It is difficult to admit, but Gridspy is not yet complete. The physical prototypes of our new Radio device are not yet manufactured and much of the software is yet to be written. That has not stopped me from putting on my sales-person hat and describing Gridspy as a complete system. We know that everything will be finished running and ready for deployment in January or February next year, but it is not ready today.
Sitting down to develop new features for Gridspy is a real pleasure, but it has recently become a rare one. Marketing has quickly become essential to gather feedback from our clients and secure pre-orders. Trust me, there is no time-sink like marketing. Hours flash by as careful email dialogue takes place, meetings are arranged and executed, and promotional materials created. I started to forget how great it is to sit down and code for hours straight and my late hours quickly caught up with me.
Of course the marketing is a requirement and has had may benefits, not least the continuing refining of the product upon hearing client feedback. However, all of this takes time and our to-do list is now longer than our features list. Like any great product, there will always be something new to add. The pragmatic thing to do is to get out there and sell what we have now with an eye to the future. What we do have is our wired device (we call it Nexus) which is already installed and running in a couple of locations. But of course we want to have more, and we want to have it now!
Unfortunately we are not sitting on piles of cash just yet that would fund long uninterrupted hours of development. Without angel funding or a huge savings account to raid, I’ve continued my full-time programming job and am moonlighting for Gridspy. An average evening for me runs like this: cycle home after a long day as an employee, put the kids to sleep, talk to the wife and cram some dinner down, and then put in around 4 hours of work on Gridspy before crashing into bed. In that 4 hours I have to housekeep general operations, publicise, secure sales, and oh-yeah, develop the product! I also work as much of the day and night as I can on Sunday, leaving only Saturday for time-out with the family. Stephen isn’t moonlighting right now, but will probably have too soon. Here’s hoping that we can begin securing regular sales and devote all our time to development for some old fashioned bootstrapping.
When you are a software developer in a large organisation you remain isolated from the sales reality. The day that your new product hits the market a lot of work has already been done by other departments to build buzz and a ready clientèle. Programmers tend to moan about clients being promised features that are not yet complete, but that is simply the reality of sales. As a founder wearing many hats I have had to confront this reality and the early feedback gathered really helps to inform the design, and to assure me we are doing the right thing.
I’ve realised that striking a balance between publicity and features is essential. Your start-up can die either from incomplete solutions or from lack of exposure. However marketing efforts can quickly become very time consuming, slowing down feature development. The hard work is paying off and word is slowly and surely getting out there, be sure to tell your friends about Gridspy! It is now time to turn my attention back to features. Next on my list is the ability to push software updates out to our installed devices. That is an interesting problem involving flash drivers, firmware downloading and in system programming of our microcontrollers.
We are confident that we will hit our targets on the back of decades of hardware and software development, so no issues there. As hard as it is, selling our system while still in development is the only way to go. To my fellow entrepreneurs - If you haven’t tried to secure a pre-sale, why not? Are you secretly afraid that you product won’t sell? Better to test your business model now than after months of development time.
Talking to clients and selling early lines up really well with releasing early and often, creating something people want and validating your market. As you can see we already have our core features working and our wired solution (Nexus) is already deployed.
The word is out, Gridspy is coming and I can code late into the night in peace, just after I have finished this last email.
Of course the marketing is a requirement and has had may benefits, not least the continuing refining of the product upon hearing client feedback.
Don't forget data visualization - graphical - easy to read - convey critical info in a quick glance.
http://www.slicedbreaddesign.com/blog/index.php/2009/11/watts-all-the-buzz-about-smart-grid-energy/
Yes, visualisation is important. As you can see from my own visualisation of data there is still a way to go for us. However, the dashboards you have linked to are great examples of putting presentation before data.
Most of our competitor's dashboards are confusing and hard to read, they make it hard to spot trends and get actionable data. To work through some alternative designs, have a look at the bad dashboard examples at http://www.perceptualedge.com/examples.php and click on a couple to see the author's re-interpretation.
I consider our current dashboard design as a work in progress and the bare minimum required to be useful at this point. My goal is a highly streamlined, fast and useful interface that is clear and easy to read.