Naked Startup

Looking Back, Looking Forward

So, only a few days into the new year and I'm already late writing this.

2010 was frankly a brilliant year for Arun & myself. We launched stuff, and we saw that it was good. Looking back at our heady 9 week sprint to take Gameplan from nothing to product was super productive. Now it may not have been the soaraway success we had hoped for, but it does what it says it does and technically is probably the proudest I've ever been of anything.

The future of Gameplan lies in a 'pivot' (ugh, dreadful startup cliche ahoy!) we need to work out a better way of attracting users, in short we built something useful for people who don't know they need it.

We also built our first (and Arun's second) iOS app, Today's News a Guardian iPhone App. We subsequently launched a major improvement, a version for iPhone as well as iPad and implementing Apple's iAds. Today's News is as much an experiment as it is a money making venture (just as well given the performance of banner ads!) but we have thousands of users every day who find the app as useful as I personally do. So that's awesome.

We finished the year taking on a contracting role at ViKi, working alongside the development team there and a micro-army of Pivots. It's been good to broaden our pairing partners and simply by working with a talented group of people on the rewrite of a high traffic site has been enlightening. We also launched with little to no problem and after ironing out some minor bugs (only to be expected!) over the first two weeks we have an average response time of under 150ms and that's not even including pages served from the high-speed cache.

If I'm allowed I may write in more detail about what we're using at ViKi, if not I can probably just write a bit more generically about the tools we've used in the process, without incurring the wrath of any NDAs!

The next year holds many excitements. We have a few more weeks at ViKi, I'm doing some interesting consulting work with Paul G and we may have a big announcement in the next few weeks about our future plans. Oh plus there's going to be a Ruby Conference in April in Singapore with top international speakers, you'll want to come.

So What Now?

It's been a while.

I think we can safely say that in its current incarnation Gameplan will not make us millionaires. Or frankly pay our salaries. However, this does not mean we are giving up.

Today's News seems to be a fantastic product and we have a hard core of several thousand readers using our app every day. Plus we have an iPhone version in the works, which should increase our users count several-fold. Arun even thinks it might be his preferred version.

But our (meagre) salaries have to be paid. So in an effort to do some interesting work and make some cash we met with several people over the last month or so to attempt to secure some paid work so we can fund ourselves as an entity for the forthcoming year.

After meeting with several potential clients we finally agreed to work with ViiKii on an extended consulting job that'll see us well into 2011.

What made us take the assignment? We're working on something that's an interesting project, with a decent shot at success, working with a talented team of staff and Pivots. Hardly a bad way to spend your life for a couple of months.

What should be noted at this stage is that we're not giving up on our 'startup', we're just going about it another way. We're both talented developers and don't need to spend other people's money on a workforce to build our ideas. We can help other people with their ideas, get involved, learn and at the same time fund ourselves for another run at Gameplan (or maybe something else) next year.

As is often said, investors are often backing a team rather than an idea, per se. We're doing the same. Investing in a team, but we're just funding it a different way; through our own skills. We back ourselves to do something amazing but by taking on interesting consulting work, for a little while, we don't need it to be right this minute.

Also the benefits of working with other people on interesting projects can only help us to avoid pitfalls and spark interesting new directions for us as a team. Plus it's nice to get out and about in a coding sense once in a while!

Our Attempt to become the Pull-To-Refresh of iPad News Apps

When we launched version 1.0 of Today's News - we were quite aware that it's navigation UI was flawed and needed quite a bit of work. The first thing I do when I read any newspaper is to scan the cover page and then jump straight to the sports section, and then work my way through the rest of the paper. The first version of Today's News didn't let the user do that easily. But we launched anyway, because apparently real artists ship.

As we were rolling out version 1.0 and waiting for the App Store gods to approve our work, we were hard at work at making changes to the navigation UI. Very early on, Andy had sketched a version of what he thought it should look like, but said - "this is definitely version 1.1, let's get this version out the door quickly". As is evident from the sketch below, it had a heads-up display which would let the user scrub between stories, but it would also graphically denote to the user the length of each section in the paper, which upholds the Today's News ethos of not ever showing counts of stories, but yet subtly managing to tell the user what he needs to know about the day's paper. The coolest thing (and my favorite bit) of the new UI is the ability to tap in a section, which would then bring you to the first story of that section. So for example, if you tapped anywhere in the Sports Section, it would bring you to the first sports story.

I spent a couple of days working on a rough implementation of Andy's sketch and after a few days of our combined polishing, we've gotten to a stage where this UI is something we're really proud of (and as an aside, I personally couldn't stand to look at version 1.0 when a much improved version 1.1 was waiting in the wings). To make things obvious, you can even skip between sections using the conventional method which is to tap left and right arrows. We've also made the HUD on-demand, so you tap once to bring up the navigation HUD and tap again to make it disappear. The pleasant side-effect of this is that you get more room for the content of the article, leading to a much more pleasant reading experience and that's the whole point really. Here's a brief peek at what it looks like.

Please excuse the less-than-professional video quality. This was done with an iPhone4 and a flaky Internet connection in India. You can watch it in full HD glory here.

We believe this is a nifty piece of innovation and we're (not-so-)secretly hoping this will became the "pull-to-refresh" of iPad news apps ;)

Another important piece of feedback that we've received from plenty of people is that the ads spoil the elegance of the app. While we'd love to provide an in-app purchase to remove ads from the app, we're unfortunately limited by the terms and conditions of Guardian's Open Platform. We have to live with the fact that despite the elegance and beauty of our product, we're still sharecroppers on the Guardian's wonderful farm.

Version 1.1 of Today's News is now live on the App Store and is ready for download.

Today's News - A young iPad app's journey from an Idea to App Store

First of all, apologies for the obtuse Seinfeld reference.

So Uncle Steve was kind enough to approve Today's News this morning. It is interesting to see how little time is spent in the actual review, just an hour, compared to how long you wait for a reviewer, 9 days. We've spent the last month working on Today's News - a different kind of news iPad app - and it is available for free on the iTunes App Store, starting today.

The Beginning A few months ago Andy showed me a site he stumbled upon called Today's Guardian, created by the very talented Phil Gyford. It was a very interesting take on how news must be presented on the web. The biggest feature of the site was 'finishability': you get the feeling that you are done with the day's paper without having to worry about unread counts, todo's or percentage complete bars. As a big fan of the Guardian (or more specifically it's weekly football podcast) myself, I was very impressed by the app as well.

A few weeks later we both got our iPads, and from day one we were completely blown away by the awesomeness of the media-consumption experience on the iPad. This may sound like fanboy talk, but websites genuinely look and feel better, and like Scott Forstall likes to say, it really did feel like holding the internet in your hands. It was at this point that Andy said "I would so love to have Today's Guardian on the iPad as a native app" and we made a mental note to ourselves that this would be an interesting project to do at some point in the future.

A few short weeks after this, we were done with Gameplan's paid-pricing plans launch and we decided that we could do with a little break from thinking about it, and thus began our efforts to start work on Today's News.

The Technical Details Today's News is powered by the Guardian's excellent Open Platform which gives us full access to their entire content, with the only condition being that we run their ads as part of our app. The iPad app however does not query the Open Platform directly, and instead queries a Rails-powered web-service that I wrote in a few hours, which periodically gets the "day's" news from the Guardian Open Platform and stores it in a relational database.

While Andy was in the UK, I did a rough-and-dirty prototype which basically used a bunch of UIWebViews (in simple terms slightly-underpowered MobileSafari instances) to display each story. It was functional, supported sideways scrolling and the scrubber, but had very little else. This was when Andy's input was crucial as we polished the app into a fairly useable and pretty app in about 2-3 weeks. After he got back, we went into over-polish mode and after a couple of days, we decided that using UIWebView wasn't going to cut it.

The Move To Core Text It was at this point that we discovered Core Text and realised that some of the premier apps on the iPad, such as iBooks (and possibly Flipboard) use Core Text to display attractive text in a fast and efficient way. The move to Core Text was more challenging than we expected, but the results in terms of look and performance are excellent. Today's News turned from the lovable, bumbling Mini Cooper of the sixties to the BMW-powered Mini Cooper of the noughties.

The rest of the pre-launch timeframe was spent fixing niggling crashes which enabled me to learn about memory management in a much more detailed way!

Andy also conjured up a brilliant logo and this is probably one of my favourite parts of the app. John Gruber recently opined that the quality of the icon is a proxy for the quality of the app, and so I hope the quality of the app lives up to the quality of the icon.

Marketing Details and our conversations with The Guardian Once we had a prototype I setup a simple website, wired it up with Campaign Monitor and used the excellent 140proof.com service to run a few Twitter ads targeting keywords such as "Guardian", "iPhone", "iPad", etc. and this got us some attention and some signups. We also also submitted our "MVP" to techstartu.ps and news.yc.

We were always convinced that we wanted to charge for Today's News - seeing how successful the Guardian's official app is and we also think good software needs to be rewarded! It was at this point that the Guardian got in touch with us, and clarified that we would be violating their Terms & Conditions if we charged for Today's News. We had some good-natured back-and-forth resulting in an agreement to keep Today's News free and deploy our Mobclix ads in the app to help cover our costs.

We finally submitted to the App Store last week and Andy put the icing on the cake with a kick-ass microsite as well as a screencast which goes does a pretty good tour of the app.

I personally had an absolute ball working on Today's News and I think both Andy and I are quite proud of our version 1. We already have a version 1.1 in the works that makes the released version look a bit clunky which will hopefully be on the App Store pretty soon!

Seedcamp Singapore 2010 Retrospective and Distilling Reality

So Andy and I were accepted into a mini-Seedcamp in Singapore last week. We were apprehensive that it might turn out to be an echo chamber of familiar faces and generic advice, but Seedcamp turned out to be an excellent exercise in questioning our assumptions and challenging the direction of our product as well as our business model.

The Pitch The day began with all companies pitching their ideas to a roomful of fellow Seedcampers as well as mentors. Andy gave a very good pitch and many of the mentors later commented that the Gameplan pitch was quite memorable and that they were intrigued by the idea and wanted to speak to us about the product as well as our business model.

You can watch the entire presentation here.

The Mentorship Sessions The pitching session was then followed by mentorship sessions which can be best described as 'speed-dating-meets-advisors'. We were paired with BitDin and shared 15-20 minutes of time with multiple sets of mentors over the course of the day. Reshma and Philipp explained that this is to maximize the number of ideas that you can absorb, the number of introductions or connections that you can get, and most of all - exercise your brain and think outside the box. Here are a few highlights:

Daniel Heaf (BBC Worldwide) and Yeo Yaw Shin (Infocomm Investments Pte Ltd) Our first session set the tone for the rest of the day. Both Dan and Yaw asked pointed questions about Gameplan - what it does, what our target market is, how do we plan to market it, etc. and it gave us the chance to clarify our pitch and our message and ensure that we made sense while speaking to veterans of the Internet industry.

There was discussion about engaging schools as users of Gameplan but Dan pointed out that schools are tough to involve as early adopters (he was speaking from experience). Dan also sowed the first seeds of the Gameplan pivot, when he said that for a consumer Internet company, it is easier to go with a bottom-up approach rather than our top-down approach.

In other words, if we are targeting leagues, then the initial set of users that we need to get on board are not the league managers but the players. Given our struggles with marketing and early adoption we also asked Dan about how we figure out when to 'pivot'. Moral of the story: give it a bash, get critical mass, but if you don't have measurable traction - think of changing course.

We also got to demo Today's News and if we weren't mistaken, there was some definite excitement over what we're about to launch.

Adrian Blunt and Chieh Suang (Nusantara Ventures) Our next session was with Adrian Blunt and Chieh Suang from Nusantara Ventures - an early stage venture capital firm focusing on investments in Indonesia. Adrian also used to be the program manager for FIFA Online, and as enthusiastic FIFA players, it was a mini-thrill for both of us to meet him.

They both recommended various avenues to persue for exposure - from advertising on sports/news sites or blogs, to running our own leagues to spread awareness (we came pretty close to the second suggestion with our sponsorship of The Startup Cup).

Philippe Cazaubon (Data Robotics, Inc. - makers of the incredible Drobo) My favourite takeaway from this session was how Philippe, as soon as he sat down, asked us this question: "How do you make money and who do you make money for?" I personally think it's a brilliant question and one every startup should attempt to answer before it sets out to do business. This led to another engaging session about getting traction, speaking to various kinds of people who would generate leads for us as well as more introductions in the bag.

Remember: "How do you make money and who do you make money for?"

Christian Geissendoerfer (Yoose.com) and Edvarcl Heng (Mediacom and SocialHero.me) This was by far the most eye-opening session for us. We've never really spoken to a 'pure' marketing person regarding Gameplan prior to this, so Edvarcl really had us thinking when his first words were: "Make it free". He went on to provide us with a fairly convincing alternative course, focussing on the players and then our business model primarily becomes lead-generation for major sports brands such as Adidas, Nike, Puma et al. He cited examples of DailyMile, Endomondo and Runkeeper of how they kept their primary app free but became a vast resource for huge sports brands to tap into.

In the six months we've started, we'd become somewhat wedded to the idea of a pay business focused on revenues and profits - so to listen to this perspective was fascinating (as well as a little scary).

Christian also offered to introduce us to a German sports league he knows of - the number of introductions and leads we got from Seedcamp is outstanding.

Aarti Gumaledar (Yahoo) and Philipp Moehring (Seedcamp) Aarti and Philipp took up where we left off and further strengthened the case for a product that is free at the point of use. Aarti also brought up the angle (very Yahoo-esque I might add) of how Gameplan could become an excellent source of hyper-local sports data if we made it free and focused on a bottoms-up approach. Philipp further shook us up when he asked us "Who our target market is?" and dismissed our generic answer and poked us to come up with a much sleeker, cleaner message.

At the end of the day, though very tired, Andy and I felt very good about our decision to apply for Seedcamp. Even though some of the mentors had very little knowledge of how sport works (or sometimes even of how consumer Internet companies work!). Not to forget, our hearty congratulations to the winners and we hope you guys have a great time at Seedcamp London.

It was incredibly valuable to remain sponges for the entire day, ask questions, be questioned and most of all have a lot of fun. But as a friend of ours Dinesh mentioned later in the week, it's important not to get carried away by new ideas and thinking different. What's important for success is for us to distill our own reality from the advice and not accept or implement ideas wholesale.

We've spent a fair amount of time discussing the future path of Gameplan between us (and with anyone who'll listen!) whilst also polishing Today's News and starting a few little freelance jobs. In the next couple of weeks we'll get back into Gameplan proper with what will probably be a new direction, but we're letting the Seedcamp-sparked ideas seep through our subconscious until then.

For those on the fence about applying to Seedcamp, we wholeheartedly recommend it!

Week 26 - Accelerated?

So last week was taken up with polish on our iPad app, including a transition from WebViews to CoreText. And for those of you who are familiar with iOS programming this involved a huge boost in speed. We also met up with the talented souls at COMA, who agreed to give us a little feedback on the app during a 'lets meet and see if we can work together in the future' chat.

The middle of the week was taken up with Accelerate 2010, I've got some extensive notes that should be up later in the week.

Prior to the conference I was up late putting the finishing touches to the Neoteny Labs website, which has launched and they seem pretty happy with. They wanted crisp, clear and to focus primarily on the companies in which they've invested rather than themselves, which is bizarrely the opposite way that most other funds do it!

In terms of Gameplan, our frankly appalling Google Analytics tell us the story that we know... Gameplan is not a product for the early adopter tech crowd. And that the direct emailing is not working. We need to do a better job of marketing, so with that in mind I have been collecting phone numbers to ring actual people (gasp) and go and meet them and explain the benefits in person and get their feedback.

Given that it seems at this stage that we're not going to be an overnight success I'm also having discussions about doing some fixed-term contract Rails work and other projects (perhaps iOS-based) in order to increase our 'runway' as a products firm. It looks like we're likely to be a half products and half consulting firm for a little while.

So a week of realisation and preparation. It is amazing/terrifying how the weeks can fill up with non-programming activities.

Week 25 - Field of Dreams

I've returned from the UK (and wedding season) to Singapore. Gameplan now sits at the precipice of success, we know the product is good, we know it is better than the alternatives, we know what we'd like to do with it in the future. But now we must perform that most arcane of arts (to the developer): marketing.

Our particular struggle is with our marketplace, in the whole it doesn't know that it needs our product. We're not competing against a bloated incumbent, we're competing against wasted hours on spreadsheets. We're not selling to early adopting techies who scour Hacker News for the latest iPhone hotness. We're selling to normal people in love with their sport enough to try the Herculean task of organising sport.

In short to paraphrase Kevin Costner in 'Field of Dreams', if we build it they might not come. So we're experimenting with reaching out to them. I've been cold-emailing various sports leagues, who's details I've been collecting over the last couple of weeks. I've broadly used a template from Peldi's post on marketing. I'm trying to send out over 15 emails every day alongside the 'regular' work I'm doing.

We're also going to hook up with our local startup colleagues myADengine to help us try out some online ads and see if we can drive some traffic that way. We're keen to hear any other ideas or advice anyone might have. Although ideally on a budget, TV ads are a bit beyond our cost!

Our side-project Today's News is close to releasable, we just need to iron out some details with the lovely people at guardian.co.uk and polish the edges. It's looking like our original plans for the app have slightly changed but more on that when we launch. We also know exactly what improvements we're going to make for the next version.

In other news we caught up with Jon from buUuk and traded tales of the Singapore startup scene and got (and hopefully gave) some good advice as well as a good old fashioned gossip.

Next week we're heading to Accelerate 2010, which seems frankly huge and unwieldy as a conference compared to the entrancingly bijou Schnitzelconf. If you're going come find us, we're not exhibiting, but we'll be happily dishing out business cards and opinions and we'll happily demo for anyone! :-)

Schnitzelconf: An Overview

I would normally throw something like this up on my personal blog, but the Schnitzelconf ethos is very much how Arun and I think about Gameplan.

I'm going to say it now, rather than save it for the end: Schnitzelconf was the best conference I have ever been to, bar none. The speakers were all terrific, the narrow focus of the conference and panels was a triumph and it all ended with eating chilli in the shadow of dinosaur skeletons (thanks to the amazing venue of the natural history museum).

So firstly congratulations to Amy, Thomas, Harald and Alex. Epic shit. I've got a couple of further articles to come on the individual talks and the panels so this is simply the 'around the conference' post rather than details of the individual sessions.

Firstly it was great that this was in Vienna with a European focus, apart from the embarrassment of my appalling German contrasted with the excellent English of every European I met. Most of the other conferences I'm aware of in the UK and Europe are about more narrow technical subjects (web design, Rails etc) so a more general 'small business with a web focus' conference with a strong build-a-fucking-product-and-charge-for-it message was more enlightening for me.

I'm not aware of any other conferences with such a strong opinionated message, I guess the only spiritual sibling might be lessconf in the US. So many web conferences are driven by a VC/be-the-next-Twitter vibe that to be reminded that outside money is a) not the only way and b) is most likely not even a good idea for most people, was intensely refreshing. This is particularly true when you consider the funding (and subsequent behavior) of startups that haven't even got half a product, let alone any income.

A couple of meta-observations of all the featured businesses:

High quality design and attention to detail were the hallmarks of the successful businesses of the speakers, reconfirming my belief that a beautiful/usable product is a must.

There was also a high focus on the exceptional treatment of customers and high levels of support, another hallmark of all of the speakers businesses.

Also rather obviously, CHARGE MONEY FOR YOUR PRODUCT.

One of the most interesting observations was in conversation with Alex Hillman who noted that for a web conference we hadn't heard the word 'startup' much, rather the word 'business' seemed a better fit.

The high quality (and accessibility) of the speakers, given the low ratio of speakers to attendees, was a tremendous boon. It's always great to be able to meet people you respect and realize that despite their success, they have come from a standing start as well.

So I return to the UK, and then sunny Singapore, reinvigorated and more convinced that the track we're on with Gameplan (and our other projects) is the right one. In fact I think a version of this conference for Singapore itself might be a good thing given the burgeoning web scene, to perhaps suggest another way than the Gahmen grant or Gahmen-backed finance routes.

Returning & Avoiding Burnout

It's been a while since we've posted on the naked startup, and for that I apologize. Gameplan has been down to one full-time person, Arun, as I've been attending the weddings of some very good friends in the UK and Italy. I also took the opportunity to take a proper, no-Internet, break with my wife and a group of friends in Tuscany.

In my absence Arun has pushed the payment functionality and redesigned front end/homepage live, thus ending the free preview period. We'd done a great deal of the work before I disappeared but all credit to him for polishing off the rough edges and getting the site live.

I've also been working on the Neoteny Labs site (launching real soon now) and Arun has been working on an iOS side-project which should hopefully launch in the next month or so.

In our own way we've both been taking a break and letting our brains ease off on Gameplan before we begin marketing it in earnest. I obviously took a holiday (one which my wife has been reminding me I needed) and Arun has, although still working, completely changed his focus (I hope in his case a change is as good as a rest).

In addition, as I was in Europe I was able to attend Schnitzelconf, a conference aimed at bootstrapping entrepreneurs. I'll be following this 'apology post' with a few write ups of that inspirational event.

I personally feel immeasurably better, although I didn't even realize I needed the break, now refreshed and ready once again to blast into Gameplan-related activities and that includes keeping this blog up to date, so keep listening - I hope this is still useful.

Weeks 19 and 20 - Of Payments, UI Polish and Remote Working

First of all, apologies for the absence of last week's weekly update. We've been neck deep in knocking out bugs and payments and polishing our product and one thing led to another and it was already Friday, so we decided to roll out a combined report this week.

Payments We've made some stellar progress with integrating payments into Gameplan. What we're especially proud of is that we've made paying a very unobtrusive part of the entire Gameplan experience. A user can essentially sign up on Gameplan, create an entire league and decide to pay us once he sees how much time Gameplan has saved him. Paying us is not a pre-requisite for a user to use Gameplan (whatever the size of the league/tournament) and we think that will encourage a lot more people to give it a spin. Integrating with Paypal has been a bitter-sweet experience. Since we aren't doing recurring payments and thanks to the excellent Railscasts, we have a tested (with Cucumber and Shoulda) payments system built into Gameplan, but running tests on Paypal's Sandbox is still a nightmare-ish scenario. If ever there was a service ripe for creative destruction, it is Paypal. But I digress.

User Interface Polish and Tweaks Andy and I have also been hard at work ironing out irritants and glitches in the user interface to make it as seamless as possible. We've been heavily influenced by the Blank Slate Design Pattern - thus making sure that users are not lost when they sign up. Funnily enough, while we were in the process of making these changes we bumped into a friendly Gameplan user at the Web.Sg meetup and he mentioned to us that once he signed up, he wasn't sure what the difference between a league and a cup was - and this really re-affirmed our decision to spend time improving our message and making it as less confusing as possible.

Andy's also making some massive improvements to our homepage, so watch that space!

Remote Working Andy's away in the UK for a month so we're working remotely this month. Luckily most of the hard engineering problems have been solved and so working remote looks like it will work out since most of the tasks that we have to do are related to marketing and responding to bugs and user feedback. While this will be the longest period the Gameplan founders will be split up since the first of April, it will be an interesting experiment to see how we work during this month. We've also launched an internal project codenamed S10K which both of us will be working on - more details on that soon!

Weeks 19 and 20 Combined Stats: 11 issues closed. 5 new features adding up to a current total of 99. 5,134 lines of code and 12,317 lines of test code with a code-to-test ratio of 1:2.4.