Firstly, apologies if you have arrived here through your feed reader which has suddenly been flooded with every blog post made by hedgehog lab. We just deployed a massive re-design and re-code of our main website, which meant that a few things were bound to go awry. This should be fixed now, so please feel free to "Mark all as read" and move on.
Moving onto the good news, as you can see, we have taken on-board nearly a year's worth of feedback all our loyal customers have provided and spent some long sleepless nights to build and deploy our brand spanking new website. It's also a great opportunity for me to provide an update on our products and summarise our new website.
Website re-design and re-write
Most software companies are guilty of spending far too much time re-designing (lesser crime) and re-writing (greater crime) their website and internal tools every so often instead of focusing on, err, writing software for customers.
Lest you think we fell into this trap, our site re-design and re-write is actually in response to overwhelming customer feedback. Our previous site had a good enough design and a basic set of tools but there were constant complaints about both small details like font size, and big important details like issues with license generation and account management tools. We listened patiently for over a year and decided now was the right time to introduce an update. Here are some key points about this update,
One of the biggest overhaul has been in the visual/brand side of things. We have ditched our "far-too-corporate" look and adopted a visual style that we feel reflects our personality and ethics.
The product pages and content have been completely overhauled, giving a better experience when looking for information and making it easier to evaluate your options.
There is more information about hedgehog lab now, and more importantly, the much requested Team page and team information.
The license and account management section has been completely re-designed and re-written. It is now even quicker to buy and manage your product licenses from hedgehog lab.
We have a lot more exciting support-related changes and more content coming in the next few months, so make sure you keep an eye on the website.
fixx
This has been months in the making but fixx 1.9 is finally here and it brings with it a wealth of new features and updates which have been requested for a long while. Check out the Release Notes for more info and grab your copy. Here are a few big highlights from 1.9,
You can now delete projects you don't need completely from fixx.
The free user limit has been increased to 3 from 1. You can now have 3 valid users in the system without paying a penny!
fixx can now speak Spanish & German.
You can perform a 1-click migration from Unfuddle.
solomon
The past 2 months have been full steam ahead with solomon development. We have made massive progress with functionality (which included 2 re-writes of the contacts screen) but we are finally happy with the experience and UI. The beta is very close and although I don't want to give away a lot, expect a blog post and a sneak peek into both the solomon web and iPhone app soon.
People who read our blog will know that our first ever Hog Camp concluded last Friday. Hog Camp is hedgehog lab's internal Hack Day that runs over 48 hours and gives us a chance to build, experiment and work with tools and ideas that we would normally not explore in our daily jobs.
The biggest difference in Hog Camp from traditional Hack Days is that everybody participating works towards 1 single idea/solution rather than each individual or small teams working on their own. Our hope was that this encourages team work and help people build on the type of skills that are required in large teams (which is something we usually don't get in a small company like ours).
As expected, it was an intense 2 days of coding, design, discussions and beer+pizza which ended up producing some awesome results. We even managed to get people from outside hedgehog lab interested in the event and we are now opening up our next event to a select list of guests.
Presenting hedgehog lib....
The project our team chose to tackle for the inaugural Hog Camp was a web-based library system that allows us to manage our ever-growing book list and allow a painless and easy way to track their movement.
Unlike most Hack Day projects, hedgehog lib has a very practical purpose; it is going to be used on a near daily-basis internally at hedgehog lab. The core idea behind hedgehog lib was to build something within 48 hours that would have the following functionality.
Allow us to search for and add books to our library (using Google Book Search)
Allow the ability for users to register and check out/check in books to help keep track of who is reading what.
A wishlist feature for people to request books they would like in our library.
Although the final feature set includes a bit more than this, I am glad to report we managed to build and get to a first version of a usable product.
A sneak peek
Free as in free beer
Although hedgehog lib is a great first version, there is plenty of scope to improve the solution and customise it for various needs. To keep with the spirit of the event, we have decide to open source all our future Hog Camp projects in the hope that others will find them useful for their own use or developing the solution further. You can grab the source from our public Hog Camp mercurial repository.
Hog Camp is an internal Hack Day at hedgehog lab that takes place for 2 days every other month. Our first Hog Camp
in September 2009 was a success (a blog post on this will follow soon) and there has been a fair bit of interest from people who
would like to attend, even though it is internal.
Therefore, we have decided to open up our November Hog Camp to a select list of invitees who can join along in the beer+pizza fuelled
coding sessions and produce some awesome code. If you would like to be invited to it, please enter your details below and we
will let you know if you have made the guest list. Your invitation will contain more details of the format, the dates and miscellaneous
details.
Dan Pink is an author and speaker who despite having worked in politics, has a surprisingly interesting take on managing employees and how the modern workplace should function.
I watched a recent talk of his at TED after being pointed to it by Herb Kim. I would advise anyone who is considering running their own business or has already been running one to watch the talk, which makes a strong fact-based argument for radically re-defining the way we motivate employees at work.
In both his talk at TED and his thought-provoking book A Whole New Mind, Dan talks about right-brain thinking and how creativity is now an essential competitive advantage in the workplace. Like the talk, the book is a must-read for the insight it provides into creativity and how simple it can be to instil it into both your personal and work life.
At hedgehog lab, we have always taken pride in our left-brain strengths and developers with strong logic, reasoning and language skills. Our entire hiring policy and ethos has been surrounded by the fact that we are a company for developers, by developers. Sure there is a lot of creativity and abstract thinking involved in general software development but our work practises and hiring processes were geared towards left-brain focused developers.
We did have processes in place to encourage creativity, like our Lab Days, which were informal internal hack days. Unfortunately, the pressures of every day work and deadlines meant that this process was woefully managed and resulted in very little. In retrospect, this was a necessary but unfortunate path to becoming a sustainable small company.
Meanwhile, in the past year, we turned down around 10 different designers who applied to work at hedgehog lab because I was absolutely convinced that our in-house team had no need for a permanent creative member of staff. Why hire a full-time creative person when we could focus on our core competency[sic] and outsource graphic design and creative work to freelancers and companies skilled at this?
The problem with this was that, although it was good traditional business wisdom, it did not take into account the exponential benefits a creative person could bring to our team and products while changing the monotonous composition of the team. It was becoming clear to us that the advantages of having an in-house designer far outweighed the negatives.
This is where Dan Pink and his theories come into play. To tie in with our recent office move, we took some time off to think about how we can inject some of the creative principles and right-brain culture in hedgehog lab. This essentially culminated in the following new practises that have been brought about at the lab.
Switching to a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE)
ROWE is an extension of our existing working practises to focus on results and move the focus away from time spent on a particular task. We have always had a liberal working policy at hedgehog lab but we have often been guilty of focusing too much on measuring and evaluating the amount of time spent by individuals in "doing stuff". Although results were still more important than time in the past, a formalised ROWE process gives us better guidelines and tools to measure and motivate employees in the future.
Monthly "Hog Camp"
Hog Camp is essentially our version of the Google 20% time (where each engineer gets to spend 20% of their time working on interesting and non-core projects). Unlike Google however, our growth rate is far slower, which means we could not afford a day a week from employees' time. Hog Camp is a monthly internal 2-day BarCamp where the team gets together every month to hack on interesting ideas and code fuelled by plenty of pizza and beer. Our first Hog Camp is in September and we will posting the results of this soon.
Hiring a designer
We are now actively looking for a creative designer for our team. If you are someone who loves producing beautiful and usable interfaces and "gets design", then please get in touch with us. Alternatively, if you know someone who is looking for a new challenge and is happy working with geeks, let them know about us. We have no specific and rigid criteria as long as you have the right aptitude and principles to fit into hedgehog lab. A creative job application could help too.
No doubt, I will be reporting in a few months what impact these changes have had at hedgehog lab and if there were any negative results.
It has been a very quiet 2 months on the lab blog as we go through a hectic phase of growth and changes at the lab HQ. I wanted to take a minute (or 30) out of our frantic schedule of product development and daily grind to provide a quick update of what's happening at hedgehog lab.
Office Move
When we started hedgehog lab 2 years ago, we had a grand vision of the type of office we would like to work in and the nature of office space that would enable us to get the best out of our employees. Unfortunately, as a bootstrapped company, we had to make compromises with the space due to restrictive costs and company size. In some ways, we just got comfortable with our current office and decided to cram as many people in as possible, so we could focus on the business at hand.
Fortunately, hedgehog lab is going up in the world and both our revenues and employee count has increased steadily in the past year, which meant we needed to re-assess the space we had and look for a larger space that suits us. Anybody who has undertaken an office search knows that this is a painful and drawn out process, and it took nearly 6 months to find our ideal office.
Therefore, I am pleased to announce that the lab will soon be moving to new premises at The Kiln in Hoults Yard in Newcastle. Hoults have some fantastic space with all the right facilities and have a great team to back it up with exceptional service. I would recommend anyone looking for new office space to try them out.
The Aerons have been ordered and the IKEA furniture delivered, so we will be moving our postal address in the coming 3 weeks. Keep an eye out for pictures on our blog of our new office.
New employee
Ever since we launched hedgehog lab, we have been very keen to enter the mobile space and bring our unique blend of enterprise understanding and user experience love to the table. However, our product strategy and existing demands meant that we were never fully able to make mobile products a core strategy other than dabbling in bits and pieces of R&D.
I am please to announce that with our most recent hire, Jonathan Williamson (or Jonny as we call him!), we now have a full-time mobile developer and the making of our dedicated mobile team at hedgehog lab. Jonny will be working on defining our mobile strategy and on a mobile app or two that we will be announcing soon.
Products update
We have been firing on all cylinders in terms of our product development roadmap with massive progress being made on both fixx and solomon. Due to current customer demand, fixx has been prioritised a bit higher to resolve key bugs and implement some exciting new features. We are working hard on fixx 1.9, which is another feature loaded release after 1.8.
The original idea was to stop new feature development at 1.8 and continue with 2.0 but customer demand and the increasing popularity of fixx has meant that we wanted to deliver some key features in the 1.x stream.
Unfortunately, this means delays in getting a beta of solomon out but rest assured that solomon is not vapourware and the heavy interest and demand for this means that, quite honestly, we cannot afford to not release it soon.
As always, keep an eye out on our blog for more updates as soon as we settle into our new office space.
When we released fixx 1.8 a couple of months ago, we were elated to deliver the biggest set of functionality in fixx since launch. With 50+ new features or
enhancements, it was inevitable that the changes would impact some of our customers in a large way.
Unfortunately for us, some of the improvements manifested as critical upgrade issues for a few customers and we would sincerely like to
apologise for this. We should have anticipated and put in additional tests for these but we did not and I would like to apologise to those customers that have had
to postpone their 1.8 upgrade because of these issues.
To be clear, the critical problems only apply to existing customers who upgraded from 1.7 and we have worked hard to resolve these
problems in the past 2 weeks.
As a result, we are releasing fixx 1.8.1 which addresses these critical upgrade issues and some major bugs reported from our 1.8 release. We would
advise all customers (even those on 1.8 already) upgrade to 1.8.1 as soon as possible.
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!
