Wraply - one month in
It's now been a month since Wraply was piloted at the Launch48 weekend.
Behind the scenes the Wraply team has been busy, and we're very nearly ready to unveil the fruits of our labours. Here's what we've been up to:
- Recruiting the founding team, and deciding on our roles and way of working
- Arranging offices for Wraply HQ
- Setting up the limited company
- Opening a bank account
- Setting up business Paypal account
- Getting legal agreements in place
- Setting up accounts with suppliers
- Designing the site from the ground up:
- Writing user stories (the features for our users)
- Deciding on what will be in the first release (after 3 iterations)
- Being really strict about making the first release very basic - the minimum viable product in Agile terms
- Designing wireframes - the rough layouts of the site
- Development decisions, including the server setup and the framework to develop on. After considering a number of options we went for the Kohana framework, running on an Ubuntu/Nginx/PHP server. We decided on Drupal for some non-core parts of the site, such as this blog and our media centre.
- Designing the data model - how data will be structured and handled in our system
- Graphic design of the site
- Building the site:
- Configuring the server - a lot of optimisation has been done
- Setting up a distributed version control system, enabling a number of people to work on the code separately and track all the changes. We opted for Git
- Setting up the codebase
- Developing the controllers - the code that runs the site. Although this is just one line here, this is one of the most lengthy and difficult parts of building the site. Iman worked very long hours on this.
- Developing the views - what is displayed by the site, based on the wireframe designs developed by Kay and Trenton
- Adding some javascript goodness to improve the user experience
- Applying the graphic designs to the site
- Testing!
- Planning the marketing:
- We worked out some key decisions around our brand, specifically what our brand values are - what we stand for, and how we want to be seen.
- Kerry did a lot of research into what our target customers are searching for when it comes to gifts, to give us a clear picture of what content we need to develop for the site. She also gave others in the team a training session into how to do this
- We launched our Media Centre to provide press releases and background resources to media contacts
- We developed a media plan, deciding which outlets our target audience reads, watches and listens to, and which we should target initially
- We looked at social media options, and planned our use of this communications channel
- We launched this blog to provide another way of connecting with the outside world
So all this is done (or nearly done!) and we're preparing to launch. But our first release is going to be done quite quietly, without much fanfare, to allow us to see how things go with live users.
We'll then be doing extensive user testing, and watching how the site performs with real live users, before making a second release - and that's when we'll begin to tell the world about it.
Challenges
Of course, the path to a site (and a business) launch never goes smoothly and there have been a fair few challenges to overcome.
At first, the process of bringing the right core team together after the launch48 weekend was more difficult than it should have been, but ended well - with a great Wraply team, and also another great team formed from the other participants from launch48 who are going to develop their own project separately.
Then, once we were up and running, the challenge was to keep good communication going - especially as people were doing this in their spare time, and working from home. Communication within a team that's working remotely is always more difficult - so we used a couple of key tools to keep in touch. We have a specialist team site that has our private team blog, a docments area, and most importantly the project management system that tracks all our tasks, user stories (features) etc in each iteration, and working towards each release. We also use Yammer (a kind of private twitter for the company) for short updates and Skype for conference calls.
Then, just a week before our planned release date, one of our developers had to travel back to India at short notice for a few weeks for family reasons. So we extended the release by a further week, and other members of the team helped out our lead developer, Iman. Zeshan ended up doing some server management, and I did some frontend work - taking the designs from Trenton and Kay and applying them to the site. This involved a bit of a learning curve with Kohana, and also with javascript. But in a startup everyone has to get involved with everything and it was actually a great experience.
Resisting Perfectionism
The temptation is not to release anything until you feel it's perfect - and the key to succeeding as a start-up is to resist this and get your product out there as early as possible to start testing with real users. Only that way can you truly understand what they want, and how they expect to use the site.
So the challenge for Zeshan, who is leading our team in this phase, has been to keep us all moving towards an early release even though our natural instinct is to wait until our site is more polished. In his weekly team update email last week he gave a great quote about this:
Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn had a great quote about this: "If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late."
I think this is very true. And actually, although you may be embarrased, your customers don't know what little features and tweaks you pushed back to later releases in planning in order to get to a minimum viable product specification for Release 1.
On my personal blog I'd previously written an article about Twitter, and showed some images of how their site evolved from what was actually a really rough and ready first release: http://www.steveparks.co.uk/blog/steve_parks/twitter_and_evolution_busin...
So when we launch the site it will be basic, but it'll be only 5 weeks since we started work on the idea - and a second release will be hot on its heels, and a third release, and fourth release and so on. We have some fantastic features planned for future releases, but the first release is just about getting the core functionality live.
A start-up wins advantage by moving fast and embracing constant change. That's just what we plan to do at Wraply.