Reflections on startup life: Week 58
Not quite sure where I’m at!
Things have been incredibly hectic still, thankfully Christmas hit and slowed things up for a bit. We are gradually making the changes we need to focus 100% on Trunk.ly for the next month or two (or more). We’ve had to let go one of the contracts we were working on just to get the time we needed to get things done.
It remains very flat out. Finally though, we’ve caught up on the absolutely critical issues and now only have the critical issues left and everything else left. I guess what this means is that by and large everything that is currently in Trunk.ly is now working properly — sure there’s lots more to do, but what we’ve got it doing what it’s supposed to.
Managed to take Christmas day off which was nice, didn’t even Tweet — the only time I got near the PC was to help my daughter setup her new iPod shuffle. I did check my mail on the iPad a couple of times, we still had visitors and people logging issues with the user site 24 * 7!
Trying to take it a little easier this week, which means keeping it to 8 hour days where possible and finding some time to spend with the family while they are all on holidays.
It’s definitely slowed down a lot with the Christmas / New Year break and we are already starting to think about how we can kick start that wave again after the break and also how we can get some chargeable features into the site to start trying to make some revenue.
Highlights
- New servers.
- A breather.
- Getting some of the most critical features in.
Lessons Learned
- A lot of things we did that made sense at a few hundred users just don’t make sense anymore. The best example of this is email — signing up with mail chimp and integrating seemed like a really good idea, but the reality is that we have enough users now that it begins to cost us to send mail to to people and hence the integration no longer makes sense as we are incredibly unlikely to actually send messages now! This is a consistent experience — at any level of success beyond a few hundred — 1000 users, you’ll have to start paying to make it possible.
- There are lots of ways of doing things for free, but when you’re time constrained, it makes a lot more sense to pay $30 per month to make it happen now and not worry about it.
Goals this week
- New servers implemented.
- Follow and social features improved.