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Reflections on Startup Life (ROSL): The series that documented the startup Tim had with Alex back in 2010 - 2012

ROSL105: The last one…

ROSL105: Reflections on Startup Life, Week 105 — The last one. For those that missed the new last week, we’ve just been acquired by AVOS, the owners of Delicious. Of course we’re not “stopping” startup life at all, we’re really continuing the journey but as part of a

ROSL104: Two years and a TV spot

ROSL104: Reflections on startup life, week 104. We’ve just clocked two years. What a milestone! In that time we’ve launched four products (including Trunk.ly). We’ve had paying customers. We’ve killed sites before we launched. We’ve met fantastic people, had amazing support, been insulted, ripped

ROSL103: Driven by users, designing for customers.

ROSL103: Reflections on Startup Life, Week 103 “You know that little ball you put on the aerial so you can find your car in a parking lot? That should be on every car!” — Homer Simpson, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou Of course you’ve heard the saying “the customer is

ROSL102: If only I had a horse…

ROSL102: Reflections on Startup Life, Week 102. A quick trip to the US last week — nothing to see here, move along. It was interesting in a couple of ways though that I can share. One was the culture of the Mac. There really is an amazing dichotomy between the Mac

ROSL101: Whoops

Missed another one. For some reason this is getting harder to keep up with!

ROSL100: Is your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) actually just Minimum Product (MP)?

ROSL100: Reflections on Startup Life, Week 100 Since launch, Alex and I have always considered ourselves fairly lean minded (as in “lean startup methodology”). It’s not been a formal thing for us — we don’t really think about it that much, in the same way we don’t really

ROSL99: Polarizing users and the impact of UI change.

What’s most fascinating about the new release of trunk.ly is that it seems to polarize users into one of two camps… either they loved the old version and this is a disaster, or they hated the old version and this is the best thing we’ve done. @timbull

ROSL98: Release week and the power of change

ROSL98 — Reflections on startup life, week 98 What a huge week last week. We met our deadline of the 22nd for releasing the new version of Trunk.ly. It was a massive effort to get it over the line and although we exhausted ourselves, it was hugely satisfying to finally

ROSL97: The art of making movies.

ROSL97: Reflections on startup life, Week 97 Well I know now I don’t want to be a movie director. It’s taken the better part of a week to get a cut of our introductory video for Trunk.ly that I’m happy enough with, and yet there is

ROSL96: Context switch

ROSL96 — Reflections on startup life, week 96. Once again we change gears. The last few weeks have been head down coding on SportsDP. Now that’s launched and out the door, my focus is switching back to Trunk.ly. But now it’s not coding, it’s marketing. With the

ROSL95: Launch! And deadlines…

ROSL95: Reflections on startup life, week 95. Wow, another week where I didn’t write a Monday post. I think it’s because I’ve been flat out with the contracting work I’ve been doing on Sports Digital Passion. Which begs the question — why aren’t I that busy

RSOL94: Business planning and contracting

ROSL94 — Reflections on startup life, week 94 Wasn’t I here five minutes ago? I can’t even recall what happened in Week 93, suffice to say I was probably busy, but it was last week (week 94) that really crunched time. So what’s been happening? It’s been

ROSL93: This post left intentionally blank

ROSL93 — Reflections on startup life, week 93 Well it was bound to happen sooner or later. I missed a week! Suffice to say, I was busy — the Internet had things it wanted me to see :-) So rather than break the chain, I’ll post this to note the week

ROSL92: A call to action — let’s launch #corphack

ROSL92 — Reflections on startup life, week 92. On Saturday I dropped into the Melbourne Start-up hackathon which was part of entrepreneurs week. I’d been asked to come along and give a talk to the (mostly students) who’d at that stage been up all night hacking away on their

ROSL91: Hello Monday!

ROSL91 — Reflections on startup life, week 91 I loved this tweet from Alex this morning: Had a walk through the botanic garden before going to work. Despite the money issue, life is really good. — Alex Dong (@alexdong) August 7, 2011 “Had a walk through the botanic garden before going to

ROSL90: What was I thinking when…

ROSL90 — Reflections on startup life, week 90 Good progress was made last week with the new connectors page finished and launched, as well as a new Quora connector (held up by some debugging, but almost ready to go) and another two connectors in the works that should launch this week.

Fighting back: ROSL89

ROSL89 — Reflections on startup life, week 89 Last week was very productive, not so much on the coding front, but on a number of business development opportunities, some angel pitching and finding some short-term contract work to help with the cash flow. Alex was delayed getting back from Beijing — he

Roadblocks: ROSL88

ROSL88 — Reflections on startup life, week 88 Last weeks post got a huge reaction and a much broader readership than typical. Thanks everyone for your comments and support. Although actually less than I expected, it’s still interesting how the reaction of some people is “you should have done this,

Adventures with Venture Capital outside the Valley (or how to get screwed): ROSL87

ROSL87: Reflections on startup life, week 87 This is one of the hardest posts I’ve had to write. Not least because it’s a personal, painful series of events. But I’ve tried to remain open and honest about our journey thus far, so within the bounds of what’

Time in the game: ROSL86

ROSL86 — Reflections on startup life, week 86 For those who’ve been following for a while, you’ll remember that prior to iterating to do Trunk.ly, Alex and I had built a product called Tribalytic. After launching it (about 12 months ago now) we acquired a few customers we

Slowing down hurts : ROSL85

ROSL85 — Reflections on startup life, week 85 There’s no end of things that keep me awake at night, but one current observation is that we are slowing down our release speed. I think there’s a few reasons: Code quality and performance When you start, you build features at

Co-working and maintenance: ROSL84

ROSL84 — Reflections on startup life, week 84 I’m not sure if it’s just the winter setting in — cold days, not getting light until late and dark early, but things continue to just feel hard at the moment. It’s a real slog. One thing I’m doing to

Tough decisions in real time: ROSL83

ROSL83 — Reflections on startup life, week 83 I don’t think I ever expected that among the many skills I would acquire, that being a tight rope artist would also be one. Turns out that startups are the worlds greatest balancing act. We are constantly bombarded with decisions and often

The grind and the faith: ROSL82

ROSL82 Reflections on startup life — Week 82 The grind and the faith Another week where “nothing happened”. We released some changes, we networked, we experimented with some new features, we kept our nose to the grind stone. The “TechCrunch” perspective of the world is exciting things happening every day, but

Building Networks: ROSL81

ROSL81 — Reflections on startup life: week 81 General news We had a huge day overnight Wednesday / Thursday — our biggest single day of sign ups since back on the 26th of January (which was when we were on the tail end of our launch press). Was feeling pretty good about it,