One of the toughest things with e-mail based group discussions is keeping up to date on how a conversation is progressing. As each e-mail comes through, you not only have to re-construct the context around the conversation, you need to sift through 5 other emails to figure out who is saying what in relation to who.
This is one of the problems that Braintrust has been solving. First, it does so by centering the conversation onto one page. But that wasn’t enough, today we released a feature that also helps you keep track of what’s “new” instead of having to scroll through an entire conversation.
The concept is totally simple. We’ve added a simple counter of “new messages.” So, when you log into your Braintrust account, you get to see the number of new messages that exist in each of your Braintrusts. For example, over here, I can see that there are 4 new messages in my Team Braintrust, but nothing new to check out in my Customer Braintrust.
Once I click through to the Team Braintrust, I’m shown all of the important conversations happening within my team (as it has always shown). But now, notice the little red circle underneath the second conversation. That tells me that there are two new messages in that conversation, so I should probably check it out and catch up.
Now usually, once I went into one of the focused discussions, I’d usually just scroll through the whole page, where the entire conversation has been neatly pulled together for me. For smaller conversations, it was pretty easy to see what is new. However, as conversations started to grow, we realized how it gets hard to see “just the new stuff.” And so now, you’ll see we highlight every new message in the conversation with a little icon.
Simple.
Now, with your Braintrust group discussions, you can get catch on the context of a conversation and see what is new all in a few seconds.
I once read that the majority of human conversation centers around “Good” or “Bad.” As in, most people in conversations are either saying something is GOOD, or are saying something is BAD. Examples of good are, “I like…” or “I think that is interesting..” or even “Thanks, thats very helpful.” Examples of bad are, “That doesn’t sound right…” or “I don’t think thats helpful” or even “That was mean.”
So, with that said, I was inspired to introduce a new feature in Braintrust that I’m really excited about. It is called Braintrust Feedback. Now, the goal of Braintrust has always been to help small tight knit groups of people share ideas, get feedback and communicate better so that they can make great things happen. Although till today, you could always write a comment to give feedback to what someone has said, it didn’t seem like enough.
So now, with just 2 clicks, you can give a wealth of feedback to each share. Here’s how it looks:
As you can see, the design starts off with the basic fundamentals of Facebook’s “like” and Twitter’s “RT” but is taken a step further. It tries to replicate the same natural conversation pattern, where you can easily give either a “Good” feedback or a “Bad” feedback.
I’m really excited about this feature, I hope you are too. Try it on your Braintrust today.
Posterous announced a couple days ago that as part of their “switch to Posterous” program, they’ll be offering quick and easy ways to switch your (or anyone else’s blog) from what they titled “dying platforms.” While the full list of “dying platforms” is still not clear, it seems that Ning and Tumblr are on it, and it is predicted that Typepad, Blogger and WordPress.com are coming up next.
While there is a pretty healthy discussion thread on Hacker News about this latest not-so-classy move by Posterous to deem all of their competitors as dying platforms, I’m not here to talk about that. I’m here to talk about an alternative strategy for Posterous that they should consider for their larger vision.
What I perceive Posterous to be doing now
Now, based on what I have seen, it looks like their goal is to become the next WordPress.com. They’re incorporating the same features (e.g. pages and themes) and they’re trying to (seemingly) convince users of WordPress.com-like sites to import their blog onto Posterous.
This seems kind of a waste to me. I mean…why bother? Why bother creating a company, and raising funds, and working as hard as you do (based on their twitter streams, they look like they’re really working their ass off) when all you’re doing is by and large going down an already paved path?
An alternative for Sachin to consider
If I were CEO, I would stop this chasing game that Posterous has going with WordPress.com. I think there is a better strategy to attack the blogging and CMS market. I’d go after the millions of businesses, startups, and individuals that do three things today:
1. Pick WordPress (Free)
2. Hire a consultant to do the “design” and “coding” ($$ Spent)
3. Research, analyze and implement the elements that helps the person achieve their specific goals ($$ and Time Spent)
This means that instead of creating a generic blogging system that just copies WordPress features, I’d focus Posterous on creating the “starter” blog for a set of verticals. A starter blog that has already been optimized to achieve my desired business/personal goals.
For example, take my blog. I’ve analyzed countless blogs and tried out hundreds of templates until I settled on this design. This design is optimized to the brim to explain who I am, re-share my content, and most importantly drive traffic to my products. It took hours to get to here, and its probably not even perfect.
If you were an entrepreneur that didn’t know much about coding, wouldn’t you PAY for a blog that has already been optimized to help build your personal brand? If you were a startup, wouldn’t you PAY for a blog that has already been optimized to spread your story?
So the idea is simple. If I were the CEO of Posterous, I’d create a set of ready-to-go, tested, and optimzed ‘starter’ blogs that has the right bells and whistles for each of these individual targets:
A startup looking to promote their story (have it pre-set with a “About Us” page, a sidebar section to explain their product(s) and what they do, and Twitter/Like buttons to promote the posts
An author looking to promote his/her (e)book. Have an “About the Author” section, have excerpts/reviews on the sidebar, and a way to profile sample chapters as blog entries along with a super easy big call to action for buying the book from amazon.
A small business trying to attract locals. Have a clear display on the sidebar for location, maps, hours, and phone number. Have a section showing off pictures of the business. Have custom post types for Sales, Events, and special SEO sauce optimized for the given zip code.
And we all know, there are a good 10 more solid verticals like this. Think schools, community groups, and even non-profits. There are probably niches within those that they can further optimize for and charge premiums on.
With an offering like this, not only will you solve a real problem (people like these having to create and customize these sites from scratch AND having to figure out what the right things to show are — even though its well known), you ‘ll be solving a problem that people are already paying through time and $$ for.
Sachin and Gary are both talented and are working hard. But maybe they’re just too caught up in the tasks. Step back and take a look at the forest.
Today was the first day I felt creative in nearly 2 months. Why? Because I found a serious problem with my schedule. It has to do with the # of anchors.
About 3 months ago, I made a change to my schedule. I offered to drop my wife off in the morning, and pick her up in the evenings from the train station. At the time, it seemed like a small thing and more importantly the right thing to do. She has a grueling 2hr commute (each way) and easing the journey to and from the train station was the least I could do for her.
The train station was on my way to work, so it was a no brainer in the mornings, and its about 10 minutes from home, so even though I get home before her, the 20 minute pause in the evening didn’t seem like a huge deal at all.
My original schedule
As you probably know, I had a bit of an unique schedule already (before making the change). Since I am bootstrapping my own web business, and I am also ramping down at my day job, I essentially work two jobs. I generally wake up in the morning, work on my startup for a couple of hours, and head into the day job around 845 so that I get there just around 9ish. I work on my day job till around 5 and then head home to get more work done on my startup till about dinner time…which was generally 730. to make this sustainable, and to keep myself productive, I meditated twice a day for 20 minutes, usually at the point I context switched between my startup work and my day job.
I maintained this schedule through what I consider to be one of the most creative and productive times of my life. It is during this time that I conceptualized, designed and implemented Braintrust, Tout and atleast 5 other startup ideas that I haven’t talked publicly about yet.
The new schedule
At first glance, the change to the schedule seemed minuscule. In the mornings, the train station would be along the way, and in the evenings, it would be a 20 minute pause on my work. No big deal, right?
Creativity #fail
Wrong. While I got a decent amount of work done over the past 3 months, I realized that while small tasks were easy to get done during my startup office hours, I never was able to let loose and take on the bigger meatier goals that required my creativity.
I always left the bigger stuff for “later” — but later never came.
It turns out that the one thing I introduced into my schedule was an anchor. The anchor of the train schedule meant that I HAD to leave my home at 815, and so whatever task I picked in the morning worked back from that 815 deadline. Similarly, when I got home in the evening, I worked back from the 710 anchor and picked a small task that I could do in that timeframe.
Creative schedules cannot have anchors
The awesomeness of my original schedule was that there were very few anchors. I knew I could compensate for being a little late to my day job in the morning, so I never worked backwards, I just sat down and worked to a natural stopping point.
Similarly, in the evenings, it was OK if dinner started a bit later, so I always was able to come to a natural stopping point.
If you want to foster creativity, get rid of anchors in your schedule. Block out days where you don’t have anything scheduled — so that you can start and stop your work naturally — the results will be immense.
Changing back my schedule
I shared this reflection with my wife. Now that we are moving closer to her work in about a month (hopefully), her commute will go from 2 hrs to 30 minutes.
She was extremely nice to take on the train station grunt for the last month that we are here, so that I can switch back to my creative schedule.
Today is the first day I’m back on my new schedule, and I feel great.
June has been a tough month for me. My last day at my day job is fast approaching and although Tout and Braintrust are both generating some revenues, its not close to where I want to be to feel financially secured. I’ve come to realize that quitting is easy. Accepting another a job offer is also easy. But, taking the leap to a sound footing is hard and requires you to make a lot of tough decisions. Transitioning from a day job to being on your own is a seriously scary thing.
In contrast, making the decision to quit my day job back in March was a no-brainer. I reflected on what I wanted to do with my life, and I knew in my heart that building startups is what I love doing. Knowing what you want is important, and sometimes hard, but now that I’m working through getting what I want…well this is where the rubber meets the road. And…it’s hard. To craft my plan, here’s how I went about doing it.
Answering the obvious questions:
I started with answering logistical and concrete questions like:
Are Braintrust and Tout the right products? Will it make money for me?
Do I need to focus on one product to succeed? Is now the right time to focus?
To make these products a success, do I need to bring on a co-founder? Is now the time to build a team?
should I look for funding?
should I apply to ycombinator?
Note: I think both of these ideas are pretty strong in my opinion and it is unlikely I will kill either. I see no reason I cannot continue to grow both in the long run with short periods of focus on each.
Although thinking through these questions was helpful, and talking to people gave me a ton of insight, I realized that I was getting very fixated on the financial questions, and even worse was jumping to common solutions like “oh.. Just go look for funding.”
Transcending to the higher-level questions:
I paused.. And pulled myself up to the larger questions at play… What is it that will make me happy? How do I want to be spending my day? What is really the larger goal at play here? Fortunately, I already had the answers to this. When I set out on a conscious journey to build a startup, I wrote down my personal goal: “Be able to do whatever the fuck I want.”
It was funny. After reading that, it all became so much clearer. I’ve been having to prepare for months if not years to become non-dependent on an employer… Do I really want to turn around and get funding? Do I want to take the leap from one master and jump to another?
All the little questions became irrelevant.
Of course I don’t want funding. Of course I should work on my ideas freely. I don’t want to take on any masters. I want to be Bootstrapped, Profitable & Proud (inspired from the series that 37Signals has been running).
Hopefully getting what I want:
And so, armed with the clarity of knowing what I want (be able to do whatever the fuck I want), I defined my transition strategy. I know where I want to be…just read any one of those articles on the 37Signals blog. And I know I can’t get there in one fell swoop. Its going to take some steps, and some transitions. But on a 10-year timeline, I think I can get to a great spot (hopefully). Here’s what my transition looks like:
Focusing on each of my ideas 3 weeks at a time. In about 6 months time, I’ll re-evaluate which idea should get less and which should get more attention.
Spin up independent consulting for 50% of my week. If you know someone that needs help with UX, UI, Product Design or just to take an idea to a prototype, I’m your man, please send them my way (tawheed at gmail).
Scale back on expenses. This means getting rid of my beloved BMW, moving to a smaller (but still cozy) place, and spending less money on going out.
I’m excited. I want to be Bootstrapped, Profitable, & Proud. I want the freedom to do whatever I want. I want to be my own master.
As a single-founder, developer, designer and general biz-dev guy, my Basecamp To-Do list has been invaluable in tracking all the moving parts of an aspiring new startup. But today, I had to stop and take the time to completely reorganize how I group my tasks in Basecamp. Here’s the story of why.
How I originally used Basecamp ToDos
I keep a project for each product, and over the past year and change, my To-Do lists have served me really well. I always kept multiple ToDos based on the general area of focus (e.g. marketing, a major feature, a general theme). Here’s a snapshot of what my completed ToDo Lists were called:
As you can see in the picture above, Basecamp has been right along with me for the whole ride. But surprisingly, after logging into Basecamp today, I realized that I hadn’t logged in for nearly a month! It’s not like I was on a vacation over the past month (far from it) — I had been doing lots of work. However, it didn’t occur to me to refer back to my ToDos.
This wasn’t OK though — because I still recognized the restless feeling in my OCD self. That feeling of angst, that fear that I’ve got lots of activities going on, but I’m not 100% sure if I’m achieving the goal, and I’m not really tracking what I’m doing and where my time is going and this could be bad. But at the same time, I just couldn’t get myself to start creating more ToDos based on what I was working on.
My new design for ToDos
Upon reflection, I realized that my whole paradigm of working has changed now that I’ve got two products that are beyond just defining the MVP but at a point where they need more refinement and more rinse and repeat.
More concretely, now that both Braintrust and Tout are starting to see some traction, it is no longer about just rolling out the minimum viable product and seeing whether it sticks. It has become more about setting some specific goals for each product and honing in on the set of tasks that will effectively achieve that goal.
And so, I started to reorganize my ToDo lists based on the specific goals I had already set for my products in my head. Once I did this, the actual tasks started flying in. My ToDo list finally aligned with my mental model, and I knew the movie of what needed to happen to achieve each of those goals. Basecamp felt like a friend again, and here’s how it started to look:
In the picture above, you’ll see how I split ToDo lists into the higher level goals I’ve set for Braintrust (this is a sampling, there are more) — and you’ll also see (vaguely — I’m still fleshing them out) how the specific tasks can add up to effectively achieving my each of my goals.
I think this “new” way will be really awesome in both sticking to my goals and keeping me honest on thinking through how to achieve a goal — instead of just attacking individual tasks that do not amount to anything.
Thoughts/Feedback are most welcome! How do you manage your startup’s ToDo list?
I’ve been thinking a lot about Braintrust lately and whether this thing is truly going to fly or whether this is just a bad idea that I should kill.
There are a ton of different ways to think about it, some scientific (looking at customers, market, trajectory) and some more based on the gut (am I still excited by the idea and the space, does it look like I’m starting to build a tribe of followers, etc).
Interestingly enough, the greatest wisdom I came across on this subject came from an unconventional source. It was from this series of videos by one of my favorite journalists of all time, Ira Glass.
In the second part of this four part video where Ira talks about the art of storytelling, without even realizing it, he gives some amazing advice to entrepreneurs on how to think about their startup idea, how to curate it so it becomes something amazing, and also, of course, how to ruthlessly kill it if it doesn’t meet your expectations.
It’s been just about a month since I posted my article on how I built Tout and took it to market in 3 days. I think its time to do a bit of a retrospective and talk about how things are going.
To give the quick back story, I built Tout to “scratch my own itch.” I was sending out a ton of marketing and customer development emails for my other product Braintrust and I needed a way to do it more effectively. And so, I built Tout, a way to templatize my emails. Just for kicks, I added a Premium plan that would give web-site like analytics on the emails I sent.
The numbers
After about 30 days since launch, Tout has signed up a total of 334 users, processed about 1,600 pitches, and signed up 10 premium subscribers each paying $30 per month.
Changes to Tout over the first 30 days
Thanks to a rather passionate group of customers around Tout, I also received a ton of feedback around the service.
The first two weeks after launch were spent ironing out random bugs around the service, implementing things like a “Forgot Password” feature and adding some features that I wouldn’t have thought of myself such as integrating with Highrise, being able to change the greeting for templates for other languages, and ensuring people can put in HTML in their messages for customizations.
After the first two weeks or so, Tout got to a pretty humming state. It turns out the problem it was solving struck a real nerve in people. One of my customers put it best: “Copy-n-Paste is SO 1990s thanks to Tout.” With the fires put out, I started to focus more on customer development. I hooked up a Survey.io widget to gather feedback, and I also used Tout to email new users and ask them how their experience was going.
About three weeks into the service being online, I got enough information from customers to realize that:
people were looking for a slightly more polished interface for Tout (but admitted that it met their immediate need)
and although some people were turned off by the $30 price tag, there were lots of people who were perfectly fine with it as long as I put in some certain features.
And so, on the three week mark, even with existing premium subscribers, I implemented the low hanging fruit of the premium features: the ability to share Tout Premium with up to 5 team members AND the ability to share the pitch templates across the team. This meant that if 5 of the team members used the same pitch template to deliver a consistent message, you’ll get 5x the amount of analytics data tracking whether your e-mail pitches (and messaging) is working with your audience.
The Premium update struck yet another nerve, followed with a set of emails saying “Perfect! I was waiting for exactly this feature…” I got yet another bump in revenues.
Over the last week or so, it seems I hit another peak, and people started to complain about slowness. And so, thanks to Heroku’s awesome infrastructure, I just dialed up the # of dynos, and added some background worker threads for synching Highrise and sending e-mails. Problem solved.
What’s next for Tout
At this point, I see a Premium subscriber sign up just about every other day or so. I told my self that since Braintrust is my first priority, working on Tout would not be worth it to me without the $30/month price tag. At this point, I’m pretty satisfied. Tout is more than paying for it self, and is also generating extra cash that I can feed into Braintrust.
More importantly, Tout is easily attracting the type of people that also happen to be perfect candidates for Braintrust. Which means that by placing a simple upsell link for Braintrust in Tout, I can more than recoup whatever time I’ve put into it already revenues aside.
Moving forward, I’ve got some killer feature ideas from my customers. As time permits, I’ll be implementing them over the next few weeks. If I see enough of a response from all of you, I’ll post another update reporting back in a few months or so.
I think an introduction to Braintrust in this blog is long overdue. While I’ve been writing a ton of blog entries about Tout (the web-app I built in 3 days), I wasn’t quite ready to officially introduce Braintrust up until now.
What is Braintrust?
First, let me explain the problem Braintrust tries to solve. I believe there is a magic spot between group e-mail collaboration and real-time chat. Historically, this has been filled by mailing lists and discussion forums, both of which now pale in comparison when it comes to the Web 2.0 user experience we demand from our tools.
Today, there are a handful of products trying to fill this void, trying to bridge the gap between e-mail and chat, keeping the organizational benefits of discussion forums, and introducing the snazziness of social networks, comments, and news feeds. Google Wave, SocialWok, and some others are examples of this space, and now, so is Braintrust. To be clear, Braintrust is not trying to be everything Google Wave is, it is simply trying to solve the same problem through my own vision of how the problem can be solved.
Simply put, Braintrust is a social collaboration tool that helps groups organize their conversations. I built Braintrust by combining the timeless elements of a traditional discussion forum and innovative features from popular social networks. Braintrust is hosted in the cloud, works in real-time, and provided as a SaaS offering.
For the impatient, here is a quick demo of how Braintrust works:
Why is Braintrust a lean startup?
First of all, up until a month or so ago, I never paid attention to the lean startup movement. After hearing/reading a lot about it, it just so turned out that my principles around starting a business by and large matched up to a lot of the practices that lean suggests. But, when looked at through the lens of lean, there are a lot of interesting observations.
When I started out with my idea for Braintrust, it wasn’t called Braintrust, and it didn’t look much like what Braintrust is today. As Steve Jobs said in his Stanford commencement speech, “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” The Braintrust you see today is the result of atleast 3 major pivots (along with a number of smaller “recalibrations”) and a fair amount of customer development.
My idea for Braintrust first started as a crowdsourcing tool where people could ask a question and have structured discussions (read: Q&A) on the best answer. I called it Recommnd. I pivoted away from this idea because a) UserVoice nailed it and b) I realized that I didn’t believe in crowdsourcing, I really just wanted to get the opinion of a select few that I trust.
So my idea of Recommnd morphed into “Ask My Braintrust” — the idea was to take the interface I designed for crowdsourcing and apply it to a private set of “advisors” — a Braintrust if you will. While doing customer development around this product, I kept failing to reach “product market fit” — people loved the idea, but no one had a ready made group of advisors that they could tap into to create a Braintrust. And for the small number of people that did, the market just wasn’t big enough or wasn’t exciting enough. The best piece of advice I got during this phase was “You’re going after people and trying to convince them to create a group and then use your product… why not go after people that are already in a group?”
And so, that lead to my third pivot. Instead of focusing on “advisors,” I focused on teams (a.k.a. existing groups). Also, instead of just trying to appeal to all kind of groups (e.g. families, social groups, communities), I decided to narrow my focus as well (this was one of the smaller re-calibrations).
I don’t think I’m fully there yet, but I think I’ve reached a point with enough people loving the Braintrust product that I want to get it out to a larger audience. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are going to be a few more pivots in the path ahead, but I think the core product is by and large there.
The development of Braintrust has been lean as well. I did most of the development myself and used contractors when I could. With the size of Braintrust, and all of its moving pieces, it literally would have been impossible to build something like this without the use of open source and the common services on the cloud. So here goes the shoutouts:
If it wasn’t obvious already, I’m a total Rails fanboy. Without Ruby on Rails, I don’t think I would be in the web business, and Braintrust almost certainly would not exist.
Braintrust is hosted on EC2. Because it uses XMPP, ActiveMQ and ActiveMessaging to deliver the real-time features, going with Heroku like I did with Tout was not an option.
Being a single founder, I didn’t want to risk wasting time on OPS, so I wanted to automate as much of my infrastructure configuration as possible. So I used Chef and Capistrano for infrastructure setup, packaging and deployments. Everything is automated. “chef-solo and cap production deploy” — you still rock my world.
Not to boast or anything, but Braintrust has a ridiculously sick UI and User Experience. I mean it, but I can’t take credit for all of it. If it wasn’t for the AMAZING jQuery library and the even more amazing plugin development community, I’d never be able to get Braintrust to auto-expand text boxes, automatically embed Youtube videos using oEmbed, or show growl-like real-time notifications.
I think special recognition also goes to the open-source community (and the magic of Github) in general, which lets not-so-talented developers like me bring my ideas to life. I really want to make it a goal to give back, I’m just afraid of whether the OS community is ready for my terrible coding skills. If I had to spend time writing G-Mail address book imports, or messaging libraries, Braintrust would never have come to market.
I think the last thing I want to mention is that lot of people think being lean means not having a vision. This wasn’t the case with Braintrust. Through customer development and pivoting, there were numerous times I could’ve slapped on a ToDo list to Braintrust and turned it into a project management tool and called it a day (otherwise known as Product-Market-Fit) — because that is what the people I was talking to were asking for. But, I stuck with my vision and my goal, that this would be a tool around conversation management and not about project management. I still don’t know for sure whether this was the right move, but helping people communicate better is what excites me, and so I stuck with that goal and to this day still continue to find a better product-market-fit. I have this vision, and I’m sticking to it.
So…what’s next?
Well, I’m still bootstrapped, but I’ve given my resignation at my day job to work on this full time. Whether I go in for angel funding or whether I keep bootstrapping this while doing consulting on the side is still unknown. It really depends on how much $$$ Braintrust starts generating with the PR and Marketing push I’m kicking off with this blog entry. That and the apetite for risk my wife OKs.
Ideally, I would like Braintrust to get a decent number of paying customers so that I can build out my team. There are so many more ideas I have to move Braintrust forward, but I don’t want to continue development at this point until I see whether this thing can truly fly at the level I need it to.
In Conclusion
Wow, what a ride. I’m excited, I’m jazzed, and I’m scared shitless. But, I need your help. No really, I do. Please go to Braintrust and set up a FREE account and give it a try. Then, email me and give me your honest, brutal, unfiltered feedback.
Also, please RT this article and help me spread the word. Countless hours have gone into this, I truly and deeply care about this, and I really want it to succeed.
As I’ve been working through and applying my 9 Principles behind an Effective Landing Page, I’ve been experimenting with different ways to “show” what Braintrust and Tout does. So far, I’ve found about 3 ways to effectively show people what your app does, and 1 that I’m absolutely in love with.
There is the “show the app in all its glory, and point to stuff and explain what is going on without getting in the way”
Then, there is the “show the app in all its glory, but don’t count on people moving their eyes back and forth AND reading so put it the explanations on top of the app” way
While this worked pretty well, I never liked the messyness this introduced. And then, I saw Panic’s amazing solution to this problem.
So far, I love this one the best. It has these emitting red dots around interesting areas. The red dots emmit a red halo and basically call out “hover over meeee!!” and when you do, the explanation appears gracefully.
TK is an entrepreneur, a web enthusiast, and a dreamer. His latest adventure is being the Founder of Braintrust – a communication tool for groups. Continue reading about TK…
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