What a year! 2009 Wrap-up
January 1st, 2010
I know this space has been quiet for the last few months. Although I have no real excuse, most of the posts related to Silentale have been published over at blog.silentale.com. And today’s 2009 wrap-up is mostly a (lame) re-post of LeWeb08 People’s Choice winner – 1 year later and lessons learned published just a few weeks ago.
2009 has been an awesome year for Silentale, going from a stealth company to an actual service used by thousands of users around the world. I wanted to give you an update about everything that has happened since we won the People’s Choice award at LeWeb in December 2008, and what we have learned while doing it.
In the last year we’ve accomplished a lot, and learned even more:
- a great team can do great things (even if small): we added some world-class folks to the team, both experienced managers with a track record of rolling out new products at brands like Netscape, ComScore, AOL, Orange, BSkyB and Yahoo!, and even more importantly some great young development talent. We’d love to have even more folks on the team, but if you have to have just a few, they gotta be great.
- it’s lonely being the only one at the dance: when you’re launching a new service that can’t be compared to anything, it really helps to have other entrants in the same or similar space for people to reference, or growth in the general space you’re operating in. The launch of Threadsy, MessageBunker, the impending arrival of Raindrop, and indirectly even Google Wave demonstrates that there are others looking at a similar market. Plus the obscene growth and fragmentation of real-time communications helps demonstrate the need for a service that consolidates and archives all your conversations and contacts. And it doesn’t hurt that we’re in the Cloud either…allowing users to access that information where they need to.
- meeting and talking to people gives great ideas: we attended as many events as we could on our travel budget, and met /engaged with as many people as we could (keeping dry mouth at bay with copious amounts of lubrication)…everyone from respected investors to journalists/bloggers, other startups, suppliers, potential partners etc. We can’t tell you how invaluable it is to not live in a silo, but to get feedback, share best practices and brainstorm ideas with as many folks as possible. Trends start to emerge that you might otherwise have never thought of on your own…no matter how great a team you have.
Great events we participated in from 2009 include: Plugg, The Next Web, Web 2.0 Berlin & SF, various TechCrunch meetups, OpenCoffee Club, Nordic Venture Forum, Ignite Paris and Geeks on a Plane. - users really are king: in the same vein, we’ve tried to listen to our users as much as possible, by conducting market research, conducting polls, and reviewing feedback from the site as well as tweets, blogpost comments etc., and use their comments to prioritize our development and improve the service.
- there is nothing better than launching: we launched our Private Beta on 8 September, and we can’t emphasize enough how much it helps to just get your product out there and start getting all that great feedback from your real (and royal) users, so you can iterate and improve your product to truly meet their needs.
- social media saves the day: being lean means $0 marketing budget, in whatever currency you care to count, but the community on the web means you can get the word out without having to spend. If you have a decent product, engage with the community and respond to feedback, you can grow.
- lean is HARD, but sharpens your focus: you never have as many resources as you want; whether you work for a 5K employee company or with a handful of people, so prioritization of product development and everything else is key. Re: fundraising, we have learned that you need to have a) a sufficiently decent-sized user base (still wish someone could tell us what the magic number is), plus growth of that base going in the right direction, and b) ability to demonstrate that your business model will work, before you get any serious funding. Sort of a Catch-22, since you need the funding before you start to make money…but we get it. Heard loud & clear. Did we mention that we love our angels?
- scaling on a large scale is REALLY hard: our dev team worked their butts off building a process that can adequately scale to both process and store tens of millions of messages and contacts. We now have more sympathy for sites that sometimes have FailWhales during growth.
- tools of the trade make it possible: we’re operating at a great moment, where there are so many inexpensive tools and open platforms available, without which it would be impossible for us to function. You name it: customer support (Zendesk), surveys (PollDaddy & SurveyMonkey), email marketing tools (CampaignMonitor), databases (MongoDB, MySQL), cloud infrastructure (Amazon Web Services), collaboration (Yammer, Highrise and Box.net), marketing (HubSpot Marketing Tools), analytics (Google, bit.ly)…the list goes on and on, and we are grateful.
- going global is not a choice, it’s mandatory: altho our HQ is in Paris, our team of 8 represents 5 different nationalities (some with 2 or 3 each!), and we believe that to be truly successful, we have to be global. Our current beta users come from 57 different countries, and we have deliberately launched in English only initially to cater to the broadest possible audience. This may seem slightly controversial, and there can certainly be successful companies that cater for just one particular market, but if your ultimate goal is to compete on a global level, you have to prepare for that from Day 1.
- we get high off of buzz: we try not to obsess about it too much, and look at all feedback as good feedback whether positive or negative, but we do really get a buzz from positive buzz. As a startup, you hit so many walls, its important to get your high where you can! Anything from being called “Europe’s Hottest Startup?” in TechDigest (even with the “?”!) to a user tweeting “Everyone check out Silentale!!! F***ing great!” (thanks @harmen_h) really keeps us going.
So thanks again for a great year and let’s make 2010 even better!
Flickr image by @jomilo75
It’s been a while since I posted here, probably due in part by the Twitter-effect. Although I partially blame twitter and my lack of free time in the recent weeks, I intend to improve the frequency of my posts. So stay tuned.
Intrigued by Silentale? Can’t wait to try Silentale? The best way is to join us. We have just opened two new positions based in Paris. We’re looking for passionate software developers that love working on difficult problems and that thrive in a startup environment. Some of our challenges include distributed systems, scalability and natural language processing. Familiar with internet based services, cloud infrastructure or machine learning, see the job descriptions at 
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