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Unless you’re one of the lucky winners of the venture capital lottery, or happen to be independently wealthy, starting a new business is a difficult proposition.
It’s especially tricky for companies in the product business, because so many of their costs are front-loaded — they incur the charges long before they can recoup the money from customers.
Infovark is lucky, because as startup companies go, software companies are cheap to run. Computer software and hardware are relatively inexpensive these days, and you can work anywhere that there’s a decent Internet connection and few interruptions.
Assuming you don’t count the cost of labor, of course.
That’s the reason so many software start-ups are located near universities with good computer science programs. The biggest asset a software company can have is an endless supply of folks that will write code for pizza and beer.
Gordon and I can’t work for free, though. We’ve got mortgages and families and responsibilities and stuff. Which contributes to a problem I call startup schizophrenia.
We started Infovark with money raised from friends and family, but no matter how frugal we are that money won’t last forever. So, starting six months ago, Gordon and I started doing occasional side projects.
On one hand, it’s been a great thing for us, because it’s helped us preserve our cash during the downturn. It’s also kept us connected to the Enterprise Software community, the Enterprise Content Management space, and the larger arena I’ll call “corporate computing”.
We know that space well, and we know that organizations need the help of experienced consultants to keep their disparate software systems working together.
But that space, familiar as it it to us, is not really Infovark’s market. And while we firmly believe that something like Infovark would be useful to a lot of people in the business world, it’s not something that CIOs or IT directors would find very interesting. The folks that manage back-office corporate infrastructure have different concerns from those that work directly with customers or are out in the field.
So Gordon and I find ourselves switching mental models a lot.
Wearing our consulting hats, we’ll talk with companies about security, scalability, interoperability and then we’ll hold an Infovark conference call where we’ll talk about sharing, openness, and ease-of-use. It’s a different set of priorities, driven by different motivations.
It’s a strange disconnect. The cognitive dissonance gets to us sometimes.
While we were preparing for the beta release, we spent a lot of time dwelling on the subject of enterprise software. It’s what we know best. It pays the bills. And we’ll be more than happy to help folks with their ECM deployments or change management initiatives.
But over the coming months, I think we’ll talk less and less about corporate computing and more and more about personal productivity.
Our focus is changing now that the beta has been released. We can now get feedback from actual users that have tried Infovark. We’re hearing a lot about what features work and what things confuse people.
The folks at 37signals call it Getting Real. We had a theory about a personal information sharing application that was easy to install and use. Now we have to put it into practice. We’ll learn a lot about which of our crazy ideas work and which are just plain silly.
And as we do that, this blog will be less and less about the places we’ve been and more about the places we’re going.
In the meantime, enjoy our mental disorder.
As Infovark moves into its third year, people often say to me, “Er, when are you going to ship something?” and “What is it you’re building, anyway?”
And you know, as much as I’d like to launch the product right now, I can’t. Infovark isn’t finished.
When Dean and I started in October 2007, we thought that we’d be able to get a public beta ready within about 6 months. We were really wrong. Here’s the link to the sad trombone.
In the absence of a product announcement, Dean and I have been talking a lot about the problems we’re trying to solve (in between furiously refactoring, debugging, re-bugging, etc.). And as we move into a new year — one that will definitely see the first public release of Infovark — I thought it might be prudent to re-visit exactly what it is we’re building, and why. So here’s a few of the questions that we’ve encountered over the last few years of running our start-up.
What is Infovark?
Infovark is a smart software agent that lives in your computer. It follows you while you work, remembers things, and learns a little bit about what you do, who you work with, and the documents and emails that you create and use. It then uses this information to build you a spiffy personal website that’s all about you, your work activity, and your stuff.
You can make your website available to your colleagues, so that they can browse your Infovark, leave comments, post updates, and access the information you choose to share with them.
Why would I want it?
Because you are busy, and you don’t have time to answer repeated requests for information, or spend ages digging around for answers. Infovark helps you find things that you work with, and share them with your colleagues. Infovark also provides you with insights based on your work patterns. For example, It will suggest related documents for an email you’re reading. It will help you determine which is the most recent version of a document. It’s very helpful.
If you’ve ever thought that you could benefit from having a personal assistant, or someone who took notes for you, then you will love having Infovark on hand.
Will it run on my computer?
If you’re running a version of Windows from the last 5 years, then chances are pretty good that it will.
How do I use Infovark?
Once you install Infovark, it asks you a few questions about what you do and don’t want it to include. (This process doesn’t usually take too long.) And then, you just get on with doing whatever it is you do.
When you get stuck, lose, or forget something, you can ask Infovark what it knows about it. If your friend at work also has an Infovark, you can browse to it instead of their Facebook page. (If you want to do work stuff, that is. Infovark doesn’t support throwing sheep.)
Does this mean that all my stuff is always shared?
No, only if you let it be shared. You can keep Infovark and all of your information to yourself if you like. You can also tell Infovark to ignore whole folders or files, so that it won’t consider these when making recommendations or suggestions.
Does this mean my Boss can spy on me?
The content that you choose to share will be available to your colleagues, including your boss. So, if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t actually add any value to an organization, and likes to avoid doing things, then you probably shouldn’t install Infovark. It might make you look bad.
On the other hand, if you’re delivering awesome work, and you want other folks to know about it, then Infovark is a great way to get the word out. Sending an occasional reminder about your valuable contributions couldn’t hurt during the next annual performance review, could it?
I thought you guys were all about solving Enterprise Problems. How does this help?
Enterprise Software is unwieldy and complex because it abstracts all business processes into a single piece of software. It’s designed to solve management problems as seen from the executive level. But the real work happens on the front lines, at the individual level — where we all do our jobs.
With your permission, your Infovark will contact other Infovark agents within your organization, allowing you to share, search, and collaborate with your peers. In the process, Infovark builds up a realistic, organic representation of your organization’s knowledge and insight from the ground level. We think that enterprises are made of people, and genuinely useful enterprise software has to acknowledge that fact.
We also have future plans for an Infovark Team Server that will aggregate individual Infovarks and provide a more holistic and structured approach to information management.
That’s all well and good, but when can I have it?
Soon! We have one more private beta to go through, in Feburary this year — look for our public beta sometime in April. (Really, if we don’t get to share this with somebody soon, we will explode.)
Meanwhile, Dean and I will endeavor to keep posting our thoughts and ideas here as we go. You can also drop by our other Infovark blog, The Underground. The Underground shares our experiences as programmers — and contains some more technical details about our approach.
A big thanks to all our readers, and smart folk who’ve left comments for us over the last year. We love hearing from you. Happy 2009!
Here’s some interesting thoughts to begin the new year. The Epicenter blog at Wired just posted the Rules of the Garage, the shared vision of the founders of Hewlett Packard.
(Yes, HP actually began in a garage. It was the original Silican Valley start-up. It makes the Burrow look posh by comparison.)
To the list, the author John Abell adds six additional quotes, also worth pondering.
Do you want to create a must-have software application, a compelling new business model, and the next Internet darling? (I sure do!) Then Daniel Tunkelang offers some sage advice: when in doubt, make it public and permanent. He cites Blogger, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube as examples of previously private communication brought into the public sphere.
The lesson is that while security features remove objections in the customer’s mind, they don’t help you sell the product.
Looks like there’s a new entrant in the social search space with an aardvark mascot. VentureBeat wrote a glowing article about aardvark.im. They’re taking an instant messaging approach to the problem of getting expert advice. In that regard, they’re more like Qunu than like us.
Mechanical Zoo, the company behind aardvark.im, recently closed $6 million in VC money. Not bad for a company that started at the same time as we did, late 2007. They’re currently in private beta.
Other than the potential for confusion with our own lovable Infovark pal, it’s good news for us. It shows there’s still interest — and funding — available to companies trying to reinvent collaboration tools. We’ve got some product announcements lined up for the coming weeks, and we’re just about to enter our second Alpha test. Watch this space.