ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 36 It was a confronting week in a number of different ways. Definitely not quite back on an upward swing yet! Under pinning all this is a personal milestone this week — a switch from money set aside for this venture, to now starting to eat into personal savings. Really in a
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 35 How do you keep going when confronted with cresting the top of a hill to achieve a goal and only to realise that there is another bigger hill in front of you again? The crest this week was pushing out the latest release of Tribalytic. This was the major focus
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 34 This weekend just past is now officially 12 months since Alex and I met at BootUp Camp. That’s us there in the middle — me in the centre and Alex in the green top to the right. This photo was taken at the end of our 2 weeks together. I’
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 33 I’ll say up front that this last week has been one of the toughest. Some of the best highs and the lowest lows to date. It’s perhaps the most challenging post to write as well — I’ve always wanted to keep this an open dialog yet I find
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 32 We closed two more sales this week, one of them three months up front (end of financial year special). Officially we’ve now taken more money through the door this month than we’ve spent. A nice feeling. Now we just need to make enough to start paying ourselves. I
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 31 If there is one lesson to be learned on reflection, it’s that major iterations always introduce bugs. Technically we are 1 week into the next iteration and already 1 week behind because we’ve been resolving the last of the issues in the Victoria release. I never liked Collingwood
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 30 Still waiting for the hockey stick — after signing the first customer the second, third and fourth are still “in the pipeline”. With a new release over the weekend, we have something to go back to a few people now and try close some deals. We pushed the Victoria Park release
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 29 Well, we’ve signed our first customer! While this is a major milestone, to put it into perspective, if he stays with us for 841 years we’ll be millionaires. There is a way to go yet. I’ve been fascinated by the change in perspective this has brought about
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 28 The new beta is still not quite fully operational, still a couple of minor issues that should be resolved today. We are feeling the pain of not having a proper development environment anymore — the challenge (as I’ve said many times in Twitter) is that doing something once is NOT
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 27 Straight up — we didn’t get the next beta out just yet. But it’s close! As I said to Alex, it will get closer and closer until one day it’s just done. That will be real soon. This anticipation is kind of strange in a way. There’s
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 26 Holy crap! 6 months — where did that go? I think this deserves the main focus of this post so I won’t dwell on last week much: * Progress on all fronts: * Next beta of engine is very close * Pipeline is now behaving * Feedback on reports is very positive — we are
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 25 The first full week back from San Francisco is done. Boy, what a change of pace! After a hectic time rushing from meeting to meeting, it’s now back to the challenge of coding and trying to re-engage a meeting schedule here back in Australia. The challenge has been switching
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 24 I don’t know if I left my heart in San Francisco, but my inner geek found its spiritual home. In our two and a half weeks we met many amazing people doing many amazing things. The quality of the start-ups, the engineers and the networking is phenomenal. Perhaps the
ROSL Reflections on Start-Up life: Week 23 The time in San Francisco is winding quickly to a close. We now have only four days left to make the most of this particular opportunity. I thought in this post it would be good to summarise what we’ve learnt to date about investor meetings and introductions. I guess
ROSL Reflections on Start-Up life: Week 22 A little out of sync this week but I blame the time difference! We continue to have a very interesting time here in San Francisco. It’s ranged from the stunning (hearing Opera singers serenade each other at a birthday party in local restaurants) to the slightly off putting (seeing
ROSL Reflections on Start-Up life: Week 21.5 — San Francisco Edition Since arriving in San Francisco there is more happening than I can cram into a weekly post, hence this special edition. It’s been a really exhausting few days and I’ve never been as tired as I was last night in my life. After arriving Tuesday AM after around
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 21 Firstly a big thank you to everyone that has been reading this blog and sending their encouragement. I love to get feedback that people out there are listening and I’m not just talking to myself, so thank you. San Francisco, the major event that has been looming now for
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 20 Wow. Week 20. Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun. As I come out of an Easter weekend (four day break here) where I’ve worked a substantial portion of each of those, it’s perhaps appropriate to reflect on deadlines, goals and focus. After 20 weeks there
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 19 Two weeks now until we head off to San Francisco so the pressure is rapidly increasing with every day we spend working on getting the prototype “out the door”. The challenge is that we perhaps underestimated just how complex the actual web interface would be. It’s not just rendering
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 18 I woke up Tuesday morning last week to see that Twendly had suddenly gone “nuts”. Since our launch of Twendly we’ve been studiously ignoring it, not wanting to get distracted from the main goal — it taught us a lot but we didn’t want to waste more time on
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 17 After a quiet month or so, I’ve been getting back into the networking and meeting with people again. Having completed the prototypes, both Alex and I focused on taking them out on the road and getting feedback. I think I met around 15–20 people last week that I
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 16 There is something about actually visualising output that feels like progress for me. Never mind that we’d spent 4 weeks crunching the numbers and doing all the “heavy lifting” to get to the point we could start working on the icing, but that last 2 days of effort where
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 15 This last week get very close to a repeat of week four. The reasons were similar (scale of problem becoming clearer and a real challenge), but this time we decided to keep pushing through. The opportunity delivered by solving the engine problems are too great to ignore. It should be
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 14 Well the first week with Alex back in China and us working remotely has passed remarkably smoothly. With Skype at hand, we can easily keep in touch and communicating which is great. We’ve also successfully split our work paths such that we can move on fairly independently from each
ROSL Reflections on start-up life: Week 13 As many of you know, Alex is from China and, visas being what they are, he’s now had to head back there. On the plus side I think this now makes us a multi-national company, on the downside we obviously have some additional challenges to do with distance. Of
