Flow Mobile Surveying
The Fastest Surveying App for iOS and Android
When Paul and I started this venture, I made it clear that I wanted to build a "lifestyle business". I was naive to use that term.
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” — Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride
Ultimately "lifestyle business" means minimising the amount of work you do. But... I love work. I love working on the product and engineering. I love working on the systems that make up the wider business. It's thrilling.
After a lot of thought I've come to realise I was really thinking about company culture. I actually want to optimise for happiness. Not just me and my family, but our customers and employees too. How can we build a business that makes the most people the most happy?
Paul and I chat about this a lot and it's quickly becoming an important pillar for our business:
- Customer service is vital
- Our product should be beautiful - despite the "dull" vertical
- Work-Life balance is important
- Employees should be rewarded for owning their role
PS: A quick overview of things that have happened in the last year+:
- We hit $12k / mo - we're profitable
- We made our first hire - an old friend
- After trying new verticals, we niched-down in Asbestos
...continued from previous post...
After a brief development period, we reached out to my existing network in the Asbestos world. Ex-employees of Lucion Environmental. We had some very warm leads:
- A single-user in London
- A 4-user company in New Zealand
- A 140-user outfit in the UK
We closed the "onner" on March 19 (our first "real" customer!), then the 4-seats a month or so later. They've since grown to a 9-seats team! As for the 140? We're still talking.
Long story short, we pivoted into a technically less thrilling area, but the thrill of real customers overshadows any coding fun!
I'm writing this retrospectively in March 2021.
While building the FlowVRP product, we felt we had a good product. In reality, we were entering a crowded market where we had very little domain knowledge.
Meanwhile, we'd been hustling with freelance work. This is where things start to get interesting. My background is actually Asbestos. Specifically in creating in-house software for the UK's largest Asbestos consultancy, Lucion Environmental. Off the back of this work, I've a strangely niche reputation. To cut a long story short: another up-and-coming consultancy wanted the same service from me. We took their money and built a product. Meanwhile, we started looking for other asbestos surveyors that might want our services. They did.
So, my brother and I had a very uncomfortable conversation with our client - "we want to make a product out of this work" - we agreed to give them 2 years use, for free, while we made our SAAS product.
...read the next post ^ for more...
Last months landing-page update was hasty, but a big improvement.
We have taken the next step - I've optimised the site for inbound links. It now scores very well on the conventional tests (95% on Lighthouse, A+ on Pingdom etc.).
The site has gone from 2 landing pages to 17, and I've got another 64 pages under "draft". Ultimately we're looking for long-tail keywords by writing about the different industries we can serve, and also giving some decent information about each of our individual features.
Tech-wise I'm using the Hugo Static-Site-Generator - I've used it for my personal blog before. It's fantastic.
We've just released v2 of the landing-page. Overall it was an exercise in branding and removing things:
- Created a simple logo and color scheme
- Removed about-us, in a nutshell, request a demo (the same CTA is throughout)
- Simplified the main strapline
- Removed the pricing (call us to chat!)
- Simplified the value-calculator to only show the value, and not the cost
I think the biggest change here is to remove our pricing. We've realised that pricing is always negotiable. Ultimately we were unsure just how to position ourselves, so want customer conversations to help lead this.
http://flowvrp.com
http://flowvrp.com/value-calculator.html
#landing-page-feedback
Sharing my OKR as someone who is just starting on sales...
My current Objective is to hit £1k MRR by 1 April 2019. This means I must hustle for my first few customers. Sales and marketing is completely new to me, but I'm feeling confident.
After reading Traction, I have picked "outbound email" as my sales channel.
Assuming each sale is worth £200 MRR I know that I need 5 customers. I am working 3-days per week, giving me 28 working days to my deadline. These facts makes it easy to add some Key Results to my Objective:
1 - Send 100 cold emails per day = 2,800 emails in total
2 - Convert 0.2 % to sales = 0.2% of 2800 = 5.6 sales
I've spent the last couple of days working on a sales video that I will send in my outbound emails. Originally I thought I'd do this in multiple takes
I had some great feedback from the IH community about my initial video and have taken it all into account. One of which was that I spent a lot of time chatting without actually demonstrating the interface, and that I should be JUST a talking head. Well, VidYard doesn't have that feature, so I ended up writing my own webcam overlay UI. I think it's pretty neat :D
It's worth noting that the product is truly an MVP as I have no auth, billing, landing page... actually no backend at all! It's just what you see on the video!
Today I settled on a name and a domain. It's actually been called FlowVRP from day-1 - but some part of me thought this wasn't good enough to use as a product name. Today I realised that it really doesn't matter too much, after all I can rename it in the future if it causes a problem.
How did the name come around? Well, I've been using "Flow" in all my pet projects for some time - and VRP simple means "Vehicle Routing Problem". Ie: the specific class of problem that the product addresses.
During my time at Accredible, I created a great little component for importing spreadsheets into the system. It was heavily based on the MailChimp UI, whereby after uploading your spreadsheet you would then map the columns of your sheet to the data-points of the system. If you've ever used MailChimp you'll be familiar with the UI. For Accredible, this interface complimented their Master/Detail view where you could CRUD individual objects.
With FlowVRP I have decided that this interface will be the only way you can get data into the system. Certainly for the MVP. The decision means that I can do without a tonne of UI elements for managing data. Tables of data with filters, searches, pagination and actions such as create, update and delete - all replaced with a single component.
The UI works really well, I'm feeling pretty smug!
EDIT: Here's a video
https://share.vidyard.com/watch/eXPrLrox1zhiWbiGsyQnMn
The Vehicle-Routing-Problem is a classic NP-Hard problem - as the complexity of your problem increases, the time it takes to solve grows exponentially. Adding one more destination, or one more vehicle can 10x the computing cost to solve!
While modern computing techniques such as machine-learning can't sidestep this immutable fact, they go a long way to increase the likelyhood of finding very good solutions quickly.
Over the Christmas period I have created my API. It's the product of many months (years?) of research, reading and thought. The kernel of Flow VRP is alive. Having this in place so quickly means that I can focus on making a fantastic user-interface and gives me incredible velocity.
Next up, UI!
4 Comments
Hey David, congrats on the growth. Agreed on the customer service parr! ive seen a few other companies tackle it different ways, but was curious how you plan on doing it.
For product (my main area) the key has been to create new features... but make them hidden from our users. This means that:
on behalf of our customers
These conversations and feedback loops keep everyone happy. Product can do rough-and-ready features without fear of reproach, customers feel listened to, our team are all contributing to the company.
Through this approach our company has (by necessity) become high-touch. It also means that the user experience is fantastic as it's driven by human interaction rather than the usual. It won't scale in its current form, but that's fine for now.
That sounds genius, seems like you are on the right track! I am looking forward to following up with you in a few months.
Yeah, that'll be about how long before I post another update ;)