Today I visited Jeroen Meens, a fellow entrepreneur with whom I have always felt a close connection. In his office I saw this beautiful poster about the core values he instills on his company Cynex.
Click to see all 11 core values
At Wondergraphs we strongly share these values and I’ll add a page to our website that explains each in more detail. Thanks for the inspiration Jeroen.
So we closed our first customer. Several months before we had seen Eric Ries at SeedCamp give a talk about lean startup. Eric was hammering on getting your “build-measure-learn” cycle as short as possible: build something that demonstrates your concept, measures customers’ feedback, draw conclusions. Repeat.
We were the classic example of proud developers that would be ashamed to show something that we didn’t think was great. Between our prototype and our first customer was a year where we had worked in complete isolation from our customers. Not smart. Dangerous.
Our ears were our main measurement tool, and we had to learn to use them. Here’s an example: All the time our first customer was speaking of “reporting”. I figured “she doesn’t understand that our software is primarily about analytics”. After she said “reporting” one time too many I finally accepted, and learned “She’s right! You could call this reporting.” So we built a slightly different vision and path for Wondergraphs (Eric calls it a micro-pivot). And we noticed that our new balance between analytics and reporting resonated.
We stayed in “measure and learn” mode for months, then moved the needle forward again to “build”. We knew the good and the bad, but would our new solutions improve Wondergraphs? We wanted to design a simple mock-up and walk through it with customers right away but (surprise!) they have their own jobs too. (After 8 weeks we got a well-intended feedback meeting which wasn’t that helpful. The best feedback came with real use several months later.)
Our holy grail of build-measure-learn cycles of days or less is still a holy grail. But we’re getting closer.
Two weeks ago we quietly launched on the Google Apps Marketplace and last week we officially launched our Software-as-a-Service platform with an article on TechCrunch. In a couple of days almost 11,000 data fans came by to visit and over 1,100 signed up. Many of you gave us a kind tweet or emailed us with congratulations. If happiness was a rainbow, Team Wondergraphs would be covered in colors!
While we work on improving several features (like our data import, date categories and number categories) our API and embeddable objects are our focus in the next month. Many developers and potential partners reached out to make Wondergraphs part of their application and we want to make sure you can. Our API is in private beta and we encourage you to contact us if you’d like to know more! In a few weeks you can expect more information.
Part III of our Road to Google Apps is next.
With Wondergraphs’ Google Apps Marketplace launch last week, I’m sharing how we got from idea to product. You can read part 1 here.
So we decided to go for it. First, a name for our product and company. One that hints at our focus on visual business analytics and explains what we do in a playful manner. Again we drew inspiration from Buzzword and SlideRocket. Wondergraphs was born.
Our goal was to implement a minimum viable product. A focused, barebones product. Determining “minimum viable” was difficult. Our main guidance was my understanding of the problem and though that’s a good start, we would have moved faster if we had put our prototype online and engaged with potential customers immediately. The value of feedback is worth much more than staying under the radar and keeping ideas to yourself.
We’ve come a long way…
One year later we had enough working product to kick-start our business with a tiny highly targeted video marketing campaign. We also applied for Seedcamp and were among the lucky few selected for an intense week of mentoring in London and a tour in the US. (More on Seedcamp and why every European web start-up should apply in a separate post.)
Several months after our marketing campaign a prospect called. She loved the video. ”This is exactly what we need. Is your service commercially available?”. Two meetings later we sold 40 subscriptions and our first customer was a fact. It turned out that our tiny two person company had just eaten some big boy’s lunch! We were growing into a business and it felt fantastic.
Next week I’ll write about what we learned from our first customers.
With Wondergraphs freshly launched on the Google Apps Marketplace, I thought I’d share how we got from idea to product and how our integration with Google Apps marks the start of an exciting new phase in our company’s life.
Our road started with frustration really. I built web applications and my customers always wanted to analyze and report on their data online within the application. The custom solutions I built were always limited so my customers always ended up downloading the data into some analysis software or Excel, or asking me to analyze the data for them. Frustrating for them, frustrating for me.
I had been trying all kinds of ideas that would enable my customers to explore their data online themselves and the low-point of my experimentation was probably a horrendous attempt with a random walk component.
Example random walk explorer
In 2007 Kim and I started working together and we set out to try yet another concept this time with drag and drop. We plugged it into a web-application that we had just sold and at a local conference the response was great.
One person (no doubt a genius with tremendous foresight) compared us to Apple!
At the same time we were inspired by gorgeous online services like Picnik, Sliderocket and Wufoo, services at the forefront of web innovation with a clear value proposition. Wouldn’t it be great if we could create a service like that for business analytics?
Market research revealed competition in yesteryear’s world of technology, user experience and business models. No direct online competition though some emerging players that seemed to be on to something.
That’s when hearts start beating faster. A great idea. Market opportunity. Two guys with passion, determination and skill. We decided to go for it.
Next time I’ll share how we went from “Let’s do this” to our first customer.
It may look pretty much the same, but what you’re looking at right now is a completely rebuilt Wondergraphs website. Expect news, tips/tricks and some very exciting announcements on this blog soon!
