Archium

Yesterday I flicked the switch to open Archium's first service to the public.

I want to help teams working on distributed systems to understand their software architecture in a depth that's just not possible today. To start off with, I'm helping teams with distributed tracing in place (e.g. Zipkin or Jaeger) to get a set of comprehensive set of diagrams of their system.

If you work on a distributed system, please take a look. 👀 If you know someone who works on a distributed system, please pass it on. 📢

Some details:

• Website built with Carrd
• Google Analytics to track scrolling and form submission
• Advertising with sponsored content on LinkedIn and (soon) Twitter

38 days ago I wrote the first line of code for what will soon become Archium. Today I wrote the last line of the first MVP.

A couple of weeks into coding, I had an epiphany that I could do a much smaller MVP that what I'd originally planned. So, instead of building the first dodgy version of the product, I've built a slightly different but related product. It's much smaller and much simpler. It only provides a small slice of the value that I eventually hope to deliver, but it's taken me much less time. Rather than the SaaS product that I eventually want to make available, this is software that allows me to provide a semi-automated, one-time service, so instead of asking people to sign up to a subscription I'm just asking them to purchase something once.

This MVP is all about going from "People have told me they'll give me money if I help them solve this problem" to "People have actually given me a small amount of money for solving a small part of this problem".

While the coding is done, there's still a fair bit of work to be done before making the MVP ready to offer to people: sign-up forms, email templates, analytics, marketing plans. All stuff that's not (yet) in any of my areas of expertise.

Feeling excited now to push this across the line and into the world.

It took we quite a while to decide on the name for this product. I really love wordoids - brand names that are easily pronounced because they look like real words but in fact are made-up words. Instagram is a great example - not a real word, but there's no question how to say it (not for English speakers, anyway).

I spent hours using the fantastic tool wordoid.com. It generates wordoids for you, while offering heaps of control over what it's generating, AND shows you whether domain names are available for the generated words. Awesome!

The problems we'll be solving at Archium are related to software architecture, so I spent quite a while hunting for wordoids that related to architecture. Funnily enough, wordoid.com didn't suggest archium, but while I was reviewing all the other things it was spitting out, it popped into my head and the lightbulbs went off. I went googling for it and I found two things:

1. It's an actual word. It means 'archive' in latin, which may end up having some relevance to the product.

2. There's very little use of it on the internet. Certainly it wasn't a word that was already in use by a big brand. It's a word we can own online very quickly (which is a huge advantage of a wordoid as opposed to a common real word like Square).

A quick search of trademark databases in Australia and the U.S. turned up very little, and nothing in the related field. So it was set.

I grabbed the .io domain that was available, but other than that I sat on the name for a while, as I had no reason to incorporate or advertise, so I just kept it to myself. I didn't tell ANYONE outside my family. I trust my friends not to go stealing my product name, but you know... "loose lips sink ships".

Then one night I had an idea for a logo. I banged it out in Keynote fairly quickly, then showed my wife, expecting to get a "that's pretty daggy" response and subsequently throw it away and pay a designer.

Instead, she said, "Did you make that? It's really good!"

"Are you sure?" I said. "It's the first thing I thought of."

"It's good enough. Use it."

And that's a phrase I need to get used to using more as a founder: "It's good enough."

With the name and logo done, I felt it was time to get the ducks in a row. I incorporated a company, registered the trading name, submitted the name and the logo as trademarks, and claimed the org name on GitHub and LinkedIn. Unfortunately, the .com domain and the Twitter handle were already taken - I'll figure out what to do about that in the future.

With all that set, I thought it made sense to put something up for a website in case people go looking for it. At the moment, it's just a LaunchRock site on the cheapest plan. I'm not planning to drive traffic to it any time soon as most of my customer development will be happening offline for a while.

That's it so far. You can see the logo on http://archium.io/ - I'd love to know what you think! Sign up for updates there if you want to know more, or follow me on twitter at https://twitter.com/evolvable

P.S. It's pronounced AR-key-ehm, just like architecture