Welcome to viable a podcast that follows a startup grow from zero to launch in one week episode two this week the idea I'm Robert Gelb. I'm following Benjamin Dell and his team as they transition from a development agency into an ideas factory They're trying something a bit unique and they're trying to create a fully working money-making web app in just five days I'll let Ben recap So just to be clear about the objective here. It is go from zero to hero or zero to something zero to 100% It's to offer something to the marketplace that immediately can take live real bona fidey customers customers that will start paying us And so by giving us not only a project deadline like an actual dates deadline But also an objective deadline Which is to start billing people there is the psychological requirement straight off the bat Which is we have to have something that feels like a product So there'll be polished on an aesthetic level. It will be polished on a functional level You know, we want to minimize hope there and so from the word go we've got to be incredibly disciplined individually And as a global wider team to launch something that is a complete product, right?
And that's the that's the interesting part It's very anyone can come up with an idea But to contain it to a week and to be disciplined and strict enough to say well that feature as wonderful as that might be We're never gonna get that done in a week or there's a good chance, but the risk is too high So let's just cut it out of our mind straight away. Let's focus on what's really important Let's make sure that sings and dances and that it becomes something that can make up a full product Okay, now that we're all caught up this week we delve deeper into the idea and also check in on how the team is doing after their first full day We're gonna talk about the background of the idea and how it's transformed into what it is now I'm also interested to find out about what makes this idea different to others What are some alternatives out there already? What tools are the team using throughout their journey? We'll get to all that and much more I promise you and I have to warn you that this episode will be a bit longer than last time I think it's important that through this journey We find out all we can about what motivates the team what they're thinking and that means getting fully stuck into their environment Okay enough for me.
Let's learn about the idea. It's this thing called missing letter Before we get into what missing letter is today I'm keen to find out about where it's come from then When did you first come up with the idea for missing letter? So the product is something that I've been playing around with Intellectually, I suppose as a thought process for the last sort of 10 months really it's a landing page I put up as a concept that we listed on beta list.com about 10 months ago possibly even longer I'm really bad at judging time Fyi, beta list is a fantastic site that profiles very early stage startups and web apps that are looking to get wider attention It's a fantastic resource if you're interested in checking out some of the bleeding-edge web apps, you can find it at beta list.com And the original inception of my idea was really to build a better blogging platform for startups and brands a platform that yes Created a beautiful in space environment to write content But ultimately would would then take the baton from you at that point Once the content's been written The platform would then help you do stuff with it And by doing stuff I mean generating and encouraging and creating exposure making it more likely that people will come back to your blogging sphere So we're talking about increasing conversions attracting people back and all that sort of stuff And that's just sort of silly businessy phrases, I suppose. What does that actually mean?
Well, it meant at the time to perhaps Automatically schedule off some pre-composed tweets to buffer which If you haven't heard of is effectively a queue for your tweets Another incredibly successful company in their own right And so our system would take your content and it would schedule some tweets And so we've heard a bit about scheduling But what is all this about scheduling? What's so special about it? If you're on social media, you most likely follow people These people might be celebrities companies interesting products, etc Have you ever noticed how every day a lot of these brands have something to say? That's a lot of content they have to churn out in order to better manage the outreach and in order to ensure that they're Reaching people at the best times of the day a lot of social media managers schedule certain types of posts for the future You could be tweeting out a press release while Hong Kong is waking up and your team is fast asleep There are a variety of tools out there that provide scheduling capabilities Two of the most popular ones are buffer and Hootsuite Both work in different ways and have different features but both started with scheduling as a key aspect Missing letter isn't trying to directly compete with these companies though Ben and his team are trying for something slightly different When Ben and Amy talk about scheduling They aren't just talking about arbitrary scheduling and that's important with missing.
That's what we're doing is we're creating a wider picture here So proceed with our article. You don't want to be blogging or tweeting about that in one day five times You want to be doing it? Yes on the first day when you publish it But then maybe you'll do a follow-up three days after which will then do another one five days after that another one Maybe a month after that a following one, maybe six months after that and maybe a final one a year after that and there's potentially no End to how how you'll do that and by spreading out like that You are pushing out your your back catalogue effectively of your blog articles to your existing Twitter followers and social followers as well as new ones Of course bear in mind that you will be amassing the successful company that of course will be amassing uh an increasing number of Twitter followers out there And by drip feeding out in a spread out sense as well You're inherently not spamming you are Just reminding people effectively is probably the way to think of it Um that hey six months ago. We wrote this thing It was really interesting about about social media or about launch your own startup or whatever that thing is So we get how missing letter will be able to schedule tweets.
They want to play the long game Okay, got that. There's quite a few services out there though. That'll do that already in some form or another How will it be different now the key of course And this is what's also coming into play with our platform and our algorithms is that not only will we schedule that space out in that rough sort of time frame but we will also in a natural language sense pre-create unique um tweets for you So it's not going to be the same tweets spread out over those five sort of touch points It's going to be uniquely um sort of sort of phrased And going back to that natural word in a natural sense So we want something that doesn't sound like it's been produced by a robot It's going to sound and this is why the clever programming comes into play, of course But it's going to sound like it has been written by a human And that's going to be really powerful Frankly when I hear things like this kind of makes me think that the robot uprising is just around the corner But Ben assures me that the system can't actually take control of my mind and tell me what to think. Well, not yet Anyway There's one more aspect of missing letter.
They're trying to make your life simpler with the scheduling Replace the time you're taking to come up with the tweets through natural language processing and finally trying to figure out ways to get your tweets Seen by more people we're going to also explore in this week, which we think is feasible the ability to include some pre-generated rich media So there's a lot of um, um common ways these days or trends I should say of including photos and images with your tweets So the challenge from our algorithm standpoint is to make them pertinent relevant exciting engaging Anything with a photo in a tweet will instantly generate more eyeballs anyway But if we can do more with it and maybe through your avatar and speech bubble So it looks like it's a quote extracted from there and pre-generate that on demand as part of this automation software As well as perhaps little, you know photos that represent Um your content within the article. So for example, if we can detect that, you know, there's a there's a high propensity Or frequency of words relating to nature or outside or mountain or something We can then automatically pull out and find royalty free. I'm totally commercially free photos that match that criteria So suddenly we've got this this combination of media this this sort of marketing material that can be sent out Um over that time frame All right, you've heard a rather long complicated description So now for a summary so the story here or the journey I suppose just to bring that to something slightly smaller bunch It's that you as the author of a blog will write something We detect it We then immediately email you within you know Well, we'll see how long the algorithm takes I suppose but fairly rapidly that we've pre-generated a bunch of tweets for you We've created a marketing schedule for you with rich media You then follow the link and review what we've produced and that's the critical point here You're going to review it. So none of this is going to be sent out on your behalf without you first reviewing it That's really important certainly in the early days whilst we make sure the algorithm does what it's supposed to do and plays nicely And from that point we have these little beautiful toggles.
You'll be able to Accept or reject individual tweets all of them all at once And you'll also have the ability to edit anything change photographs and add your additional ones And so best of both worlds you'll be able to think of it like a bit of a personal buffer But for for a longer time span But in the first instance, it's going to pre-create a bunch of stuff. That's going to be incredibly useful to you And how you start engaging with your your audience on an ongoing basis Out of all three of those elements, I think you can guess which one the team's going to be tested on the most Here's Iago one of the developers on the project Probably the the person the person is going to be hard because it's a And obviously, you're going to get a back catalog of blog, so it won't necessarily always be a three-month gap because there'll be other posts coming through. But there will be gaps, and so this idea of an automated social media manager becomes quite powerful. What if you could simply tell us or glean from your blog as a wider piece what its general subject matter is and what your focus is within it?
What is it you talk about and who do you talk to? And that it could then go out there and find important resources, materials, quotes of the day. You decide what it is you want that social media manager to do for you. There's no reason why I couldn't extend to those sort of things, and that's what I love about the Focus MVP.
You start off focused and it's going to always generate these exciting ideas that you've got to have the discipline not to focus in on in the first instance, which I'm not necessarily saying I'm the best at doing that, but this is part of the journey. Part of the journey is for me as an individual as much anyone else to learn to be disciplined in that manner. Okay, enough about the idea. By now, you should probably have a grasp of about what Missing Letter is, an automated social media manager that can schedule tweets, create those tweets using fancy robots, and then also generate text on images in order to get your tweets seen by more people.
Pretty sweet and certainly very lofty for all happening in five days. But now on to day one, and I apologize for the poor quality audio. We didn't realize Ben's mic wasn't working until afterwards. Day one is interesting, ground zero.
So yeah, we've spent the first four hours this morning planning everything. You sound a bit frustrated by that. We ended up all just having one big planning session, even though we touched on everyone's individual requirements and their roles and what we needed to do. So we basically got everyone kickstarted just from that meeting this morning, which was good fun.
Okay, it's day one. Obviously, we shouldn't be expecting you to have a working prototype or anything, but any takeaways about the process so far? So I think one of my biggest learnings already today is that it's very easy for the first day to be wasted, or to feel as if it's been wasted on planning and just general setting things up, getting things started, getting the ball rolling, making sure everyone knows what they're doing in the first place. And I think if one is going to try and roll out a brand new product and build it and launch it in one week, it kind of makes sense now, looking back on it, to do a bit of pre-preparation, a bit of pre-planning before that week is started.
And that's reasonable. I think it's because we already discussed last week what the product was going to be, so everyone didn't come into this completely fresh. They knew what the product was, so they could at least be thinking about it beforehand. And I think that there's nothing wrong with going a little bit further with that and just maybe doing that three or four hour planning session on the Friday afternoon, maybe just having a slightly more relaxed Friday the week before and just doing that side of thing.
We have to set up our base project. This is getting a bit technical for a second, but you have to set up the base project structure and integrate a few key libraries and things that, you know, we do them day in, day out with our client project. Now we've suddenly only got five days for it. People were waiting for me because I was the guy who was going to set up those things to actually get that put in place.
It just adds up. Those 10 minutes here, these half an hour there, they do add up. And I think this is something we could sort of shoehorn into the week previous as we lead up to, or even weeks before, just sitting there waiting for us to have that week ready where we actually do the real work on the product. So you're not behind, but just are thinking this could be done earlier in the process?
Oh yeah, for sure. There's nothing that's going to throw us back too much, but just a little bit of a learning for next time. Aside from the crazy amount of planning just to get to this planning stage, the team also uses a variety of tools and services to help make the most out of their product. Oftentimes these are invisible to the end user, but extremely important nonetheless.
Yeah, so there's a bunch of stuff. A number of them are probably slightly too technical for this podcast, so I probably won't go into them too much. But yeah, so on the more business end of things, I suppose, we use GoSquared and Google Analytics for our analytics needs. We may also experiment with things like Mixpanel, which will help us to really track events and see what people are actually clicking on and converting into.
We've then got intercom.io, which will be a very important part of this process, so that when people sign up and start engaging with the site, we can proactively trigger slightly more useful information communications to them, I should say, asking them around why they haven't picked up on a particular feature or whether they need any specific help. We use AWS for our servers, and we, of course, have our blog in the background, which we are hoping to write something on during the week. And then I suppose the one area that we're experimenting with a little bit more that we haven't got any real sort of background in is PR and marketing and looking at whether there's any tools that we can use that will help us do that, and particularly databases that will give us access to tech journalists, email addresses and those sorts of things. We're having a little bit of a glimpse into that in the early part of this week to see what we can get out of that.
It's easy to forget that in order to achieve pretty outlandish goals, you need to have a good selection of tools to get you there. I'll provide links to all the ones that Ben mentioned in the description. I always like finding out the tools people use because it gives an insight into their processes and helps to establish where they see their main areas of focus needing to be. As you heard, quite a bit of analytics and technical tools are there.
They're still experimenting and researching PR and marketing options. This is a key learning curve that they need to get beyond in their transition from a development company to an ideas factory. As we're nearing the end of day one, Ben, any major issues? No, not massively.
Do you think it'll be a late night? I don't think it will be. Today, I think people are leaving on time today. Okay, so as you've heard, a bit of frustration in the planning of the day, but not hugely stressed out, even though they're already 20% done with their week.
Yes, I think today, this is the psychology of products or projects, even, and deadlines, is that no matter how long it is or how short it is, you never feel the stress on the first day. I'm feeling like there's some efficiency improvements to make, as discussed, around maybe just front-loading some of the planning elements into the days leading up to this week. But there's no stress being felt, I don't think, at this stage, because we've got four days left. It's fine.
We'll start feeling it tomorrow, most likely. Right, that's the end of day one. We've all heard about Missing Letter, how it went from an all-in-one blogging platform to a natural language parsing, automated social media manager. And we're just getting started.
Next time, we'll take a closer look into the transition Ben's company is trying to make from a development company into an ideas factory. No easy feat. We'll also learn about the different roles within the team, and I'll get Ben to lay out his targets for the week ahead. If you'd like to get in touch, provide some feedback, tell us how we could improve the podcast, send an email to hello at viablepodcast.com or find me on Twitter at thisisgelb.
For more information about the podcast and about the subject company Minimum Ideas, head over to viablepodcast.com. Our theme was written by Chris Gordon. Special thanks to Ben, Vitor, Amy, Iago, and Gnarly, all at Minimum Ideas. This has been episode 2 of Viable, from concept to proof.
I'm Robert Gelb. Thanks for listening.