We are no strangers to hacking at stuff here in the lab and we love building useful tools and add-ons using our own APIs. In that long running
tradition, I wanted to announce a little pet project I started a few days ago.
fixx Django Middleware (I know it's original) is the aptly named
middleware app for people who run Django sites/applications. It provides an exception handler in the middleware that allows you to log exceptions
that occur in your Django instance directly to your fixx instance encouraging pro-active problem solving than waiting for visitors to report
bugs in your Django site/app.
The middleware component does required fixx 1.8+ to work with.
You can grab a copy of the code which is licensed under the BSD
license and is free for you to modify.
Why not take a look at some of these other API-enabled tools/add-ons for fixx we are working on and even see if you can contribute?
It was exactly 2 years ago to tomorrow that we moved some basic furniture including broken garden chairs into our first office. If someone had said to me then that we would still be here 2 years on, sailing above the most difficult recession to hit the country in my time, I would definitely have had a good laugh on their account. Yet, I am absolutely delighted to say that hedgehog lab is officially 2 years old now.
In these past 2 years, we have been through some very difficult times and some absolutely delightful moments but the following were the lows and highs that have shaped our company and the team, as they are today.
Lows
Running out of savings and credit cards
When we founded hedgehog lab, Mark (my co-founder) and I were probably the most ill-suited for entrepreneurship. We both had big mortgages, very well paid jobs and very little savings.
Yet, our passion and conviction about the business and what we wanted to do was so strong that we decided to drop everything, risking a lot of money to pursue what was closest to our hearts. We used up every penny of our cash savings and went through a torrential first few months without generating much revenue. We even had to resort to borrowing from credit cards to fund our work with no real guaranteed revenue. It was simply dogged persistence and hard work that pulled us through this.
Letting go of staff
The most painful moment in our short history had to be the moment we had to let go of our first 3 employees in 2008. Facing delays in the release of our first product fixx, little cash in the bank, and the loss of a large consultancy project we were banking on, we reluctantly had to let go of 3 wonderful employees. I am sure every entrepreneur will tell you this but the morning of the day we broke the news to them felt like the gloomiest day we ever had.
I remember how terrible Mark and I felt the rest of the week, and just turning up for work every day was an uphill climb. Yet, we knew that we took the right decision for the business and thanks to quick but painful decision making, the company is far stronger in the long run.
Market Research
We always knew that we were going to build, fixx, our bug tracking system, as our first product. The advice we got from Business Link (a Government-funded start-up support organisation) was to conduct market research and talk to prospective customers about the product. Since market research was a relatively new field to us, and since everybody else seemed to be doing it, we took the bait and set about doing market research.
If you know the bug tracking market, you will find that what we found in our market research was nothing less than a prediction of total doom. However, it always seemed to me that market research was good at comparing features, predicting figures and stats but could never capture the essence of building a "usable" and "simpler" product. We dug our heels in and 2 years later, the evidence points to the fact that we were onto something.
Highs
The highs far outweigh the lows, and this in essence is why we are still passionate about turning up for work every day and have a blast doing what we do. So what were the highs?
Exponential revenue growth
Although it is fairly early to say this, as it stands, we are looking at least 3 digit growth year on year for the first 3 years. We have already made more revenue in the first 3 months of our current financial year than in the entire last financial year, and are looking to triple our revenues in the next 10 months.
Exceptional people
We have had the chance to work with some brilliant people, both in our current team and previous team. It is an absolute pleasure to go to work every day knowing that everyone there comes into work rearing to go and with a lot of passion for what they do. It also helps that they have a great sense of humour.
I wanted to do a longer post on the specific lessons we have learned in business as a young company, but I remember a talk I gave a couple of months ago at a local event that sums up our lessons in business.
I usually do not respond on our blog to articles or blog posts elsewhere, simply because I have nothing useful to say in response or don't have
a strong counter-argument to present. However, the Telegraph's commentary on the
Sun Tech Mission 2009 was too much
bait to resist responding to.
Unlike many of my peers, I am not out to defend the North. The problem I have is with the general slant of the article and the basis behind the opinions drawn in it.
The point that aptly illustrates everything that is wrong about businesses based in London is the following line,
"Plugging yourself in to the London circuit is the best way to generate buzz around your product. More importantly, it gives you the best chance of making the connections you need to investors and other start-ups."
This, fundamentally, is what wrong is with many businesses (especially tech) these days. Since when has business success been measured by how much PR/buzz you could generate or how much investment you could eke out of rich London bankers? The entire article is based on the assumption that to have a successful business, you have to pitch to investors, get them to invest a lot of money, generate lots of buzz around your product, and finally hope Google buys you for a ridiculous amount of money.
There are many reasons to base a business in London and I admit there might be statistically far more successful start-ups in London than in the North of England (I would love to see those stats) but to define success within the narrow scope of investment-led businesses is ignoring the large majority of grassroots, boot-strapped businesses that might never get on the news but contribute a large part to the economy.
Whatever happened to building great products, generating revenue and building sustainable long-term businesses? Are you not classified as a start-up anymore if you don't attend the hundreds of BarCamps or don't get featured on Techcrunch or ReadWriteWeb?
Given the current economic climate, what we need is more "boring" start-ups that can create jobs and pay taxes. Granted that venture-backed start-ups create immense value and wealth if they succeed but the success rate of these start-ups is certainly no more than that of other start-ups.
A lot of the article is based on opinions and comments by entrepreneurs who are biased because they are either based in London or are moving there. The kind of entrepreneurs who, with all due respect, believe that the only kind of tech company to build is the next Facebook, Youtube or Twitter.
(Update:Nick Bell from Quick.tv responds to my above over-generalisation in comments below. It was certainly not aimed at Nick and/or Quick.tv)
The article does make a fair number of valid points like the Government-funded schemes largely administered by people with little background in the tech industry. I also agree that support and advice for technology businesses is weaker than what is available in London. There are issues surrounding the quality of networking and the general ability of tech companies in the region to collaborate. However, none of these seem to be a reason to move to London. If they were, then why not just move to Silicon Valley, because as the article says, if the South were better than the North then by that measure Silicon Valley is far better than the South of England.
Will the real tech media please stand up and provide commentary and reports that reflect the fact there are more ways to do business in technology than generating buzz, building old boys networks and throwing around a lot of cash. The City of London and the financial institutions were symbolic of this and were much taunted examples of the superiority of London as a centre of business. We all know how that ended!
This is a month later than we had planned but I am excited to announce that we have just release fixx 1.8 into the wild. This is our biggest feature
release yet with 63 major issues raised by customers for a while.
Here is what is in store for 1.8,
You can now perform a 1-click import from FogBugz 6.0 and above.
Ability to backup and restore an entire instance of fixx through the Admin interface.
The Rich Text editor has been modified to now support XHTML and support for Textile/Markdown has been removed.
Ability to notify issue assignee when commenting.
Ability to have "private" issues.
More functionality in the API to deal with issues and comments.
I know it has been very quiet around here at the lab, but we have been incredibly busy working on the biggest release yet of
fixx and slaving hard to release a beta of solomon.
However, I did want to take this opportunity to announce firefixx, a Firefox extension for fixx. Currently, all you can do with
firefixx is drag & drop files into the browser to automatically attach them to an issue. As long as you are viewing an issue and have
permissions to upload files, just dragging & dropping a file into the main browser window will automatically upload it.
Although the functionality is basic (no feedback/progress or UI), we have big plans for this extension in the coming months. What's even
better is that firefixx is a BSD licensed project and the source is available on Github if you want to take it and write your own hacks. We
can't promise we will use all of them in the core extension but it's not like us to say no to useful contributions?
