Tuesday 4 October 2011

Designer Wanted

TweetPivot is looking to hire a designer to reshape and revamp its web presence. The ideal person will have the following qualities:
  1. Practical, hands-on web and print designer
  2. UX guru, ninja, [insert latest trending term here!]
  3. Lives Social Media
  4. Loves Lean Startup
TweetPivot is based in London and Cambridge, UK.

We're an early stage startup that's getting real traction. We can't pay you a salary yet, but you will get equity.

If you're interested, contact us at jobs@tweetpivot.com and show us what you've done.

TweetPivot at Lean Startup Machine

On Friday 16th September 2011 I took TweetPivot along to Lean Startup Machine, London. I knew I had a great product but now wanted to accelerate customer development. I know, I know, this is back-to-front; but I'd started writing the application way before I became aware of the Lean Startup movement.

I pitched the idea and my starting hypothesis and was accepted as one of the ten ideas to form teams around. I was joined by two others, later reduced to one - Prashant Gandhi. Together we started testing our hypothesis and, within about 2 hours, realised we were wrong! The potential customer we thought had a specific problem simply didn't. However, good interview technique lead us to uncover a different potential customer upon whom we could test the same problem. Pivot number one (Customer Segment).

Pivots two and three (both Customer Need) involved keeping the same customer type and altering our 'angle' of the problem. The outcome was hypotheses with positive qualitative feedback. Now we needed a larger sample set to test on.

Overnight we ran 2 concurrent, yet disparate, landing pages on Unbounce. This time window meant we were essentially testing the US market rather than the UK one, but the results were reassuring. Both pages had a conversion rate of around 10%. OK, not statistically significant, but still a good nod that we were on the right track.

What did we learn?

Our MVP prototype is very important in the customer development process. Even though we described our solution correctly and in detail, it wasn't until customers actually touched it that they got their 'eureka moment'. We saw this as a flaw in our technique but were convinced by numerous mentors that it wasn't. We just had to realise that it was important and factor it in to our process.

Customer Development gets easier the more you do it. If you're a technical founder then, chances are, you'll find this daunting. I'm a very sociable guy and will introduce myself to almost anyone. However, it took some considerable effort for me to get past the idea that I was selling something and that I was a terrible individual for invading their personal space to do this. Yes, ultimately, you are selling something; but realise that you're trying to find a mutually beneficial outcome. It's a cooperative effort.

Practice your interviews on other participants. The venue will be filled with people in exactly the same state of worry as you. Take an easy step and ask other teams' members if you can practice on them. Then  reciprocate.

You may think that you're questioned all of your assumptions, but you'll be wrong. As my G.F.D.A. wallpaper says "Question F***ing Everything".

Thanks

I couldn't write a blog post about LSM without offering thanks to all those involved. I can honestly say that, from an ROI perspective, this is the best money I've spent on TweetPivot. I had contact with almost everybody involved at some point during the weekend. So, to the organisers, the mentors and the other participants "Thank you!".

What's Next?

  • Prashant and I are working out terms in order to work together on TweetPivot.
  • I've engaged an adviser for TweetPivot and hope to officially announce him later this week.
  • We're looking to expand our team - blog post coming soon.
  • Customer Development has continued apace. We've been interviewing almost every day since Lean Startup Machine and the feedback just keeps getting better.
  • We'll be issuing private betas to some customers soon so that we can add to our bucket of validated learning.
Finally

If you've never been on a Lean Startup Machine weekend, do it now! Sign up or unlock your city.

Monday 18 July 2011

TweetPivot goes all Cloudy

Firstly, apologies for the huge gap in writing to this blog. We'll try to step up our efforts of the coming months.

We wanted to announce that we've now moved TweetPivot to be fully hosted on Microsoft's Azure platform. This gives us some great improvements in storage capability (and capacity) over our old dedicated server and allows us to trivially scale out in times of high usage.

We have had to temporarily sacrifice some computing 'oomph' in this new configuration though. What this means is that, even though we can handle move simultaneous requests, we can't process those individual collections as quickly as we previously could. Whilst we figure out some technical issues we've decided to reduce the standard limit on any collection to 250. You can still contact us if you'd like something bigger building.

The great news is that we're already working on version 2 of TweetPivot. This will leverage Silverlight 5 and the amazing new features baked into PivotViewer v2. Unfortunately, we can't release any of this new stuff yet, but we'll soon be publishing a video to show you all what's coming.

Once again, a huge 'thank you' to all our users for sticking with TweetPivot and keeping the ball rolling. We've got some great stuff on its way.

Wednesday 12 January 2011

TweetPivot now includes @Mentions

We're very pleased to announce that we have now added @mentions to our TweetPivot Twitter Client. This was the most requested feature from our users who submitted to our recent survey.

What this means for you, the user, is that you'll now be notified if you're mentioned by another twitter user - whether you follow them or not.

We think that mentions are important and should stand out from the normal 'background noise' of twitter. So we decided to differentiate these tweets by using a new colour scheme. That way they are immediately noticeable; even in a collection of 100s or even 1000s.

We hope you like it.