Mutant

We've just finished the first version of the Mutant website and we're very excited to share it with you and get your feedback - https://getmutant.com

Mutant is an issue tracking board. The kink is that it collects and brings metrics inside each user story. Our main objective is to get usage data in your face as fast as possible and help you develop an extra sense about how people use your product.

It's still glue-stitching season - we developed enough of Mutant so that we can use it ourselves to help us build Mutant. So we know for sure now that other small teams can benefit from it, too.

While the whole on-boarding process is not finished yet, if you want to give it a try, just drop your email on the website and we'll manually setup your account.

Thank you and hope to hear from you.

We went through YC's Startup School and felt we are in the right place: focus on work, talking to users, no fuss, no time wasted.

The thing we felt contributed most to our evolution as a product was the weekly chat with fellow founders. After every session we felt more comfortable talking about the product, gained new insights about what people understand / or not. We had a lot of feedback coming our way, and a few teams that would love to use our product as soon as we launch. Here's our company page https://www.startupschool.org/companies/mutant

At the end of the program we applied to YC. We look up to them for a long time and we would love to be part of their program, as it would put us in the best position possible to actually build a new-generation task board, one that can actually help tech products more than post-its.

The code-name for our product was asd14.xyz. Needless to say, I was not happy with it. So I started searching for a name that reflected what our board stands for - data-awareness, product planning and development, trial and error, rapid iteration. It wasn't easy, and I know it may seem a waste of time before actually launching. BUT I really believed that a good name would give us a sense of identity.

I used https://deepnamer.com/ a lot to combine words and check their availability as a domain, I highly recommend it. I even offered for an user interview for them, this is how much I appreciated their product.

Then I found a simple word that we all loved: Mutant. We really liked how it transmits the survival of the fittest idea & evolution of the weird, which is so essential in a product's lifecycle. I also instantly thought of a logo - please check it at https://getmutant.com

While in the 4th or 5th week of YC School, @IrinaC joined.

We've worked together before back in Romania and co-founded We Are Here in 2013, a crowdfunding platform for creatives. I would not start anything without her.

She was working at a startup who was riding the GDPR wave (encrypted layer over Microsoft Exchange and some other EU nonsense). Pretty happy, she started as Designer, got to Product Owner and then Product Manager.

In the end, I won. With my charm and well mannered jokes I managed to convince her that all of the people are wrong and we're right and we need to do something about it.

Had a few months of personal runway so I quit my job. I just wanted to work on it. If I didn't get anywhere in 2 months I would stop.

Went to a local incubator program thinking that it's better to work with a framework around me that not. It turned out that I can better manage noise reduction, research/coding/user interview time myself than an incubator that takes place in a co-working space.

Finally enrolled into YC Startup School. I've been and seen incubator programs here in Amsterdam, back home in Bucharest/Romania and all sorts of online programs. Nothing compares to the honesty and simplicity of YC Startup School.

At this point most startups are doing agile this and that: continuous integration/delivery, stand-ups, retrospectives, developers splitting their own stories, estimations using underwear sizes and whatnot.

We get that adaptation and small improvements are the way to go with regards to technical things but when it comes to product decisions we're still top-down.

Here are some guesses/hypotheses that I'm building on:

• Right now we're driving a car with the fuel gauge in the trunk. We stop from time to time and look at it. The measurement and tracking is siloed to the data team, PO or worse to a Release Manager.
• If planning would be more linked to tracking, in the same way writing tests is to writing code, it would be easy for teams to set and track success metrics on a more granular level (say user story). The hole development team will have an extra sense of how the environment reacts to their application changes. If we would write tests with the same frequency we look at analytics now, it would be just overhead and mostly useless.
• Since we're into analogies, an architect does the planning for a house and the builder builds. But the builder doesn't build all the walls to see if the house looks like the picture. He measures often: is it a right angle, is the height correct, are the bricks aligned, etc. This measuring habit should be in the fabric of day to day activities in a tech team and decisions should be made just like "if it hurts, do it often" in DevOps world.

This is not to say that we should just mindlessly iterate based on what the user says and does.
The FOUNDER needs to set the direction where the product is headed. He or she needs to point in the right direction, explain why and what the team is working for. But when it comes to decisions along the way, the team should decide based on the environment (users' behavior).

It's better to throw a ball in the blackness of uncertainty and see if it comes back than going right for it.