December meeting notes

Mike Gowen from Molehill talked about how they built their application, Tick, and shared some valuable tips. Here are some quick notes:

• Tick took a team of 4 people 9 months to build, from concept to beta. The team met for 2 hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays and 4 hours on Saturdays.The rest of the time they collaborated using Campfire (persistent chat), Skype (VoIP) and Tick, once they had a working app.

• The objective was to build a superior time-tracking tool that would integrate well with other project management and invoicing tools. So Tick can be used as a standalone product or can be used seamlessly (through API’s) with Basecamp (project management) and Blinksale (invoicing). The data can also be exported to csv.

• They adhered to many of the principles that 37signals describes in Getting Real: Build Less, Fund Yourself, It Shouldn’t be a Chore, What’s the Big Idea, Ignore Details Early On, Be Yourself, and so on. (See Molehill’s Mantra).

• They have a freemium business model, where the basic product is available indefinitely for free to all and additional, premium features and added value services are priced, in their case, at a monthly recurring fee.

• There is no ad spend. Marketing is done by providing a superior product, capitalizing on the word of mouth generated by satisfied users and using a regular ‘old-skool’ sales technique to reach corporate clients: pick up the phone and call them.

• Early on, the team talked about equity stakes and got it on paper, even though company valuation is tricky to evaluate and an exit strategy is not the primary objective.

Overall, we had a great Refresh Miami meeting and we thank Kim Grinfender, Sanjeev Chatterjee and the University of Miami’s School of Communications for hosting us.

Update: Thanks, Kim, Monica, Nick, and Xavier, among others, for linking and talking about this event.

powered by performancing firefox

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 5th, 2006 at 9:12 am and is filed under Site News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.