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 it’s a social bookmark and curation service. If you share inks via social media, and frequently click on “like this” buttons on websites that link back to Facebook, Trunk.ly collects all the links you share and stores them for you. You can then search the links and filter them to quickly and easily find a link you’ve shared again. Contact me if you’re interested in a beta invite (or sign up on the website, but we aren’t releasing new invites generally at the moment).
What’s interesting on reflection is that Trunk.ly represents a lot of our learning over the last 12 months. There are many things we are doing with Trunk.ly for the first time which reflect what we’ve learnt and experienced:
- Finally we’ve found a consumer facing business model (we haven’t implemented it yet, but Trunk.ly will not be a B2B proposition in it’s early phases).
- Scarcity. I think in the past we’ve thrown things too open too soon. It’s made it hard to asses and value what’s happening. With scarcity, we can have a balance between getting feedback (critical) but also using it to iterate and measure impact and differences.
- Measurement. We have detailed measurement of everything people do on the site. This is a big change from previous products. Google Analytics is NOT enough — we need to know exactly how people use the site, what features they click on and how often. Our custom metrics are probably the thing we look at the most.
- Profiling: A result of the metrics, but we have some customer profiles now and are already beginning to understand how different people use Trunk.ly and are able to react accordingly.
The contract work (and consequent money in the bank) has also given us a slightly longer term view of projects. We can afford to iterate ideas and test them. If you get measurement right, then you really are well placed to ask and answer questions by trying things, not pontificating about them.
Highlights
- Progress with Trunk.ly and with contracts.
Lessons Learned
- It’s easy to over-commit! No harm is done to our projects by putting them on the back burner for a week or two, no matter how hard that is for us emotionally.
Goal this week
- Lots of Trunk.ly iterations.
- Talking at Ignite Melbourne this week (Ignite is a fixed format presentation — 5 minute talk, 20 slides, auto advancing every 15 seconds).
- Complete the contracts