist from The Weekend Australian to answer some questions about the post and these quotes made it into an article in the weekend paper. It’s always nice to get our name out there broader than just online. It’s strange how our psyche is still wired to feel that seeing something in print provide more “validity” — or at least it does for me!

We are continuing to build our presence and I think slowly migrating from a “purist” tools company to a strategy and tools offering.

I was also invited to speak at the Australasian Language Technology Association (ALTA) to make a short presentation about how we use text analysis and natural language processing technology tools. This was a pleasant surprise as well and I’m looking forward to sharing with people researching in this area how we use this for business purposes. This happens in December.

Alex has taken four days off — it’s been a while since we’ve really had a proper break and something we’ve come back to again and again is that this journey is a marathon, not a sprint — stopping to refresh and recharge is essential. The positive news is I didn’t break the servers (yet) while he was away so that’s a good thing.

Overall? I continue to feel that the pressure of interest is building. It hasn’t broken yet, but the dice will start to fall our way — there is plenty of validation that we are doing “the right things”, if just keep at it, things will come together over the next month or two.

Highlights

• Article in the Australian
• Generating some interest with our analysis
• Invite to the ALTA conference
• Meeting a market researcher looking for a tool — we have a meeting planned next week to see how we can coordinate and work together.

Lessons Learnt

• Keep at it. I can never pick which “thing” we do will generate the interest, but I’m convinced that it’s not a “one off”. Consistency leads to recognition, not the individual post itself.

Goal this week — Customers

• Knuckle down and refine our messaging — the BinaryPlex website is not really doing our brand any good, it needs to be better aligned with the Tribalytic one now.
• Launch new engine to customers
• Follow ups

Goal this week — Engineering

• Ship the new release