ROSL Maintenance: ROSL80 ROSL80: Reflections on startup life: Week 80 Maintenance will eat you alive! In the last week, we’ve hit an interesting inflection point — the site is now big enough and has been running long enough (processing over 1 million links per day now) that some maintenance has become inevitable — in
ROSL Measuring success: ROSL 79 ROSL79 — Reflections on startup life 79 Measuring Success This seems to be a bit of a theme from our last week, in particular with the new Group feature which we’ve released as a prototype. Alex and I spent quite a bit of time before we released it discussing what
ROSL Strategy: ROSL78 ROSL77 — Reflections On Startup Life Week 78 Strategy It’s great to be back home. It’s been a really exhausting two weeks. Essential, but tiring. There’s not much of a reflection this week, other than a need to reflect! A valuable lesson has been learnt — you cannot spend
ROSL The similarities between Engineers and Coffee: ROSL77 ROSL77 — Reflections On Startup Life Week 77 Face to face strategy We’re still here in San Francisco for the rest of the week. Post the disappointment of not getting into Y-Combinator, we push on as always. Working side by side with Alex has been great — in some respects there
ROSL Reflections on startup life: Week 76 (Y Combinator Interview) YC Interview Sorry I missed yesterdays regular post, but Alex and I were in the air travelling to San Francisco. I’ve been a little obscure on what we are planning to do here, now is the time for the big reveal. Rather than bash out a post yesterday I
ROSL New profile pictures It doesn’t happen a lot, but every now and again Alex and I have been asked to provide profile pictures for a news article. Much to the annoyance of web editors everywhere, the best we’ve provided have never been good enough because the quality was too low. My
ROSL Reflections on startup life: Week 75 It’s been another busy week. Alex has progressed significantly with the new index and we are days, if not hours away from releasing it. There’s another change banked up behind this one already (allowing you to login in to Trunk.ly with Twitter) and a feeling of excitement
ROSL Reflections on startup life: Week 74 We’ve finally moved the new release into user testing. What a relief. The mood has instantly picked up and we are steaming ahead. On the down side, some of the initial feedback hasn’t been as enthusiastic as we’d hoped, which I think is really confirmation that releasing
ROSL Reflections on startup life: Week 73 Product Management Triangle. 10 weeks ago now (wow that went fast!) I wrote about how we tackle priority management. Something related to that which I’ve been asked a couple of times since is how do we tackle product management? How do we decide what features are in and out?
ROSL Reflections on startup life: Week 72 The value of free. Despite the fact that they are hard work, stressful, at times soul destroying, frequently the worst financial decision you’ll ever make in your life and never end, people still think that working for a startup could be fun! OK, it can actually be that too,
ROSL Reflections on startup life: Week 71 From data to instinct. As a personal note, I really want to remember this last month. There’s an important lesson brewing here, I just haven’t quite put my finger on it. We are now in what I loosely think of as “The Valley of Death”. Charging forwards with
ROSL Reflections on startup life: Week 70 Somewhere between waking up and sitting down at my PC with a coffee this morning and now, we moved some servers around, which consequently took the search offline and while I personally didn’t do much, I was online with Alex, trying to bounce ideas and test while we worked
ROSL Reflections on startup life: Week 69 As I started drafting this post, it occurs to me that frustration is largely a matter of perspective. Am I a glass half empty or a glass half full type of person? Last week was full of frustration; my immediate thought was to document all the “bad” things here (self
ROSL Reflections on startup life: Week 67 There’s not a great deal to say about the last week — plugging away at features, working hard, keeping on with the networking. You know, startup life as per usual. A couple of things of note however. For those that don’t know, the .ly part of trunk.ly is
ROSL Reflection on startup life: Week 66 Am I moving fast enough? Despite the best intentions of being agile, there are times when one week just isn’t enough to deliver a new feature. Sometimes things take two or three. When you’re addicted to delivery (which I think is the best way to describe how we
ROSL Dumb programming techniques to avoid… This is somewhat of a post in frustration while I wait for my computer to finish what’s turned out to be a far more technically challenging problem than I thought! In Trunk.ly we want to add several new features, but the ones I’m working on are “public”
ROSL Reflections on startup life: Week 65 Analysis Paralysis — or a little bit of stats can go a long way. We didn’t “turn on” the viral thing after all — instead we just enabled the feature for everyone. Why? Well as we thought more about it, we realised that we still don’t really understand why people
ROSL Reflections on startup life: Week 64 I had such a great response to the post from last week — thank you! In the last week we’ve been really focussed on behaviour, metrics and measurement. I’ve taken the opportunity at a few social events to quiz some people about Trunk.ly and how they are using
ROSL Reflections on startup life: Week 63 Wasn’t I here yesterday? One question every startup asks themselves is “Is this the most important thing I could be doing?” This is equally true of corporates as well, but as a startup, the answer to this question sometimes feels like it changes 30 times a day. Sometimes that
ROSL Reflections on startup life: Week 62 It’s been 62 weekly posts and although this one is now really pushing the boundaries of “a week”, I’m not going to let it go past. I’m mentally saving a couple of things for next week (ie. in two days time…) so I’ll make this more
ROSL Reflections on startup life: Week 61 Wow, I’m not sure what happened this week — the weekly reflection completely slipped my mind! I mentioned last week that we had to take a break. It’s been so good for us! Although we haven’t pushed a lot of visible features in the last week, we’ve
ROSL Reflections on startup life: Week 60 By the end of last week both Alex and I were tired. We were pushing through, getting things done and stuffing up along the way. With the exception of Christmas Day and a little bit on New Years Eve, we’ve both been putting in anywhere from 12–16+ hours
ROSL Reflections on startup life: Week 59 Please excuse the typos, for once I can blame my iPhone and not my rushed typing. I’m quietly pleased to look back at last weeks goals of New Servers implemented and Social Features done and realize that we’ve done that and much more. Honestly, it can feel like
ROSL New feature: See who else has shared the same link… One thing you’ve probably noticed and has perhaps frustrated you is that when you’re reviewing your links, you could only see 5 of the people who shared the same link as you. Trunk.ly would tell you that there was others that had also shared it, but you
ROSL 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
