2008 July | PocketSmith

Alpha version: T-1 hour!

Thursday, July 31st, 2008 by Francois

11pm Thursday the 31st of July 2008… Only 1 hour before the big day! As I am not involved into the technical development of the application, I am taking some of my time to give you an update at where we are at.

* Jason has been coding hard to include awesome features in this first version of PocketSmith. We have been discussing which features to include in the alpha release quite a bit in the last few weeks. We agreed on limiting the number of features available as we would rather release a simple and stable solution rather than a buggy feature rich app too soon. Jas has been impressive, picking up the language very quickly in this short amount of time. He is definitely our hard coder guru

* James has been very busy with loads of homework. Spending 70% of his time coding and the rest dealing with marketing / PocketSmith blog / research / general strategy of the startup. We bounced some ideas around revenue models and let me tell you its not as easy as in academic books. Exploring various possibilities, we once again decided to leave this question very open and wait to see the results of the alpha test. James is a giant sponge. Like Spongebob except he’s 6.4ft, he wears piercings and listens to alot of drum ‘n bass. Honestly, you need a sponge in your team cause this man makes the link between the development part and the business aspect of the project. That reminds me about the Getting Real series by 37signals in which they state the best startup is composed of 1 developer, 1 designer and 1 “chameleon” who can jump from one function to the other easily. PocketSmith management style is slightly different. At this stage of our development, Jas have been more committed to develop and design the app. James has been focusing his efforts in finding new code fixes / plugins, concentrating on the user interface and getting the marketing materials done for the alpha. I am more focused on the business part of PocketSmith, getting my head around startup finance, operations management for startups and marketing researches.We hope this innovative business structure will stay successful in the long run!

* I have been busy both with my thesis for my school in France and my workload for PocketSmith. I take this opportunity to confess I haven’t been studying as much as I should but once you try it is hard to go back to doing assignments. After spending some time to do the business setup work, I have been recording the financial transactions of the startup. Then James and I get the marketing materials done just in time for the release. Our marketing research skills will (hopefully) help us to be as efficient and effective as possible. My current mission is to test the application and find out what have to be clean or tweak. Problem: I am not a developer. Consequence: I try to have an objective opinion while looking at PocketSmith and consequently come back to Jas and James with loads of stuff to change without having a good estimation about the workload behind the idea. Hope: I will understand the strange words they pronounce!

It’s funny how you experience this at school and you read about it in the paper but at the end of the day you always end up finishing the work at the last minute. But you know what? I like this feeling of doing something great with good people!

Tags: alpha, Releases, team
Posted in Releases, Startup tips | No Comments »

PNG colour (or, color) matching issues in Firefox / IE

Monday, July 28th, 2008 by James

Jason is frantically cutting up our alpha design for me to implement tonight, and he struck upon an extremely interesting issue. Well, extremely interesting now, but before around twenty minutes ago it was an extremely (insert your favourite swear word here) frustrating issue. This almost resulted in us avoiding PNGs in our layout entirely until some very clever member of the PocketSmith team found the solution.

PNG’s are a lovely thing – alpha transparency, awesome looking and consistent gradients, the whole shebang. Unfortunately we found an unfortunate side effect of using PNG images in web layouts just now – some web browsers do not play nice. This presented itself in Firefox and Internet Explorer, but not in Safari.

The issue was that the background colour of the PNG image did not match that of the overall background colour, which was set in CSS. This meant that although the image blended perfectly in Safari, this was not the case in Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Upon investigation, we found the solution in a little freeware tool called TweakPNG, which we were lead to by a blog post by Pixel Acres. All that has to be done to get the PNG image to blend correctly with the CSS colour is to set the gamma information for the PNG image to 0, or delete it – in TweakPNG this is is named “gAMA”. We set it to zero (kinda scared to delete it completely as per the Pixel Acres blog post) and this worked perfectly – blends well across the board.

Oddly, the issues that Pixel Acres were experiencing back in 2006 were related solely to Internet Explorer, not Firefox – perhaps there has been a change in PNG image handling with the releases of Firefox since this time?

Anyway, issue solved, thought I would spread the love with this post because it took way to long to find the solution, especially for an impatient fellow like myself.

Now I just have the battle with the consistently broken Internet Explorer box model to contend with

Tags: Design
Posted in Design, Ramblings | 7 Comments »

Interesting times!

Monday, July 28th, 2008 by Jason

There’re certainly better climates in which to avoid paid employment and start a business. I thought I’d link to a couple of articles today that provides a snapshot as to where we are.

Capital Crunch for IT Startups – yes, I wish that read Cap’n Crunch for IT Startups, but alas, no. The global credit crunch and subsequent economic downturn here in New Zealand is beginning to affect opportunities for capital investment – which in a way is good really, as it places a stronger emphasis on the quality and focus of start-ups seeking venture capital. Will be an interesting one to keep an eye on down the road as we haven’t yet determined whether or not venture capital is required.

Tough financial times present new opportunities for the financial services sector, which – as we identified on our retreat – is where our core goals ultimately lie. I still keep telling people I’m in software development! There’s a stronger focus on fiscal responsibility and along with it, the motivation for people to seek out solutions to cope with rising living costs.

This is a good thing for us, as coming from the software development industry we know that educating the market is an expensive exercise. I doubt that levels of concern around business and personal finances would have been as high this time last year.

The Herald reports that families are getting creative to make ends meet by shopping smarter, selling off old items on TradeMe, setting up home businesses, or simply seeking financial advice. Depending on PocketSmith’s consumer appeal, we have long thought that the product would be of use to those who manage household finances.

Another sign of the times: defaults and arrears are trending up. Small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) are being hit particularly hard, and according to the article, defaults are up by a staggering 24%.

Here’s hoping we can help make a small difference in the months to come.

Edit: And Rod’s retired from blogging, oh dear!

Posted in General | No Comments »

TechCrunch50, Round 1

Sunday, July 27th, 2008 by Jason

Back when we were still getting our act together, I scrambled in an application to the TechCrunch50 Conference on the closing date, June 27. The idea behind TC50 is that 50 companies get to launch their products at a conference in San Francisco. It’s a great platform for networking with VCs and other organisations in the Web 2.0 sphere, hopefully resulting in relationships that will help boost the venture onto a stronger platform for growth.

While TC50 is geared towards helping out companies purely on merit without regard for financial resources, the ones who did make it through last year tended to be pretty well-funded (in the millions) and a good way into the product development phase (months if not years, as opposed to.. well… weeks, which is where we are). Last year’s TC40 lineup is a showcase of some amazing talent and brilliant ideas executed with style, selected from a pool of over 700 applicants.

Ponoko is a company from Wellington that made it to TechCrunch last year, along with a few now-familiar names like Xobni, Flock, Zivity and Mint. Incidentally, Mint is also a financial planning application, and it’s kickass enough to have won last year’s TechCrunch40 (also, according to Crunchbase, Mint is funded to the tune of US$5.45m).

So I didn’t expect to hear back. But PocketSmith has been invited to a 10-minute ‘power interview’ to show TechCrunch what it is we do! I’m sure a lot of companies get to Round 1 and I’m absolutely not getting my hopes up especially at this stage – if anything, this is viewed as more of a practice run to help us develop our pitch and perhaps even get some feedback.

It certainly is slightly reassuring to get a beam back from the valley though

We’ll schedule in a time with the TechCrunch evaluators tomorrow, and will put some thought into the shape and nature of our 10-minute pitch. Fortunately for us, the pitches extend to August 02, which is… oh god, this Saturday!

Posted in Releases, Startup tips | 2 Comments »

Validating the product in stages

Sunday, July 27th, 2008 by Jason

Two thirds of PocketSmith next to water

We had a great couple of days away, packing some belongings into the car and heading four hours into Central Otago, holing up at a comfortable pad at Lake Wanaka. The beautiful scenery and fresh alpine air certainly makes for a great mid-week getaway; also, the test of being able to spend more than 24 straight hours in each others’ companies without causing each other too many injuries is a sign of good things to come.

I was impressed that, given the cache of alcohol we brought along, we were actually disciplined enough to get a bit of work done. Also, here’s something else that rocks: we discovered how easy it was to set up a shared wireless network with our Macbooks that enabled us to share documents, code together, and serve up test instances of PocketSmith (also, deathmatches). 2 minutes was all it took! Computer-to-computer networks on OS X, brilliant.

What was this post about again? Right- market validation, user testing, etc. Ok.

Francois, James and I carry a healthy amount of concern around the direction of the application. We think we have something reasonably unique on our hands, but which markets are we targeting? What features are we going to build? How will we approach the segment? How should the product be branded? And once these factors are determined we add to this the strategy tools we need to employ to get a better understanding of how we’re placed in our industry, what our competitive advantages are, where the threats lie, what the cost is of running the business, how far to breakeven, on and on it goes.

So over a late breakfast by the lake on Friday morning, we had a chat about it. The pancakes were doughy, but my cooked breakfast was awesome. And through this discussion it became apparent that while we could make reasonable assumptions about who the product should be geared for (the first question), which then determines just about everything else that comes after – until we test the market, we simply won’t have the reliable answers that we seek.

Web software is wonderfully agile in this regard, and the alpha release of PocketSmith is a tremendously exciting prospect for us as we’ve been working in a cocoon for the last four weeks developing a prototype that is, effectively, a concrete version of the product that has thus far existed in our hearts and minds. Oh, and on the business creation summary. It’s safe to say that we don’t yet have a clear idea as to what the product will be in its final form – which is not to say that we don’t know what we’d like it to be. I think that marrying a combination of what the market wants with how we believe the application should work is a bit of an art.

Anyway, over breakfast we realised that quite a lot of PocketSmith at this stage hinges on the results of our alpha release. It’s meant to test a number of our core assumptions with our range of users, primarily:

The strength of PocketSmith’s underlying concept
The appeal of its value proposition
How motivated potential users actually will be when it comes to managing their finances
The appeal of our initial brand direction

The other two co-founders carry strong research skills, and will no doubt write a bit more about the nature of the questionnaire we’re putting forward to our alpha testers as well as how we intend to interpret the data.

So, our first stage of validation happens next week! We have a lot of work to do, and have to be careful to ensure that from a software perspective, the objectives of the alpha release are clear enough to the user.

It’s easy to muddy the waters for the testers by including too many features, or by not providing a clear enough set of objectives.

If it’s all good, we’ll continue development until the next release and subsequent iterations. No paralysis by analysis. That’s how we roll.

And yes, the first release is a tad scary!

Posted in Releases, Startup tips | No Comments »

Our startup, one month in

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 by Jason

You know what I mean when I refer to icky couples who celebrate one month together. They call it their one-month-anniversary. When ‘anniversary’ by definition is a reference to an annual event. Yeah, those couples. Well, it’s PocketSmith’s one-month-aversary. Hooray for us!

And to celebrate, the three of us are heading off somewhere tomorrow. You know, cabin in the woods, fireplace, snow outside, bottles of wine. Bearskin rug. It’s going to be man-tastic, and we’re headed for a gay old time!

What?

In all seriousness, I’d have to say that in my years of management with a hawkish eye on the ball, I tended to neglect the celebration of the little things – and really, it’s important to acknowledge milestones as they come up. Fortunately, the other two – unlike yours truly – aren’t sticks in the mud. So off we go.

So it’s been four weeks since Day 1. Four weeks since we all sat down for the first time in my livingroom and began talking about the business with an understanding that this, now, was us. A startup. It’s fair to say that in this time we’ve probably seen a bit more drama than we’d counted on, perhaps made better progress on some milestones, and found ourselves a bit wanting on others.

Through it all however, I think we’ve done pretty well in terms of being self-motivated enough to get here, and it’s my hope that once we’ve established a bit more of a routine, we’ll really get going. But in four weeks, we now have:

More confidence coding in Rails, having thrown ourselves in the deep end
An office at James’, with a server and workstations to go with it
As of yesterday (here’s a mini-milestone), we’re now all working off Macbooks – which is good, because the French keyboard on Francois’ Vista laptop sucks. I mean, why would anyone hold down the shift key to type numbers? Also, Vista sucks.
A working Alpha! Almost! It just needs to be gussied up.
A bank account, partnership documents, trademarks, a domain and email accounts so we can operate as a business.
The semblance of a routine. Somewhat. We’re working on this one.

All while balancing school and assignments, travel and family commitments, and various other things life tends to throw at you. I can see why some founders choose to hole themselves in an apartment together during the development phase – their productivity must go through the roof.

Evidently, the celebration of a milestone like our one-month-aversary will allow us to reflect on the four weeks that have transpired and attack the next four with renewed vigour and a keen intent to do better!

Or we could just don sheepskin loincloths and hunt for our food in the snow.

Happy Month-a-versary, PocketSmith! We wuv you <3

Tags: Culture
Posted in General, Ramblings, Releases | No Comments »

Never leave people guessing what is going on in the application

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 by James

I have been working on making the user experience of PocketSmith as seamless as possible, with feedback being provided to people whenever some processing is going on behind the scenes. The reason for this is that we are taking a particular user experience philosophy when building the application – never leave the user guessing what is going on.

We believe that this goes a long way to bridge the gap between desktop applications and web application. Good desktop apps provide the user with information about what is happening, what is being processed, where they being taken to, and why it is taking a few seconds to get there.

On the other hand, web applications often do not provide people with this level of feedback on the processes that are currently being undertaken – sometimes you are provided with “Loading…” and maybe a pretty animated image, but are only sporadically provided actual information about what is going down behind the scenes.

“Never leave people guessing” is a fairly simple paradigm in theory, however the execution of such a strategy can make up a large portion of how a user perceives and uses a web application, and is actually something that requires a fair bit of thought. What do you tell the user? How do you tell the user? What sort of detail, if any, is the user actually looking for?

So with this theory in mind I started to apply it to the application. All very smooth, intuitive and informative for the user. Unfortunately much of this “magic” involves Javascript, and I really didn’t want the website to be completely crippled for those that choose to switch client-side scripting off – slightly different perhaps, but not crippled. So I turned off Javascript and used the application, and as I expected there was a reasonable number of gaping holes in the usability of the site

Fortunately, fixing it so this functionality degraded gracefully was relatively easy to do, by simply defining the href html attribute in the remote link code. So now all links and actions work without Javascript. People that have Javascript turned off when using the application will however have to guess what is going on – although there are probably work-arounds for this, chances are they would take a fair amount of time and effort for a relatively small proportion of the overall market.

We are also letting people with Javascript disabled in their browser know that they will not be experiencing Pocketsmith the way that we had intended, although it will continue working. Kinda feels like the obligatory ESRB statement for online multiplayer games – “Experience may change during online play”. Except in this case it would be “Experience will not be as cool without Javascript.”

Tags: development, javascript, user interface
Posted in Releases, Startup tips, Technology | 1 Comment »

Why you should not be scared about competitors…

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008 by Francois

Today has been pretty stressful for me as I got to see two of our potential competitors I never spotted before. Part of my role within Pocketsmith is to conduct competitive analyses, so you can imagine my surprise when I got to know that there are some people out there right within New Zealand starting similar businesses to ours. But after this first impression, I realized that we shouldn’t be (too) scared about the competition for a few reasons.

As you develop your product, you will conduct research on your market. Consequently, you will always discover new people/robots/aliens developing their own application. If you haven’t found any potential competitors, then spend more time doing research!
Their applications don’t necessary fulfill the same need and/or don’t have the same way to fulfill these needs. In fact, they are very few case of two exactly similar web-based applications. Facebook wasn’t the first to play in the social networking market but it eventually became super popular thanks to a clever implementation of its concept by Mark Zuckerberg.
Your competitors don’t necessary compete in the same market. In fact, their primary target can be very different from yours! For example, many firms in New Zealand limit their activities to the local market.
One of your competitors is doing well? Then do better! Actually, facing early competition is a great way to test your determination. It is never easy to keep going when people are playing the game but the PocketSmith team believes in its capacity to reach the top!

In this case Jason, James and I have tried to adopt a professional attitude (I said tried)

Don’t freak out
Share your feeling with your business partners
Make a list of your potential competitors
Conduct a competitive analysis
Use business tools (SWOT, Porter’s Five Forces and that sort of action) to analyse the situation. And tell you that you finally make good use of the $25K you invested in your education
Enhance your strengths. Emphasise your success factors.

I hope this advice will help you people facing the stress of competition! Actually, if you believe your application will soon compete with the latest kickass web app from elsewhere, you are on the right track

Tags: business, competition, competitors, stress
Posted in Press, Startup tips | No Comments »

Pocketsmith: Alpha version soon!

Monday, July 21st, 2008 by Francois

Hey folks,

Jason and James have been working like dogs to get a first version of Pocketsmith featuring the basic functionality. I must confess they have been very productive as we are about the release the alpha version after 5 weeks of work! One thing we have learned from reading other startup experiences was that it is essential to launch a first version of your product quickly. According to the Y Combinator library, launching quickly forces you to actually finish some quantum work. In other words, it is not good to be too perfectionist and/or to wait until you release your last super-start feature. Moreover, we are conscious that we need feedback from early users as soon as possible. In fact, spending 12 hours a day in a room in front of a computer can easily drive you to forget that at the end of the day the market is driving you…

Here is the list of stuff that have to been done to prepare the first release:

Get the big picture: what are you trying to achieve with this release? What are the possible outcomes? Are you ready to face early critics? Let’s hope we are ready
Set up a deadline. We have decided to launch it by the 1st of August
Decide what you want to include in this first version. This part is a tricky one as you don’t want your baby to look ugly and being consequently underestimated by the first users. On the other hand you need to be realistic and recognize you can only do a certain amount of work within this time frame. Regarding on the current development of the application, I am pretty confident we will unveil a balanced first version of Pocketsmith
Identify your target. Start small. We are thinking about 20 people to start with from various background – bankers, accountants, students, family representatives… Make a good use of your network. This is a perfect time to ask the enthusiastic people that support you from the beggining to spend some time helping you to improve the product. Picking up people you know allows you to expect serious feedback. Moreover, you would have more opportunities to spend some time with them. Finally, you can hope they will be very honest while criticizing your product. It is pleasant to know our job is great but it is more constructive to point out its drawbacks!
Prepare a questionnaire you intend to submit to your alpha-testers. As the number of people interviewed is small, make sure you customize each of them regarding on your target. More information will come once we had time to look at it!
Summarize their feedback in a formal document. Share this document with your testers and show them your appreciation for their time and kindness.
Go back to work!

I might make some changes to this post as we discuss this issue further on the track. Kowabunga!

Tags: alpha, pocketsmith, release, version
Posted in Releases | 3 Comments »

10 things to do to create a web startup in New Zealand

Friday, July 18th, 2008 by Francois

We have been working on Pocketsmith for almost a month and there are still thousands of admin / set up / business things to get sorted! If you don’t want spend hours freaking out about what you have to do to make it right from the beginning, just follow these 10 things to do to create a web startup in New Zealand:

Find a cool Name for the business.
Release a blog to share your experience with family, friends and everybody around you. They are the first people to support you so let them know you think about them.
Buy the last BENQ 21.6″ (22″) G211OW LCD Monitor and use it as your second monitor
Set up your bank account and make sure your on good terms with the bank manager
Find and talk to your accountant. Get the friendly one who support you in your project
Find a whiteboard, two markers and one whiteboard eraser. Then, get a gold fish and a coffee machine. Finish your shopping with decent seats and you will be ready to rock on
Contact a lawyer (make sure they understand some web 2.0 concepts / big up to Upstart from Dunedin for your wise advice). Think about signing up a partnership agreement to start with in order to guarantee your partners’ protection just in case Jason decides to run off to California with the business idea.
Get an IRD number. If you have to call them for any reason, remember not having anything to do in the next hours as you can expect waiting on the phone for a good portion of your life!
Register a trademark. If you want to know what class your business is in, I advise you to look at famous web startups you know. We tried with 1000minds, and Vouchermate, two IT startups from Dunedin, and we are now pretty sure (but not entirely) that our web startup belongs to classes 9 and 36. Yeepee!
Use your old gaming machine as the first server. Get ready to release an alpha version within 4 weeks.
*James rudely interjects with an 11th, completely ruining the whole 10 things concept* Get an old Xbox and throw it underneath an old TV that squeals like a pig whenever you turn it on (the old one you don’t want to throw away because DTR molested $1000 out of you for it when you were 15 and stupid). Play three minutes, then realise that console controls really do suck as bad as playing on a 21″ TV that is about to explode. Get back to work.

To celebrate our first month, the Pocketsmith team will move out sometime next week for a “spiritual retreat”. We don’t know where are we going but we are going. Good times

Stay tuned!

Tags: Blog, New Zealand, pocketsmith, startup, tips, Web
Posted in Startup tips | No Comments »

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