Trail blazing and shoe laces

I heard a great analogy from a friend I had lunch with recently, about how start

Getting great at iterations is an iterative learning process

Getting great at iterations is an iterative learning process

ups start off in a trail blazing mode, growing like crazy and building their product into uncharted territory. Then there’s a settlement effort in making sure that you put in place the infrastructure to support everything you’ve built so it doesn’t get lost. But how do you do both at the same time?

We’re big on iterations here at aprigo. Do what you know, get feedback, and then repeat. (Kinda like shampoo, just without the smell). For those of you that have worked in fast paced startup’s you know that getting the product ready is like re-lacing your shoes while you’re running. Balancing the desire to do EVERYTHING you know, with doing enough to get to that feedback phase is the tricky part, and takes discipline. We’re not there yet, but we’re learning that even learning how to iterate, is an iterative process. ;-)

If Escher figured it out, so can we!

who says you can’t buy style?

Doing something new, taking a different approach is easy. It’s the getting other people to understand that that’s what you’re doing is the difficult part. A big part of our belief in breaking the boundaries at aprigo, is not only providing a great new offering that nobody’s built before, but also making it look and behave like that too. We don’t want to do what everybody else does, or have our application look like all the other applications (only where it makes sense, after all some people have built some pretty cool apps). When it comes to IT apps, let’s face it, most of them look the same, regardless of what they do and how they do it.

We’re putting an emphasis on cutting edge interface, and coolness, and so we hired Dan Warner who brings both en masse. Dan’s the type of designer that looks at how the design fits into the function and he’s working his magic on our private beta as I write this blog…

Here’s Dan at “New Hire” training day. Keep smiling Dan!

New Hire Smile

New Hire Smile

The secret is out, sorta…

It feels like it was only yesterday that our first working demo marked its debut, and already you can sense the excitement in the air.

We’re pretty stealthy about what we’re up to, which makes sense as a stealth mode startup. However, we let a few people in on some of it every now and then (strictly under NDA, CIA, MBA, ESPN, and other important acronyms of course). We’re big proponents of listening to our audience and adapting, so this week we shared our demo with a select number of advisors, and the reaction was well worth the effort of putting it together in parallel to building the real deal. 100% likability quotient so far, we just need to keep it there.

It’s amazing how simply doing something simple, can make such an impact. In the past couple of weeks we’ve had a flood of new advisors and design partners signing up to partake in our revolution and we’re still hungry for more…

Build it and they will come…or wait till they come and then build it?

Last Friday, Tsahy and I were invited as guests to attend a session at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

Gil Rapaport, was the speaker and we were his guests. I’ve seen my share of Marketing experts, Sales Quarterbacks, and Finance and Number crunchers, but Gil has got it all wrapped up in a combo platter that makes it seem like those disciplines should never have been separated to begin with.

Keep it simple, and automate everything

I wanted to share Gil’s very interesting, common-sense, and pragmatic approach to building a machine that starts with the customer looking for your product, and ends with your ability to handle every aspect of the customer’s experience within your company. Gil’s view of “Sales is responsible for making the numbers, and Marketing is responsible for the growth” makes plain sense, tying it all together into one machine that generates leads, qualifies them, closes the deal, and supports the customer, makes even more sense. Especially when your market has hundreds of thousands or potentially millions of customers.

What makes it even more compelling is Gil is a serial entrepreneur and you can sense it, he’s actually done everything he’s talking about. He’s doing it again at Viewfinity now.

The question that kept coming to my mind, is why every company that is going for critical mass, isn’t employing a similar strategy. The answer for me is the build or wait paradox. The machine you build requires a critical mass of input to process (leads), and the mechanism itself is hard if not impossible to predict, your customers will dictate most of it. However, if you wait until you have critical mass and makes sense to automate and measure everything, it’s a pain in the ass to stop everything and build the machine, possible but very difficult to pull of in most cases. So where do you start, building or waiting. My bet is on both. Build a small machine, but wait to upgrade the components when you know more about your customers, and when your critical mass is building up.

Sitting in an MBA class at MIT, listening to all the students (even though they aren’t as smart as my Northeastern fellow MBA classmates are…) made me think of how powerful it is to get to meet real world executives (in and out of the classroom) that give you so many answers and experiences, but what you take away and use is really up to you.

Director’s tears

Yesterday was our 2nd Board of Directors meeting, and both Dorin and Yaron were crying throughout. I tend to err on the side of optimism and see it as tears of joy, even though they each had their excuses. Yaron’s pensive look (one eye was semi closed), was really an eye infection, and Dorin’s teary eyes where the result of living in a Claritin not-so-clear allergy haze.

Personally, I think it was the demo Ron, Jim, and Yaniv put together that blew them away and brought them to tears, they thought so too. Way to go team for pulling it together!!!

Sixo de Mayo will be a day to remember in the aprigo books, as the first demo of a working something that does something cool, and looks just as cool. Especially since it’s never been done before.

1st rule of blogging…publish posts

Ok, Ok, I finally got the message. I’ve been getting hints and threats from everybody I know congratulating us on our new fancy blog, but stating that something is missing.

I tried new themes, I changed fonts, and still there was this emptiness lingering.

It finally clicked that even a stealth mode startup can share what’s happening without giving away the formula for the secret sauce. So I am going to make a pledge to post more, it’s not tough considering we only have two posts so far and it’s been a few weeks….

By sharing this lesson, I will make bloggers lives all over the world (not just data geeks) infinitely better. I am sure they will flock to our comments section to thank us.

The first rule of blogging is keep blogging, and then blog some more. Keep your blog fresh!

West coast import

It’s been a while since our latest addition to the team, and today our import from sunny California arrived in the form of Jim.

Jim’s got his act together when it comes to software development and he brings with him a unique combination of skills, experience, and get-it-done-right attitude that we love to see in all aprigo-ites. Jim and Yaniv are digging our new crib, and talking data management, saas, and IT.

When is the real furniture arriving?

Jim and Yaniv are pictured here looking for the real furniture…This is it boys, fold-up tables and chairs are THE furniture 2.0 today.

Welcome aboard Jim! team aprigo is ecstatic to have you join us.

aprigo is go!

We did it. We finally pulled the trigger and started our very own blog. If you love data as much as we do, this is the place for you.

If you’ve ever visited our website you probably guessed that we’re in “stealth mode” and seen that we’re working on something interesting…Well, it just got a lot more interesting as we welcome our first employee, Yaniv!

We just doubled our development efforts.

aprigo is about data and the people that manage it on a daily business. To quote Albert Einstein, “You can’t solve a problem with the same kind of thinking that created it.” aprigo is all about solving data management issues by thinking differently. Stay tuned as we explore the wonderful world of data management from a new perspective, with a fresh approach, not bound by conventional thinking.