Crossing the start line

It’s been a busy few days, sorry to everyone who’s contacted me and that I’ve not replied to.

I’m glad we’ve managed to do what a surprising number of “start-ups” fail at — starting. As you’d expect, traffic to our site spike after the TechCrunch article, and stayed pretty high for a day or two. I don’t know exactly how many uniques, but probably between 10 and 20 thousand, and we’re converting about 10% into users. We seem to be getting a second wind at the moment, as word spreads out.

We’re hosting on EC2, with a cool scaling agent / database caching proxy doo-dah to help us grow in the future. The guys that are developing the aforementioned agent / proxy doo-dah are actually staying with us in Pat’s house, which was really handy when it fell over in a heap at 4am on Sunday morning. Back up and running pretty quickly, although we’ve had brief outages pretty often as we’ve been patching like mad.

For those of you that have signed up, you may have noticed that search is a bit crap at the moment. I’ve spent the last couple of days wrestling with the python bindings for Lucene before facing up to the fact that hand-patched experimental code of alpha products is not good enough for production. So, just scrapped all that nonsense and tomorrow I’ll be moving over to use Solr via JSON. Hot replication and distributed indexing all for free like beer and speech.

Launch!!

WebMynd has launched: on TechCrunch

We told Paul (from YCombinator, aka the Secret Program) about it at 10pm last night and it went live on TechCrunch a bit faster than we were expecting!!

If you’re using Firefox, try it out here: http://www.webmynd.com

TELL EVERYONE!

Um, more hard work..

So, we’ve got the product far along enough to release for alpha testing now. We’re going to send out emails to people who might be interested in trying it – let me know if I miss you out! To use it you need to be a) using Firefox b) tolerant of intermittent service and random data loss c) 1337.

I won’t go into it in any detail as to what it does here, but suffice it to say that it has several buttons, two (2) scrollbars and a stealth mode. At the moment it’s pretty feature sparse, but quite fun to use and maybe even useful every once in a while.

New foods:

• Oreos – “milk’s favorite biscuit”. In general, American biscuits and cookies are a bit crap; hard, brittle and crumbly. Oreos’ key differentiator is they happen to, heck – they are DESIGNED TO, complement milk dipping. Creamy.
• Also, been eating loads of cheese. We’ve learnt that staying late at the secret program events means we get to leave with the cheese. Lots of Brie, Stilton, Emmental and smoked cheddar. As a food; not old, not new, but arguably borrowed and blue.
• French toast. Similar to the eggy bread that mummy used to make when I had the collywobbles. The American version differs in that you toast the toast, butter the toast, fry them in butter then serve it with maple syrup. And butter, obviously.

Hard work

We’re fully set up for working at Pat’s place now, having been sat at the kitchen table or on the sofa up until now. Mark and Pat cleared out a load of stuff in the garage and after a re-arrange and installation of some heaters it’s a nice and quiet place to get stuff done, although it can still get a bit nippy sometimes.

Work’s going really well – over the last two weeks we’ve gone from pretty much a cold start to teetering on the edge of having something we can show to other people. It’s still ropey and I’ll be really embarased for anyone to see it, but They say that if you aren’t mortified by your own product then you’ve launched too late…

If we get something out there (for limited testing) by Tuesday, out of all the teams on the secret program, we will have started last and finished first. I’m very good at that.

To treat ourselves for all this hard work, we left the house for a reason other than food – the first time since we arrived. We drove down to the Marina District, by the bay on the north side of the San Francisco. It’s the area where they filmed that car chase from Bullitt, and Pat’s car was straining a bit going up the slopes carrying 5 burly computer ninjas.

We went down to the bay with a nice view of the Golden Gate Bridge – I was disappointed to find out only really lives up to a third of its name – and chucked a frisbee about. Obviously, I got the frisbee stuck in a tree, but combined pine cone-throwing efforts saved the day.

New food:

• Jamba Juice fruit smoothies – awesome
• Odwalla Superfood Micronutrient Fruit Juice Drink – looks like pond scum but tastes like the sun rising over a golden meadow on a crisp summer’s morning
• Eggs in the hole – ‘the hole’ is a bored piece of bread, into which you drop an egg
• American bacon – basically, the offcuts of English bacon, burnt to a crisp

Up and running

Nearly a week in and things are going really well. We’ve spent the last few days brainstorming, prototyping and eating lots.

Pat’s helped us tick quite a few culinary boxes so far – I’m going to try and keep track of my new tongue-tingling taste adventures here. This week, I have been mostly eating:

• Burritos (al Pastor and carnitas style) – soft, thin wrap filled with diced meat, rice, guacamole, salsa, refried beans. Delicious, and not causing me any problems so far.
• Tamales (pork and beef) – steamed corn dough parcels filled with shredded meat and thick gravy. Not as good as burritos.
• Nachos like you’ve never seen before – actual deep-fried tortilla with spicy guacamole, sour cream, salsa, mince, cheese, …
• Mac and cheese – macaroni and cheese, but made from a packet. We’re on a budget.
• In-N-Out Burger – much, much better than the name suggests. The best takeaway burger I’ve ever had, and the “4×4 animal style” is four patties, eight slices of cheese plus extra fried onions.

I’m not sure what this diet is doing to me – I went to the gym with Pat yesterday and felt so rough I had to have a sit down after trying to bench the imperial equivalent of a litter of piglets.

On the work front, Justin and Mark (co-founders of another startup) are joining us in Pat’s house, staying in the flat downstairs, which is great as we’ll spur each other on and they’re good guys as well. Of the five of us, four are English and all of us went to Cambridge.

We just got back from Mountain View (the secret program we’re on is based here), where we had the first of our weekly Tuesday night dinners with all the other founders, investors and external guests. It was good fun and we’re all the more focussed and determined after hearing all the advice from previous years’ alums

The recommendation from all sides is to work as hard as you can manage for as long as you can take, so our provisional plans for a skiing trip up to Lake Tahoe this weekend have gone out the window. Power naps and regular tea breaks are this man’s secret weapons.

I’ve arrived!

An eventful couple of days…

I started the New Year with a house full of stuff, rooms which needed cleaning and bags that needed packing. By 1:30am on the 2nd, I had an empty, clean house and bags full of clothes and tea. At 3:30am I got up to go to Heathrow, where I met Amir and his wife, Kirsty, as planned.

Queuing to check-in, we were told that the flight had been overbooked, and would we consider being bumped in return for $1000 flight vouchers. We had nothing planned to do in SF, so we took the deal, ending up on a flight 20 minutes later, with a free upgrade to business class. Breakfast was champagne and lunch was filet mignon.

The stopover in Chicago was pretty uneventful, but the red carpet lounge was nice, with a subsidised bar…

Pat came to pick us up at San Francisco International to make the 10 minute drive to his place in the Mission district. The house is great – really nice old style to it, and full of gorgeous aged oak furniture which Pat seems to find in dumpsters.

After having some tea and a bite to eat, and saying hello to Emilie (his girlfriend) and Henley (his dog, named after the regatta), we headed out to walk round the block and have a couple of drinks in Jay’n'Bee, the local bar.