In our early days of my startup , I would try to enter as many pitch competitions as was feasible, just to try and get our project in front of as many eyes as possible and get our names mentioned in the popular startup press. I used to give everything in these competitions, and we were finalists in several, including the prestigious Australia Post Pitchfest even in 2017. These competitions were…
Our very earliest marketing copy for our HR SaaS was “Replace your spreadsheet nightmare with a nice clean HR database…” We thought it was a cute and quirky tagline, and that it would immediately relatable to our target audience of business and human resource managers. After all - who love working on large spreadsheets with thousands of rows, tabs and formulas? Well, as it turns out - LOTS of…
A recent conversation on Twitter with a colleague has reminded of this dilemma that we faced in our early days of launching my SaaS . You see, In 25 years of consulting to small businesses, I had learned that business owners and managers were faced with the challenge of recording and maintaining a LOT of information about their staff. Things would often get forgotten or lost, being recorded on…
So, last week I got removed from one of my company’s Slack channels… and it was probably the best thing that could have happened for me, and my company. You see, like most companies, we have ‘global’ chat channels that everyone participates in, plus each team has distinct channels usually for just those team members to discuss operational matters. Some of our company Slack channels Our Customer…
I could only avoid AI in my startup for so long before I actually found a use for it… How I used ChatGPT to make the life of my support team easier.
Photo by Sergiu Nista on Unsplash We’ve noticed a disturbing trend here at our startup in the past 12 months or so. We’ve been growing and adding new team members, and almost without fail, almost all our new starters are getting hit with a scam email within a few days of starting at our company. Here is one such example: As you can see, the email appears to come from me, and is asking our team…
Like most families, we like to start the new year with a bit of a clean slate, which means moving on old pieces of furniture and belongings that are just cluttering our life and no longer needed. But this is a surprisingly difficult task. Almost every time we go to get rid of a major piece of furniture, we stop and look at all the emotional and social connections that are still attached to it. For…
Photo by Dan Nelson on Unsplash I guess one of the downsides of the rising popularity and profile of our HR startup is that it attracts the lowest online lifeforms to try and see if they can make illicit profit from it. We have been getting the occasional trial user signing up and subscribing to our lowest plan, then posting fake job ads in the hopes of harvesting applicant email addresses, or…
I was having pre-Christmas lunch with Paul*, one of my best friends from middle school a couple of weeks back. However, as soon as he sat down at our table and I asked him how he was, he surprisingly announced that he would be closing his business at the end of the year. I was taken aback to hear this news. Paul was in his mid fifties like me, and had been running a really successful tree lopping…
It’s been two days now since I stayed up late to watch the final race of the F1 season in Abu Dhabi with my sons. Full disclosure, we are all team Hamilton fans here, and were excited to watch the final deciding race as to who would take out the 2021 World Driver’s Championship. But now, days later, I am struggling to articulate my feelings about the events of the final 5 laps of the race. I am…
I was digging through a cupboard today, when I came across the package shown below. I was initially flabbergasted that I still had a copy on hand, but that soon gave way to feelings of nostalgia that took me back 30 years (yes, that is 3 decades) to when I first created this. It is basically the first time I had “scratched my own itch”. Being a commercial pilot at the time, I was finding paper…
Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash I was listening to Arvid Kahl’s latest podcast episode on my morning walk today, where he talked about Facebook’s recent 6 hour outage, and how you can ‘judo’ negative things like server downtime into a positive outcome. As a former student of the martial arts, I love that term. Judo is all about using your opponents strengths and turning them into a weakness in…
The screenshot here is our company Trello board, where we manage our product roadmap. We are extremely lucky in that our thousands of happy customers give us a steady stream of suggestions for new features and improvements, which we used to just throw on this board. However, that soon lead to stagnation, and I would become paralysed with indecision whenever I looked at the board. It all seemed too…
Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash This is probably an out of date concept these days, however if you ever ran a traditional business back in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s as I did, one of the most frustrating things ever was trying to get my banking done over the counter. Almost all businesses have to have cash floats, or make deposits etc. to ensure cashflow stays strong, or perhaps talk to a…
Many years ago, back in the late 80’s, one of my first big development contracts was to create a database for NAALAS - the North Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service (no longer around). Basically, this organisation provided legal assistance for Aboriginal people to help them through the quagmire that is the Australian legal system. The database I would design would be a case management and…
Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash Character is like toothpaste - it really only comes out under pressure (unknown) I don’t know where I first heard the above quote, but the events of the last week have really shown how true this saying is. I will start by saying that I have been an interested (but not rabid) fan of the journey that Jason Fried and DHH have been, building their startup called Basecamp .…
Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash Frequently, when we finish a demo session of our HR app , customers will tell us “Wow, that was a great demo!” when signing off. I never really thought about it, other than the fact that I usually had a good time showing them around, and that I was glad they enjoyed it too. But then this past week, I have been on the opposite end of the stick, as my co-founder…
I got an email earlier this week from a guy reaching out after he read a post of mine on a gaming forum that was posted over two decades ago ! I couldn't for the life of me remember what I had said, but he reiterated that it was about a simulation that I wrote in BASIC that was a replica of the WOPR computer from the movie "War Games". All my old code was stored on floppy disks and ZIP drives, and…
Photo by Caspar Camille Rubin on Unsplash I love dashboards, and I run several on my system to monitor my HR startup in real time. I love collecting data points around subscriptions, user activity, and most importantly, server uptime and performance. Especially now that we are growing to thousands of customers and tens of thousands of employees using our system on a daily basis, I am finding that…
I feel kind of conflicted writing this, because 2020 was a horror of a year for most people around the world. Instead, for me, and my family, it was somewhat of a start of new beginnings and some huge wins. I feel that I have finally stepped out of a decade long black tunnel, and I can finally see the light ahead. You see, back in 2009, I lost my dad, and my wife lost her mum. For us, each losing…