ROSL Reflection on startup life: Week 57 Sorry, no time this week. Suffice to say the wave finally hit. We got Trunk.ly out the door (much earlier than we intended) and we’ve been chasing our tails ever since. We’ve caught the wave and we are surfing it for all we are worth. 16+ hour
ROSL Trunk.ly update — what an awesome afternoon It’s been a fairly insane afternoon — with the rumor that Delicious is going to be shut down, everyone was talking about links. If only we knew someone who had a link service… oh, wait! That would be us. We poked a few ants nest to stir up some interest
ROSL Reflections on startup life: Week 56 When I consider that last week I touched on 5 out of 5 projects, started learning a new language and framework, plus spoke at the Australian Language Technology Association conference on Thursday afternoon, I think I know why I feel like I’m doing about 10 jobs. The vast majority
ROSL Reflection on startup life: Week 55 The way in which people use product is endlessly fascinating. For example, with Trunk.ly (which collects links from multiple sources) one of the very first features that most people requested was to filter links by source. So we added this in. A week after launch, no one is using
ROSL 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
ROSL Reflections on startup life: Week 53 I admit to some nagging thoughts in the back of my mind. Last week was busy — we are delivering two contracts between Alex and I, continuing to operate Tribalytic and work on our own projects. But that’s not exceptional or even interesting, lots of people are very busy. For
ROSL Reflections on startup life: Week 52 Just over twelve months ago, this appeared on this blog New beginnings — I’ve resigned. Shortly followed a few weeks later by Reflections on startup life: Week One. I made no promises in that first post but I did say that “I’d like to try and make this a
ROSL Reflection on startup life: Week 51 Because these posts are after the completion of the week, I can’t help but think ahead a little. It’s now a year since… (ok, I’ll save this for next week). Last week was a short week and having blogged on Thursday, there’s not a great deal
ROSL Reflections on Startup life: Week 50 Did you miss me? It’s been bugging me all week that I haven’t yet done my weekly post. Let’s just all pretend this is Monday and move on :-) After 50 weeks of this, I think it’s only the second time I haven’t posted on
ROSL Reflections on Startup life: Week 49 For this weeks blog post there are three things on the top of my mind. * Being passionate. * The value of time. * Reframing Being Passionate I received sad news last week. A very close friend (we were best man at each others weddings) who was in his very early forties passed
ROSL Reflection on startup life: Week 48 Too much to do, to little time to write, but after 48 weeks I can’t stop now. So a collection of loose thoughts. 1. Everyone needs a cofounder. More importantly you need a cofounder with a different perspective. How else can you have hard discussions. 2. You’re not
ROSL Reflections on startup life: Week 47 Another week and another major new client. Here’s hoping I can say the same again next week too! After a slow burn, we’ve hit a few runs with clients recently which is very re-assuring. So much so we have some “key” clients we’ll start advertising on our
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 46 Deep breath. What a week. Every now and again I have a week like this one just gone where I think, wow, that’s some kind of turning point. * We launched Distlr * We signed World Vision Australia as a client for Tribalytic for 12 months. * We had another major client
ROSL Launch of Distlr — The event specific Twitter client If you’ve been following this blog for a while, one thing you may of noticed in the last few weeks is some cryptic references to “Project X”. Well, I’m really pleased to announce the launch of our new project, Distlr — The Essence of the Event. One of the
ROSL Reflections on startup life: Week 45 The rest of the holiday cruised by very nicely. I took one day “off” to work (love the iPhone and tethering for keeping me online wherever I go). Aside from that, plenty of theme parks and generally a good time. Still, I was itching to get home. It’s great
ROSL Reflections on Start-Up life: Week 44 It was a short week, I worked Monday and Tuesday then from Wednesday I’ve been off on leave. It’s been a great holiday so far. Much needed, yet I can’t shake the feeling I’m “cheating” on myself — this is time to be putting in, not taking
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 43 Is it the spring in the air? I don’t know, but I think the fact that Alex and I sat down and really challenged ourselves on what to do differently has brought a different vibe this week. That and two potential customers got back with strong buying indications which
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 42 This is one of those “it’s easier to write you’re going to do it than it is to do it posts”. Last week the focus was public relations. Well we have set the wheels in motion, but nothing big has happened yet. Like so many things we dive
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 41 Wow! Two releases in two weeks. That’s right, we shipped a new release again over this weekend just gone. It includes two important new features — a share of voice measure and an hourly average. This changed plans slightly as we decided not to heavily push the last release, knowing
ROSL Reflections on Start-Up life: Week 40 The awesome news this week is that we have released the new version of Tribalytic! It’s been a hard road and has involved Alex re-writing the engine almost from the ground up. We’ve got a new database, new index structures, large amounts of codes re-written into C++ (much
ROSL New business cards with Tribalytic branding. Pity reverse poorly cropped but I’m too cheap to fuss! /cc @alexdong
ROSL 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
ROSL Alex’s contribution to the startup blog world Just realised I neglected to mention this here. http://startup.alexdong.com/ Alex has now started his own startup blog — if you’re enjoying reading this one, then you might like to read Alex’s which balances out both sides of the view on what’s happening. His latest post
ROSL Reflections on startup life: Week 38 With a new release on the immediate horizon, the mood is picking up again. All the work and frustration over the last few weeks is starting to gel together with a clearer idea on where we are going, a much better understanding of the market and some strong ideas on
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 37 Typically we know how to do whatever it is that we need to do (we may not always be the best at it, but we know the mechanics on how to go about it), but we sometimes don’t do it because of blind spots in our thinking. The realisation
