Reflections on start-up life: Week 10

Last week was very interrupted for a number of reasons - family events and then a HDD failure on my main PC which stopped me dead in my tracks.  This turned out to be a blessing in disguise as I'd been putting off moving to Ubuntu, so this was my opportunity.  Fortunately I lost only time as all our data and code is well backed up - DropBox is a blessing for documents as well.

I won't rave about the Ubuntu install other than to say it took me around 1 hour to get a functioning Ubuntu machine up and running - almost 8 hours for the Vista re-build (patch, reboot, patch, reboot all day).

So the last weekend wasn't as relaxing as I would of liked, mostly consisting of building new machines (2 boot images on my main desktop and I also purchased a new MSI X340 laptop I installed with Ubuntu as well).

The reflection this week for me is that decision leads to opportunity.  Being decisive about things opens doors and provides more information - sometimes it might be that the decision was wrong, which is still good information, but it does lead to action.  Indecision kills start-ups. 

Having decided to focus on the consumer play we found that we could start to do a number of things:

1. Write a pitch deck and circulate for feedback.
2. Act on the feedback to refine and define what we are doing.
3. Have more focus in our meetings.
4. A clearer idea on what we "want" when we meet with someone, and exactly what it is that we have to offer them.
5. Actually forecast a plan for two weeks in advance.

Technically not much happened from my perspective (although Alex has been doing a lot of planning on his side), but from a business perspective we made some major steps forward.

We will be in Sydney all week next week - if you're following this blog and interested in catching up, let me know - we are there to pitch to potential investors, but we would love to meet with anyone who is interested in what we are up to.

Twendly continues to do very well and is gaining some real evangelists for the service.  Again, doing leads to learning - without a real live demo like Twendly we could never have learnt as much as a we have about our HiveMind engine and how it works in the real world.

• Wasted time rebuilding PCs.
• Still not enough time on the business plan as is needed.
• Hating the touchpad on the MSI - need to get the proper driver for it so I can turn off the stupid touch to click.  Why anyone would think this is a good default behaviour is beyond me.  I constantly brush it with my thumbs on it when typing and end up typing somewhere else in my document.
  

• Refine and rework the business pitch so we are good to go for Sydney next week.
  

What next for Twendly

What a week it's been!

Twendly has grown and grown after TheNextWebAU article was published, sparking a wave of interest across the globe which has been fantastic.  We've also seen something in the order of around 500 retweets about Twendly as people share the news.

Our initial suspicion that there was something useful about this way of searching for people, has now been have been confirmed by lots of enthusiastic people.

So where to from here?  There are a few things that we are focussing on now in the short term:

1. We've decided to put the enterprise version of HiveMind aside.  Twendly needs our full attention to realise its potential and we have lots of great ideas we want to build into it.
2. We've expanded our server capacity - as the search load increased, we've run into trouble both keeping the search up AND also loading and indexing the data to expand the search without dramatically impacting the search experience.  A second server will help.  This should come on line this weekend and will enable us to index new users much faster while still keeping the search experience for existing users running well.
3. Catching up! We experienced a massive surge in growth that we were not properly prepared for - we are working hard to get all these new sign ups into the index and deliver the experience we have promised.
4. Squashing Spam.  We have had an anti-spam component to the engine from day one, but we have refined it a lot over the last week as we get more and more accounts indexed.  Roughly 10% of accounts the we index, we consider spam and we remove from our search results. Our ultimate goal is that when you search you will find a real person, not a bot or a person who tweets like a bot.

You should start experiencing the benefits of these changes by next week.

In the medium term, we want to re-write the search engine from scratch and include more sophisticated algorithms for people matching.  Twendly works quite well at the moment based on the feedback, but we know that it can be a lot better and for us to continue to scale we will need a different underlying architecture for the engine.

Thanks to everybody who has tried Twendly for your enthusiasm, your tweets and your blog posts - we are excited about the tool we are building and are looking forward to seeing what we can turn this into with our 100% focus and your support.

Cheers,

Tim Bull (@timbull) and Alex Dong (@alexdong)
Co-Founders of BinaryPlex (@binaryplex

How does Twendly differ from a Google or Twitter Search?

We are really excited about the traffic we are getting on Twendly - it's great to see people getting value from it.

Of course, in a world that is largely used to searching for documents, it can take a slight "twist" of thinking to easily understand the difference between a document Vs. a people search.  We'd like to illustrate this with some examples.

In Twendly, put simply, you're searching for the things people are talking about.  If you search for your name, you're searching for the person who talks about you the most, not necessarily yourself (unless of course you talk about yourself a lot!).

These three screen shots help to summarise this difference and give a good illustration on how it works by comparing a Google Search, a Twitter Search and a Twendly Search using exactly the same search terms "Lotus Connections".

In the following Google Search you can see that a search for Lotus Connections returns documents and sites-  it's shown you the most relevant locations to go and research further yourself.

In Twitter search, you see the people who are mentioning Lotus Connections "right now".  This also has its place - you can join in the current conversation.  The problem is that although these are people, it doesn't give a sense of who the relevant ones are - perhaps the leading people are silent just at the moment.

Finally there is a search in Twendly.  It returns people, with an easy gauge on both how much and how frequently they talk about Lotus Connections.  Having had some experience, I can vouch for 7 of these being excellent people to talk to about Lotus Connections and the rest as good information sources.

To keep the test fair, we used the same search terms for each tool, however there are lots of ways in each search engine to refine the search results.  If you want to refine the result in Twendly to exclude people (or Twitter bots in this case) who tweet lots of links, a handy tip is to include -http at the end of your search e.g. http://twendly.com/?q=lotus+connections+-http This simply says don't include any thing mentioning HTTP.  Depending on the search topic and the type of people you are looking for, you'll find the relevancy often improves further if you do this.