We’re one year old today!
Today, we sit at our desks at the Lab in the top floor of the Center for Innovation, surrounded by our good friends and colleagues from the other startups in The Distiller. It’s a reasonably ordinary day - chilly outside; the sun’s been setting at around 5pm; and we’re taking care of day-to-day business - responding to our users, issuing minor bug fixes and incremental application improvements, meeting interested stakeholders and making plans for extending our business. Upon reflection however, our path to this very spot has been quite extraordinary.
A year ago, we hadn’t imagined we’d be here. To be honest, I suspect one of the biggest reasons for our survival has been our blind optimism and our collective focus on the task at hand. We didn’t set a distinct plan for exactly what we wanted to happen, we just followed our instincts, paid attention to the application, the market, and most importantly: our users.
It’s been an incredible journey for the three of us. I for one am tremendously chuffed when I think about how far we’ve come - a feeling that’s quelled by the sober fact we’ve still got quite a ways to go. Here’re short highlights to recap what we’ve been up to for the last year:
June 23, 2008 - We three start our company in my livingroom. It feels strange and exciting, and yet we don’t quite know where to begin. We decide to focus on building an Alpha version of the application, code-named ‘Plannr’ (I come up with ‘PocketSmith’ while on a video chat with James five days later, and thankfully, my co-founders like it). We’ve decided to apply to TechCrunch50, and a possible interview date in four weeks becomes a delivery deadline. James and I are a bit nervous as we can barely code in Rails.
July 31, 2008 - We launch our Alpha! It consists of a calendar that sums up a running balance with few additional features, along with a cash flow statement and graphs. It looks like a photo of your great-uncle from the early 1900’s: it’s big, dark brown, bears pinstripes and has a monocle on the upper right-hand-side. Also resembling technology from the 1900’s, it took over a minute in processing time to save on a calendar with too many events. But we think it’s the best thing ever! And so we pester 50 users onto the platform by means of a pre-determined list of family and friends.
August 02, 2008 - We demonstrate our Alpha to prominent and outspoken LA tech entrepreneur Jason Calacanis and are interviewed over Skype. He is tremendously polite, and is highly positive about our bare-bones product. We are blown away. Also, we end up not qualifying for TechCrunch50. Sometime in the next few weeks, James spills beer into his MacBook Pro. These two events are possibly not related.
September 2008 - We continue building PocketSmith and launch the Private Beta, which means only invited users can create accounts, however users can invite other users. The design has been greatly improved on and is the basis for the application’s current look and feel. We’ve challenged our development capacity by layering complexity into the app, including the ability to upload transactions along with a Compares feature. Along the way, we learn more about Rails deployment through amazing support from Slicehost and Heroku. Francois finishes his MBA thesis and begins to work on a marketing and PR strategy for the company.
October 2008 - We get our first round of media exposure, an article on the front page of the Otago Daily Times’ Business section, which leads to a live interview on National Radio. Coincidentally we’re approached on the same day for an interview for Computerworld magazine. We watch in wide-eyed wonder as our user base jumps to 350 private beta testers, and our new users begin corresponding with us. James builds Financial Confessions in a day. We begin contacting banks, seeking partnership opportunities. Also, The Distiller is born.
November 2008 - Francois and I bid a tearful goodbye to James as we depart for Malaysia and France for two months. PocketSmith makes a presence at Global Entrepreneurship Week events in Kuala Lumpur; we make a lot of new friends and begin dipping our toes into an export strategy. It seems the world is listening, as we are contacted by Workplace Options, the world’s largest provider of employee benefits, looking to take PocketSmith to a potential 18.5 million users. James builds a home-rolled feedback system which further opens lines of communication with our users, and will see a lot of use over the coming months.
December 2008 - I’m becoming a (re)naturalised Malaysian; in the process I realise that Malaysia is an emerging market that is not entirely ready for our product. Also, that it is very difficult to do business in a large environment when you’re a nobody. In Paris, Francois is coming to the same conclusions regarding the latter. He attends the Le Web 09 opening and closing ceremonies, and meets many like-minded tech entrepreneurs and prominent figures in the web community.
January 2009 - We all reconvene back here in Dunedin and begin the shift from James’ study into our new premises at the Center for Innovation. The feeling of working in an office again is slightly odd, but looking out the windows at the registry building, manicured lawns, and the Waters of Leith, we concede that this is offset by the beautiful environment here at the University of Otago.
February 2009 - James spends a few weeks in Auckland, which gives him the opportunity to connect with our network up north. We start to get a vibe for Uni, and as a part of The Distiller, we begin to volunteer our time by taking part in and contributing to lectures and student events. The Lab, which is where we’re located, is gradually populated with the startups that will eventually be a part of the Sprints. Work continues on PocketSmith as we refine existing features based on user feedback.
March 2009 - We begin the first series of Sprints at The Distiller, and determine our key outcome from the 12-week period as the exit from beta and eventual go-live. To this end we chart out a development roadmap outlining the ‘final’ set of features, and get to work. We also engage the help of a brilliant young Rails and Flex developer, Arthur Gunn, who quickly prototypes a next-generation top graph, which at time of writing, we have yet to debut. Also, we are pleasantly surprised when PocketSmith is featured on high-profile Japanese tech blog, 100shiki.com. James pulls a rabbit out of a hat by converting the app database to UTF-8, bringing support for international characters in a matter of hours (a feat deemed by us as tricky, high-risk and time-consuming just the day before). This brings us a raft of enthusiastic Japanese users and boosts our user base to over 700. Also, after four months of negotiation, we sign our first enterprise partnership with Workplace Options.
April 2009 - We have our heads down gearing the application for its exit from beta, slated for May the 4th. Along the way, PocketSmith’s interface gets a sprucing up, giving it a more mature and established feel. The navigational cues are much improved on and we begin using mega menus, which we suspect is a big relief for our users. We open the app to Public Beta, allowing all users to create accounts without invites, procure a ‘grown-up’ quad-core server to scale and cope with the load, and begin laying the foundations for our migration from our VPS on Slicehost. Five days before our planned migration, PocketSmith is featured on Lifehacker.com, one of the most prominent productivity blogs on the web. PocketSmith buckles under the load but we monkey-wrench it back into action. Our user base triples to more than 3000 over the next couple of days.
May 2009 - The Lifehacker exposure reveals a slew of bugs and necessary improvements that we hadn’t discovered, and we decide that PocketSmith is not ready to exit beta. We improve on our feedback system by implementing UserVoice, and get back to work. The next four weeks are a blur of intensive software development, and we pull some of the longest hours we’ve seen to date. The feedback and support from our users continues to be instrumental to the direction and development of the application. As co-founders of The Distiller we travel to Christchurch for the PricewaterhouseCoopers Hi-Tech Awards, where we’ve been nominated as finalists in the Outstanding Industry Initiative category. We don’t win, but the prize goes to eDay, who diverted 946 tonnes of e-waste from our landfills last year - and it’s hard to feel bad about that.
June 2009 - We bring the application as close to feature-complete as we can and end our Public Beta program. We soft-launch our subscription model which includes Free, Premium and Super plans. Paying users begin to sign up, and we feel a massive wave of relief as we realise that after a year, we finally have a product that people are happy to pay for.
And here we are. June 23, 2009 - exactly one year from when we started. I for one, am thankful for much of what we have today: a great product, 5699 fantastic users, a partnership with a global leader, fantastic support from our family, friends and community, and the remarkable individuals in The Distiller.
One thing hasn’t changed though: I still work with two great co-founders whom I dearly love and respect.
And now, we’re off to grab some dinner together. I wonder what this next year is going to be like?
) I have been reading a lot about different techniques, methods and tips to achieve that balance and consequently be more effective, focused and “energized”. Here are three articles on this topic you might find useful:
Well, if you are keen on giving a try to PocketSmith, we would be more than happy to send you an invitation FOR FREE (and for real!)