If you are heading down the wrong path, stop and turn around.

October 4, 2007 at 10:44 pm · Filed under Development Schedule

This week marked three important milestones in the evolution of Trickytix.

  1. We started to receive emails from prospective customers asking about using the product. No prompting from us, no cold calling. Just unsolicited emails.
  2. We developed our first piece of marketing material (a brochure), and sent that to a prospect.
  3. We all got together and discussed the current state of our solution, and unanimously agreed it was crap. More on that below.

Unsolicited emails

The only marketing we have done so far is attach a logo to our email signatures, and this blog. Somehow, the word is trickling out there, as three separate prospects from around the country emailed us this week asking for more details. It’s a good sign that we are building something that solves a tangible business problem.

Marketing Material

Due to the fact that we have started to receive enquiries before we have a complete product to show, we quickly whipped up a brochure that can be easily emailed out. The best thing about putting the brochure together was that it forced us to put down on paper our pricing model (something we had been avoiding making a decision on).

It also helped us to define exactly what it is we are doing. In fact, page 1 of the brochure goes something like this:

Trickytix is an online event management solution that anyone can use. Whether you’re planning for 2 people or 20,000, Trickytix can handle the online registrations for your event.

In less than 5 minutes you can:

  • Create an account
  • Set up your event
  • Accept online registrations for free

Trickytix is free to use for free events. If you want to accept payments for your event, Trickytix provides a low cost solution for processing online transactions. Accept real-time credit card payments straight into your own account, or use the Trickytix account if you don’t have your own facility.

Yes – the more savvy amongst you will have noticed that we write our own copy. Web consultants we may be, copywriters we are not. Having said that, we will continue to bang out “acceptable” marketing copy while our budget remains tight.

Download a copy of the Trickytix brochure yourself. I would love to know what you think, so feel free to leave a comment below.

Crap User Interface

The meeting this afternoon was called to discuss the prototype of Trickytix, and get a feel for what the four of us thought of it.  The consensus was that it was not quite ready to release to the market.  I think someone even used the word crap.

This is a good thing though.  In fact, it’s fantastic.

A moment such as this is exactly why we built the software in this way in the first place (no wireframes, no use cases, just straight into coding).  Wireframes don’t tell you how easy your screens will be to use, and the only way you are going to find out is if you build it and start using it.  We built it, we used it, we hated it.

Now we change.  Now we spend the next 2 weeks improving and tweaking the interface so that it becomes a great user experience.  We embrace the fact that we are small (4 employees) and simply change direction.

It was one of those moments where we realised we were heading down a path we didn’t want to be on.  Being small allows us to simply stop, turn around and go back to the last fork in the proverbial development path.  Launch gets pushed back again, but the product improves significantly.

Leave a Comment

First customers, visionaries and business models

September 24, 2007 at 5:50 pm · Filed under Customer Development ·Tagged , , , ,

Now that we have a prototype of sorts (plenty of internal testing still required), we are starting to shop the concept around to a number of prospects.This is our customer development phase. We have a product, now we need to find someone willing to use it.

When speaking to our first customers, we are trying very hard to resist selling anything other than the prototype. When asked “Can it do this?”, the answer is usually “Yes it will be able to do that in the future”, rather than “Yes, let me go away and add that on for you”.

Ultimately, we are trying to sell the customer what we have right now. If they are not interested, we move on until we find someone willing to accept our existing list of features.

It would be easy to come back from a customer visit, add all the features that they thought would be helpful and then revisit the same customer. We have decided not to do that for a number of reasons:

  1. The features we add now may not be what the majority of the market really wants.
  2. Adding features before we have actual customers doesn’t allow us to really test whether the product is going to be useful or not.
  3. The kind of customers we want at this stage of our development are not the kind of people who wait 6 years before buying an iPod. We need early adopters willing to take a chance. We want visionaries.

If in the next month or two we cannot find anyone willing to buy into the vision, well then we go back to the drawing board and add some more “must have” features. Until then, we keep looking.

We recently pitched a potential customer on the benefits of our software as an event management tool. They were looking to run a national charity event, and needed to progress from their existing manual process that had served them for the last 12 months.

We ended up missing out on the job due to price. The customer decided that their return on investment (ROI) over 3-4 years would be better served by paying a large amount of money upfront (with our competitors), than paying a small percentage for the life of the product (us).

We missed the job, but we learnt a lot about our potential customers. Do I really think this customer will still be using our competitors’ software in 4 years? No not really, but it is great to know that some customers are interested in their ROI over that kind of time frame.

So missing the job didn’t cause us to rush back to the office and instantly throw out our pricing structure. It simply increased our knowledge of our customer base, therefore getting us closer to landing the first one.

Visit the Anthill forum

Leave a Comment

The cost of building a web application in Australia

August 11, 2007 at 4:42 pm · Filed under Financials ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

One of the great things about the Internet is that people have started sharing some great information about their products and processes. It is now possible to find out what some of the leading web applications cost to build, and therefore make a good guess as to what it is going to cost you to build one.Some costs of other web applications are shown below (US$), with the numbers taken from Read Write Web.

Dropsend: $48,012
Freshbooks: $20,000
Maya’s Mom: $70,000
Mobissimo: $60,000
Wesabe: $200,000

The numbers above suggest that angel financing (or your own cash) should be all that is required to get a prototype out the door. Anyone asking for 7 figures off a VC without having anything to show for it is trying to run before they are walking. Any VC happy to give out that kind of money without first seeing a prototype, well my contact details are here!

If you ask Guy Kawasaki however, building a web app can be done even cheaper. In a tribute to that post, the following numbers are supplied from our experience in building TrickyTix. All financial figures are in Australian dollars.

  1. 2 – The number of external developers we added to our existing team of 5 in order to create the right set of skills.
  2. 0 – The number of finalised business models we had before commencing development (although we did have a broad understanding of how we intended to make money)
  3. 0 – The number of documents (functional specification, scope of work, business requirements, business plans, change management requests, risk registers,) we wrote before starting building our app.
  4. $6,500 – Legal costs for trademarks and terms and conditions (x 2). We didn’t skimp on this, and went and found ourselves a firm that specialises in IT, IP and fast-starting companies.
  5. $500 – We spent approximately $500 registering domain names.
  6. $2,500 – Accountant fees to be spent on setting up two new companies. One to run operations, the other to hold the IP.
  7. $60 – We used Basecamp to project manage the entire development, as well as manage task allocation.
  8. 4 – By the time we push the prototype out to test, 4 months will have been spent building the app.
  9. $1,000 – Time spent developing the logo, colour palette and typography. All done in-house.
  10. $4,200 – Money spent on User interface and the design of both the website and the application. Again, all done in-house.
  11. $6,500 – Development costs for the front-end of the application. As with any modern web app a significant portion of that was spent on javascript, with 1 specialist contractor brought in to assist where required.
  12. $9,000 – Where there is a front-end, there is usually a backend. Think databases, think scripting, think geek. Half the costs here were spent getting in a specialist contractor, and the other half completed in-house.
  13. $0 – When you use open source software, the license fees are pretty sweet.
  14. $450 per month – Dedicated server to host the application. There are cheaper options, but this should suffice for now.

There are other fees still to come (merchant account for one), but it won’t be much higher than what is listed here. In the final wrap up, we end up with:

$30,710 to develop a prototype web application in Australia.

I have tried to account for in-house development at wage cost rather than actual consulting prices, but to be honest there is probably still a lot of “sweat equity” unaccounted for.

So what do you think – has the price come out lower or higher than expected? Anything you think we have failed to take into account?

Visit the Anthill forum

Comments (4)

So close I can smell it

August 7, 2007 at 4:12 pm · Filed under Development Schedule ·Tagged , , , , , ,

I haven’t blogged for a while, as I was waiting for the newly minted Australian Anthill website to go live. Now it is here, I hope to be able to share our ups and downs as we attempt to grow a brand new business.So where is the prototype I hear you ask?

It is close. Real close. If it was a freshly baked loaf of bread, you would be able to smell it rising in the oven right about now.

While our regular consulting work has taken priority many times over the development of Trickytix, if we are honest with ourselves we have also neglected to properly embrace the notion of constraints.

he team at 37Signals put it best in their e-book Getting Real:

There’s never enough to go around. Not enough time. Not enough money. Not enough people.

That’s a good thing.

Instead of freaking out about these constraints, embrace them. Let them guide you. Constraints drive innovation and force focus. Instead of trying to remove them, use them to your advantage.

Constraints are limitations that actually improve the likelihood of a successful outcome. While we have embraced a number of important ones (restricted budget, small development team, tight deadlines, no wireframes just jump straight into the User Interface), we may have built “too much” software for the first prototype.

That is not to stay that the first cut will be a perfect, bug free solution (far from it!). But it may do some kind of cool things that it didn’t really need to do for the first launch. Your customers won’t thank you for spending 4 hours to make the background of an element light up when it is dragged and dropped on the screen, if by doing so you miss your ship date.

But enough of that, and back to what I promised the Anthill guys I would blog about. Everyone wants to know what things cost, especially if they are considering making the leap into self-employment themselves.

With that in mind I will get my next post out by the end of this week, with details of what it costs to build a prototype web application in Australia. Development costs, hardware and software, legal fees, accounting fees, trust companies, food, beer and everything in between.

eep in mind we are boot strapping the initial build from our own cash reserves (no VC funding at this stage), but we are an established company and so have tried to do things properly.

Therefore:

  1. If you are a freelancer in your bedroom thinking of building your own app, yes you can do it cheaper than what we have (divide our cost by at least a factor of 5).
  2. If you are a business unit within a large ASX listed company, hire 30 more people, multiply our cost by a factor of 25 and spend the next 18 months building your product. You too will miss ship date.

See you next post.

Leave a Comment

An update on the development schedule

July 1, 2007 at 4:04 pm · Filed under Development Schedule ·Tagged , , , , , ,

I read back over my first post and wonder where the time went. To quote myself from May:

Good enough is good enough, and we will launch something within 8 weeks no matter what

Welllll… good enough is good enough, but you still need to have a functioning product to launch something. This coming Friday the 6th of July was our original launch date, and we acknowledge we are going to miss that.

Setting the deadline in the first place was still a great idea, and it has worked well for us. We have made a lot of progress on the prototype, while still churning out a hell of a lot of client work. But the 6th of July will come and go without a launch.

Reasons for missing the launch?

  1. This is our first web app, and to be honest the 8 week timeline for development was a bit of a guess
  2. Developing an app while completing client work in parallel means resources are pulled out of development at inopportune times. The extra time will allow us to get the business better prepared for the first customer, including sorting out the pricing model (a subject of a future post).

A new launch date has been set internally for the 27th of July 2007, and we are now re-focused on getting a prototype out the door on that date. This first cut is likely to be a closed door beta (invite only), so sign up at TrickyTix if you want to help test.

Visit the Anthill forum

Leave a Comment

To start or not to start

June 19, 2007 at 3:54 pm · Filed under Hiring, start-up ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

Marc Andreessen (he of Netscape fame), posted yesterday on reasons Not to do a Startup. It makes for great reading, and it made me think about why I decided to go down this path.Marc begins with covering some of the positives of a start-up environment:

  1. The opportunity to be in control of your own destiny
  2. The opportunity to create something new
  3. The opportunity to have an impact on the world
  4. The ability to create your ideal culture and work with a dream team of people
  5. Money

While my motives have ebbed and flowed with time, my primary motivations are a healthy dose of 1, a dash of 3, and a side serve of 5.

This quote from the article sums me up perfectly:

you get to succeed or fail on your own, and you don’t have some bozo telling you what to do. For a certain kind of personality, this alone is reason enough to do a start-up.

My career history is marked by “nose bleed pace” rises up the corporate chain, followed by spectacular flame outs. I would rise just to the point where I either completely fecked up, or hit an internal executive who didn’t think it was up to me be explaining why their particular strategy was a pile of poo. I’ve never been sacked (perhaps I wasn’t trying hard enough), but I’ve seen the writing on the wall twice now.

To quote Andreessen again, in a post on hiring right:

Driven people don’t tend to stay long at places where they can’t succeed, and just because they haven’t succeeded in the wrong companies doesn’t mean they won’t succeed at your company-if they’re driven.

True words indeed.

Visit the Anthill forum

Leave a Comment

Hiring the right people

June 13, 2007 at 3:37 pm · Filed under Hiring ·Tagged , , , , , ,

Scott Handsaker – 13th June 2007

Finding the right people for your start up is crucial, and this is especially true with a technology orientated company. You want developers who are ridiculously smart – people who spend their leisure hours trying to problem solve rather than relax in front of the box.

Have we got the right people?

Our database consultant got bored on the long weekend, and so decided to build himself a robot. He hooked it up to his GPS system, and as I type it is currently mapping out his bedroom.

I think we found the right guy.

Visit the Anthill forum

Leave a Comment

Building awareness post-launch

June 4, 2007 at 3:11 pm · Filed under Marketing ·Tagged , , , ,

This afternoon I spent a few hours with Norman nutting out a sales and marketing plan for the launch of the product. Our strategy is one which practically guarantees that the product will not be bug free or feature rich upon launch, so it is hard to know how much to push the marketing in the first 30-60 days.We want people coming in and using the product and providing immediate feedback, but we don’t want really want to hit the front page of Techcrunch until we are a little further down the track. We need to get the balance right.

TrickyTix’s Scott Handsaker (left) and Norman Aquino nut out early strategy

Yellow Pages? Waste of time for our model, and would take too long.
Radio and TV? Don’t have the budget.
Advertising? Maybe – depends on the publication.
Blogosphere? Yes please.

So the mix we have come up with is an attempt to strike a balance between the need to attract people from day 1, but not so many that we can’t focus on product development (which is the aim for the first 90 days).

0-30 days (first month)

  • Media Release (multiple)
  • Pay Per Click (PPC)
  • Organic Search (link building)
  • Direct Mail (postcard campaign to selected niche market)
  • Blogosphere Buzz

We are an online app, so I think it is right that 60% of our efforts (PPC, link building and blog buzz) are devoted to building awareness to customers that are online. It is effectively a “soft launch” strategy, but that’s what we need.

Visit the Anthill forum

Leave a Comment

The idea and the model

May 20, 2007 at 2:59 pm · Filed under Business Model, Financials ·Tagged , , , , ,

Our new business is called TrickyTix. It is a web based ticketing solution aimed at small businesses and will exist online at www.trickytix.com.au.An event organiser or company will have the ability to visit the website and create a ticketing account for themselves. This account will allow them to then create events which people can purchase tickets for.

The tickets for any event will be available for sale on the TrickyTix website, as well as on the website of the event organiser. Customers will be able to purchase a ticket using a credit card, and have the ticket sent to them via email or SMS.

The money for the tickets sold will be received by TrickyTix and held for a defined period of time. After deducting bookings fees and charges levied to the ticket purchaser, the remaining funds will then be electronically transferred into the Event Organisers nominated account. The fundamental business model is therefore one in which TrickyTix takes a small fee from the cost of every ticket sold.

That is about as complex as it gets. There are a few small to medium companies out there offering a similar service, and one 900 pound gorilla.

We believe our approach has a number of fundamental differences which position us to capture a previously untapped segment of the market, but I will go into much greater detail in future postings. Suffice to say, we are excited about the potential.

Visit the Anthill forum

Leave a Comment

From service to software

May 11, 2007 at 2:44 pm · Filed under start-up ·Tagged , , ,

How do you move from a services/consulting company to a software company?
Not easily.

For over 2 years now we have steadily built up a web consulting company, all the while thinking of the next big thing we could build. News Limited buys Myspace for $700 million, and Google grab YouTube for a paltry $1.6 billion. Even the weakest start-up can find a few million in funding to get off the ground, so surely a couple of smart guys sitting in Melbourne can come up with a winning idea that will sweep the world? It all seems so easy.

It’s not.

Ideas for new businesses and web applications fly through my head every day, but 2 years on we still haven’t started one. Two false starts in those two years, with neither progressing far past the planning and branding stages.
If ideas were enough I would be a millionaire by now (and I’m not). Ideas are worth nothing on their own. Execution is where the sweet spot is.

But sticking with a half way decent idea and then just building it is not all that easy either (hence our two false starts). It is probably easier to take the funding option from the start and focus exclusively on your idea, as that way there are no distractions. The move from a consulting company to a software company is a much more difficult path to follow, requiring more time, more adjustment, and more pain. Try looking at the invoice for the monthly office rent, then decide whether you are going to work on that website for your ASX listed client, or your unfunded, half developed start-up.

Eventually, things have to come to a head. When I was 26 I decided I wanted to own my own company by the time I was 30. I made it with 45 days to spare, but only by chucking in the safety of a full time job and making the leap into the “I want to be an entrepreneur” mindset. The same definitive step needs to be taken now, so here goes.

We have the idea, a successful consulting company, the cash reserves and a collection of enormously talented developers. So we are commencing development before we have a full business model sorted out. Before we have any customers lined up. Before we know what we are going to
charge.

Good enough is good enough, and we will launch something within eight weeks no matter
what.

That is our stake in the ground. Set the launch date, and work back from that to work out what can get in and what cannot. Once launched, we will iterate quickly to eventually build a product that everyone needs and wants.

Our consulting business will continue to grow and develop, but we won’t be sitting here wondering what might have been this time next year.

Visit the Anthill forum

Leave a Comment

« Newer Posts · Older Posts »