Thursday 7 November 2013

Canva -- I love it!

I've been using Canva for a couple of weeks now and I LOVE it!

I heard about it from the startup circles, and it's currently in private beta but it's the best graphics tool online.  Seriously.

It's vector based and it's great for startups like Oddswop where we can use the tool pretty much for free. I've used it to build out banner type ads and although my graphic arts skills are not great it's in no way a reflection of the gorgeous stuff that Canva can do.

Want a sticker?  Want a menu?  What about an infographic?  It includes all the graphics you need to get something going.  And you can add (upload) your own graphics for free so in our case, logos and screenshots.

I'm just about to 'pretty up' our 1 page Executive Summary and opened the A4 page type templates (assume this would be "US Letter" format eventually too) and they layouts are so gorgeous that I just want to create posters!



Tuesday 29 October 2013

Busy with 99interns

Although I'm trying to focus on growing traffic for Oddswop I am distracted at the moment in getting 99interns.com up and running.

The site is been an interesting experience setting it up on on tools such as Wordpress and using some great themes and other plugins cobbled together.  I think we chose wisely in getting a Wordpress friendly host in SiteGround.  They have this great staging tool which we may have to upgrade to so we can avoid this:

The sentiment and image was the inspiration for this blog.  Because I have too much blogging to do and too many things I'm juggling.  I really need to pare down to the bare basics.  

I need to do guest blogs, my own blog, Oddswop blog, 99interns blog and we're about to embark on a house build (personally) which again should be recorded.  

Anyway I digress.  I was using this blog post to mention that I've been semi-coding!  Well coding to the limit of my capabilities... in other words adjusting existing code and pasting existing snippets to get what I want done.  I feel like I've done a mini hackathon in a few days to get the site up and running to the extent it is.  We'll be releasing it sometime in the next 5 - 7 days depending on if I can get a staging/dev site up and running as well as we'll push the current dev site into live.  I'll cave in and just pay the extra $10 per month for this feature.  Seems like a cheap price :)


Thursday 5 September 2013

Traffic traffic traffic!

Now that the site is live, the dev side of things takes a back seat and I'm concentrating on driving traffic.  Using all my own networks first via social media, then the registered mailing list of people and then Adwords.  But yesterday, one of my co-founders at 99interns walked me through Reddit and I love it!
Reddit has an engaged community and I was able to put an ad on the sub-Reddit for UNSW -- but only just.  The Reddit ad system only allows for credit card payment from the US, Canada and the UK!  Us poor Aussies obviously don't use Reddit as much.
I actually prefer the style of conversation on Reddit to Twitter...
Anyway I'm seeing an upward trend on traffic (not hard when you start with a low base ;) ) with very predictable results every time I send out a campaign.
It's early days and I suspect the traffic will burst when certain bloggers get hold of the site or when we bring on our community model.  I'm not too worried as I have always anticipated this would be the hard part and it would be a slower burn.  Most 'experts' suggest it will take 3 years.

Friday 30 August 2013

Grunt Funds

I have been in a bit of quandary trying to work out how we do the equity splits.  In comes Garry Visontay with his pearls of wisdom -- "check out Slicingpie.com".

Wow!  Perfect.

So we're using a Grunt Fund.

I downloaded the Grunt Fund spreadsheet and started populating the information and popped it into a Google Drive folder and shared it with the team.  We're tracking it all ourselves 'in good faith' as there are really just the 3 of us and we have some idea of what hours and $$ each other are putting into things.

So now it's just a matter of prioritising features we need/want for the amount of funds we have left and me trying to chase down some investment.

Oddswop - We're alive!!

Someone once said if you aren't embarrassed by your initial release you have launched too late.  Well... I'm certainly not embarrassed by it but it still has a lot to go feature wise.  We threw a lot of things overboard in order to get it alive.  There are still some issues we're working out but it was good enough for me to tell Andre to push the beta.oddswop.com.au to the www subdomain early this morning.

With a bunch of tools helping out with the launch side of things that was pretty smooth going.  The problem was all the cross browser stuff, in particular Internet Explorer.  Thank goodness Dave actually uses IE (don't ask!) and could do testing quickly.  There are still issues with IE8 and IE9 but some of those... well... some of them just aren't compatible with the features built into the site!

We had a session in the morning about our next major feature -- the Communities model and then it was lunch time.  Had a great time discussing user acquisition and other features we need to bring back into the fold.

Here's a photo of us celebrating over lunch...
You can see Andre is very proficient at Selfies!

So day 1... this is what the site looks like:



Monday 26 August 2013

Guide to starting up

Interesting list of things to do / not to do when starting up via Techcrunch
http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/24/the-ultimate-cheat-sheet-for-starting-and-running-your-business/

So sounds like I should continue contracting for a while longer yet and not talk to VCs for another month or so when we hopefully will have a revenue generating stream...

In the meantime, hustle, hustle, hustle...

Friday 23 August 2013

Startup 'Juice'

I presented on Wednesday at the UNSW CSE Sydney Startup Expo where there were a bunch of other startups presenting.  It was great.  It's the first time I pitched/presented after Founder Institute which brought back lots of rose-coloured memories of practising and preparing my pitch deck.
I realised that I need to go to these events every so often as I get into a bit of a slump with what I'm working on and although I still network with the FI grads it's not the same.  The buzz and excitement of mingling with other startup types is great.  I wouldn't advocating going to too many (as where would you find time to work on your startup?) but every so often it's good.

Firstly, I got to pitch (always good to stay in the game).  And this time it was in front of total strangers as I didn't know anyone there.  Maybe that's a good thing in a way as there is no need to feel embarrassed?  I did chat to a few people before hand and then it was into the pitches.  I think there were around 20 and I was impressed with how well Brad from CSE handled everything.  It was 3 minutes per pitch and 1 minute changeover.  I was prepared FI style and had my USB key loaded with the PDF version of my slidedeck.  (I also took my Netbook and my Chromebook just in case!)  Brad kindly let me preload the PDF onto the machine which was in the room.  The pitch went well and what I was really pleased about was that people actually listened!  I did go slightly over my 3 minute allotment but I think everyone stole a bit of time from their 1 minute handover ;)

Secondly I got to listen to other people pitching.  I think doing FI you forget that there are other startups out there doing the same sort of thing.  But Brad was right... he suggested that we wear our shirts.  Because at the end of the pitching I had no idea who was which startup!  I did as he suggested and was wearing an Oddswop shirt up when speaking.  But I don't think I had that much trouble being remembered as I was the only female Founder speaking!  (There was a lady from General Assembly and an Intern for NSInnovations as well who spoke).  I knew there weren't very many female founders and it was a CSE event but still... 1 female!  *hmfp*

So other people are doing some innovative things.  Some businesses are inspirations in terms of growth or funding or pitching, some are great to laugh with, some are strange in the way they pitch but everyone was in someway interesting.  And most were in a similar stage where it was 'almost' launched.

Lastly, I got to mingle and network.  I really need to learn how to do it better so I get better coverage.  I am happy to chat to people but I'm useless at moving on to chat to someone else.  And I don't want to mercenary about trying to talk to more people but I'm just curious as to what other people are talking about and want to meet them.  So if someone has mastered the art of the 'next' IRL please let me know.

Friday 9 August 2013

My Start up Tools

I'm often advising others about tools I use and tools I've discovered so thought it may be worthwhile sharing the tools I use or have tried and like.

I'm sure I'll miss some but can always come and revisit this post (or add a part 2) at a later stage.

These tools are mainly cheap/free and suitable for startups and small businesses.  Also these are from an Australian point of view which may or may not make a difference!

Mailchimp for eDMs (electronic direct marketing) or newsletters and general email out.  There is a very generous free tier.
Google Apps -- I've had a Google Apps account (two actually!) back when it was free.  This is great as I can attach additional domains to it and create groups, aliases etc.  It is limited to 100 users max but at this stage I haven't hit that mark yet :)
Google Apps also comes with Google Drive which includes the suite of productivity tools aka Google Docs (found under Drive) including Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Form, Drawing.  There  additional tools you can add via the marketplace too (for a Visio type tool you can use Draw.io)
Waveapps for accounting.  Great for creating invoices and ability to upload receipts (there is even an iPhone app and soon an Android app to process receipts but I haven't tried it).  It doesn't do Australian payroll though.  The really cool thing with Waveapps is that it's free!
Kickofflabs -- I started with LaunchRock but there was some sort of bug in it that would make the page not render. Hard to justify keeping with LaunchRock if that is the case!  So I moved to Kickofflabs.  I use the tier which allows me up to 5 pages/5 domains.  I like how quick it is to alter and to use.  Their templates are good and they have a lot of integration with other tools such as Mailchimp.  I love the ability to easily add Google Analytics goals, facebook advertising tags etc without having to think where to put it in the code.  Their support is also fantastic (they use another tool I'll mention below UserVoice).
GoDaddy -- this is mainly for historic reasons and price. It's cheap and it's good for me to have all my domains in the same place.
LastPass -- I use this personally to store all my logins/passwords and for it to generate a secure password.  For a shared password list I'd recommend Passpack.
AWS -- we're using Amazon Web Services and although the console is confusing to navigate the suite of tools is pretty amazing.
SendGrid / Mandrill - both seem good for transactional emails.  Received some good support from SendGrid when initially setting things up to keep emails out of the spam folder!
Uservoice / Desk.com - there are a number of similar tools which allow you to provide a support queue and FAQs for your website.  I've used both Uservoice and Desk.com and they seem pretty similar to be honest.  I'm using Uservoice for my own startup... because I had a discount voucher :)
Pixlr - I use this for graphics with my limited ability to do things.

General every day tools...
Evernote for note taking although on my Chromebook I sometimes have to use Google Keep instead
Feedly and RSS feeds to keep up to date with all that's happening with what I'm interested in
Google (how the heck did anyone do anything before search engines existed?)
Dropbox for synchronising files and it backs up my photos from my phone automatically
Podcasts via Doubletwist so I can listen to This Week in Google and a couple of startup podcasts.
Some Apps on my (HTC One XL) phone:
Whatsapp for messaging although lately it's been a bit flakey and unreliable and I've gone back to normal text messages.
MightyText to type my sms messages on a real screen
Timeriffic - to adjust settings according to the time
Busyme - to stop the phone from ringing out loud when I'm in a meeting
CallTrack to record in my messages and calls into my Google calendar



Sunday 7 July 2013

Beta here we come!

We had a very exciting Friday when the latest release was put into an accessible environment and the new target to get the same release into a beta site is Monday or possibly Tuesday.

I had a play around with it and did some testing including on a friend's Windows 8 machine and I even resorted to using IE8.  It was a touch screen device so was an interesting experience as I tried a few things.  At this stage there is still a lot more testing to be done across browsers.  The intention is to do this via SauceLabs as well as 'real life' testing on different browser and machine combinations.  It's good that we are hoarders and can test on an XP machine, Windows 7, Chromebook, Mac and Android devices :)

Mark Toohey has also helped out a lot by putting together a draft Terms of Use for the site.  This is such a relief as I was struggling hard with the cobbling together of the Terms based on a 'template' service (LawLive?) and looking at other Terms from similar services.


Friday 28 June 2013

DNS Not so easy!

I was pondering today how any one else does this.  I was wearing many hats today and with Dave away I am wondering how anyone actually gets a tech start up done if they have no idea on the technical details.  I suppose that is why so many people need tech co founders.  Not that I think in this case Dave could have helped me out.  I could have asked Andre but I have some pride...

So the topic of the post is about DNS stuff and I'll get to that but I also wanted to reflect on the different tasks I did today.

I started this morning working on a side startup where I'm helping out with some tech.  That's kind of good in that it's inspirational for me to see other companies get there with their work.

On Oddswop I worked on booking in marketing for the launch, picked up some brochures, paid some invoices, worked on terms and conditions, had a look at some of my Founder Institute assignment work, did some admin on things like Mailchimp, Google Apps, reviewed Gumtree as a competitive product, tried some tools which won't work for me -- I was thinking of relisting some Gumtree ads on Oddswop to give it some extra content but I just condone it... , updated Sendgrid and then tried to review my domain names as I want to go live with the .au site.  I have my .au with a company in Australia and the bulk of my domains with Godaddy (just so I don't have to set up another account).  And now I wish I just put everything through Godaddy just to make it easier for myself.

I re-looked at using DNSMadeEasy as they have been emailing me reminding me that my trial will end in early July.  And I have been told it's better... and more redundant.  But I never did do anything about it other than type in a couple of domains I owned.  But after accidentally stuffing up the .au domain by trying to update the Google Apps account details I thought I better put some effort in moving at least that one across.  Wow!  I thought I was somewhat cluey.   But I had to do some research on my http redirect as I'm never sure if I 301 or 302 is the permanent redirect and what is a 'hard' URL?  I had to search about  ANAMEs (it's a DNSMadeEasy specific thing) and then I had to test it and being impatient and waiting for DNS changes sometimes isn't that easy and I end up going through dodgy proxy sites.   I find it amusing when I read the docs or watch the videos and I still have barely an idea what is going on.  Why can't they give real examples on how a company would likely use it rather than speak technobabble.  Sometimes technobabble needs Google translate too!

The other thing in the last couple of days is that I want to one of those Women Entrepreneur events.  Usually I try and avoid them as I am just not into that type of thing.  I think it's the lack of balance.  I am hardpressed to work out a time where I worked in a balanced or female oriented environment... so maybe I do like it unbalanced but not where there are no males in the room!  It was a Google Sudo event and they had Naomi Simson (RedBalloon) and Jo Burston.  Both were fantastic to listen to.  Not the American sort of "pow wow" type thing but genuine stories on what they did to get a start.  From Naomi's naive start to Jo's gutsy move to gain the attention of an experienced investor it's just great to hear.

I was so impressed I pushed myself to chat to Jo and thank her for her inspirational talk.  And lo and behold she is friends of Benjamin Chong's.  So I've got a coffee date with Jo... as long as I graduate from FI!  I've also asked for the Heads Over Heels program application form so I'll get that sorted too in the next week or so.

Wednesday 19 June 2013

Intermittent mutterings of a startup

When speaking with Tom Frazier yesterday (who is a Director of the Sydney chapter of Founder Institute) he suggested that I blog about my start up 'doings' beyond what Oddswop is doing.  So here goes nothing!  Yet another blog.  I know people do this for a living and blog a lot but as much as I like updating and being updated blogging is something that isn't that natural to me.

It'll be valuable as I can see what progress we have made as an organisation and how I've improved also in terms of what and  how I'm doing things.  So it could contain the innane things like my comment about testing out a standing desk (which is top of mind as I'm very aware of my standing rather than sitting - but at least I'm not slouching) or more serious stuff like agreeing to commissioning a Brick film for the explainer!  It'll be exciting but was more money that I'd rather not part with but I do think it'll be a break through.  I don't think I've seen a Brick explainer before (hmm after a quick google I only found an animated Lego explainer!

I should do a quick precis of where we are at...

Oddswop is in development with 73Robots (Andre use to work with me back in CompuServe days and is doing this as a reference job so paid but certainly more invested in this than any normal vendor would be!)
Development or at least the requirements documentation tarted in around March...

I signed up for Founder Institute again in March to give Oddswop the best chance it could have for getting off the ground and successful.

We've approached UNSW and UTS in different guises to see if we can test the market with them and use them as a target marketing market (ie concentrate marketing efforts on them).  Other target markets include parents and backpackers as well as ex-pats.

We coined the term "Oddspots" for the photo tagging side of things.  This was thanks to Garry Visontay who mentioned that we should think about coming up with our own term.  It didn't take long for "Oddspots" to come to me.  It will be "odd" as they aren't really spots but rather squares!

The plan is the launch in late July at UNSW.  Originally it was at o-week but I've been told that it's called "Welcome Back Day" and happens on 29 July.  Phew a few more days up our sleeves to get things right.

The best and latest development is that I emailed a few of my friends in powerful places within IT departments and asked them if they'd be interested in the whitelabel version of Oddswop for their corporate intranet.  This is where they would run a subdomain version of Oddswop and post to it which would share it with all their internal staff as well as the Oddswop community.  The thinking is that we'd run it as a Freemium model where they can have it for free if it's locked to share it to everyone in and out of their organisation but a paid for version could get rid of fees and / or allow posting only to the internal community.  We got our first expression of interest from Ticketek!!  So that was super exciting!

The other big recent news was access to the development server where I can now see the listing side of things!

I'll put musings for today on another listing.  Thank goodness there is the ability to email to this blog otherwise I don't think there is much of a chance of me keeping all the blogs up to date.