Posted: September 29th, 2011 | Author: Jay Hung | Filed under: Startups | View Comments
Image from http://www.activegarage.com/
This post is about supporting other startups, something I really and truly enjoy.
Personally, and at my own startup Conference Hound, it gives me great pleasure when I find a product from a startup that I’m willing to pay for (and from more mature startups that I highly respect). These days, there are tons of startups creating great products at fair costs, and as a startup person myself, it makes me feel good when I can support my own.
Some of the products and startups I have supported and continue to support as a paid customer include:
Some of the products I will be supporting in the near future include:
Do you have an amazing product? Does it solve a key problem for me? And is it priced at a fair cost? If so, let me know and I’d be happy to check it out, and who knows, perhaps I may be a customer.
Posted: March 10th, 2011 | Author: Jay Hung | Filed under: Conference Hound, Startups | View Comments
Earlier today, we had a big announcement at our fledgling startup Conference Hound – we announced that we had closed our seed round of funding. I hastily tweeted this at the time without much context, so wanted to now take a moment to say a few additional words.
This marks a significant milestone for our young company, and we are honored that our investors had the faith in us and in our vision to participate in this round. It’s really an exciting time for us – not just because of our round, but for a number of things:
- The way the world consumes information is changing
- Likewise, the way we learn about and connect with conferences is changing.
- This is a space that is much more competitive today than it was a year ago, and ripe for disruption.
- New participants are bringing much more innovation to this category than had existed prior.
- The incumbents will be forced to respond and to innovate themselves or risk relinquishing their positions in the market.
- Ultimately, the attendees, speakers, organizers, and others will benefit from more options and better tools, and that is a great thing.
The funds will be used primarily to hire developers and designers, and to continue improving our products and services. We are super excited to be doing the work that we’re doing, and can’t wait to show you what we have coming next.
Our mission?
To help people find, research and connect with the conferences that enable them to grow their careers, enrich their professional lives, and have fun while making the most of the conference-going experience.
Now, the real work begins.
Posted: March 6th, 2011 | Author: Jay Hung | Filed under: Conference Hound, Development | View Comments
The CELERIFERE: The First Bicycle Ever Made
I’m a bit overdue for my next post, so today’s post will deter from the “road back to startup” series to talk about how I like to release code. This topic has been talked about plenty around the web with one of my favorites from Paul Graham circa 2006, so I’ll keep this post light and specific to my own experiences and workflow.
Release Early
I am a huge fan of releasing early for the same reason that others like it – it gives me incredibly valuable data points. Too often, I have seen companies I’ve worked for release products that were expensive to create, took too long to release, and subsequently flopped. We’re “surprised” that we didn’t get the traction we were so sure of. We begin blaming the users as unsophisticated, or we tout ourselves as being too early — and we simply refuse to believe that hey, maybe we really didn’t understand what users wanted, like we thought we did. Sometimes the products are revised and relaunched. Often, they are not and are either shelved or live on in their flopped state.
At the startup Conference Hound, we believe in releasing early. Way early. I remember my partner, the CEO asking me, “what the heck is a pre-alpha?” to which I simply replied, “it’s something that comes before alpha”. Our first release, the pre-alpha release, was nothing more than a home page with a set of links to industries, organizers, and venues, which in turn had links to individual conference listings. There was only a single image on the page (our logo), and while I didn’t call the site ugly, it certainly was not pretty. But it got us our first few users, and it got us our first spiders – which began indexing our pages for their search engines. More importantly, it got us our first set of usable data points – from what were the more popular types of pages in the search engines, to which parts of our site gets more use, to what moving a few modules around on a page did for our conversion numbers, and so forth.
Since those early days, we’ve iterated into our current alpha product that’s live, and are now iterating towards a beta product. One of the challenges I’ve seen with releasing early is that sometimes the “early offering” may be viewed by some as your “only offering”. I usually don’t worry too much about this, as rapid iteration and frequent releases will paint a very different perception, but if you’re someone that likes to release early but don’t release often, you may have to deal with some of that negative PR.
Releasing Early vs. Releasing Poor Quality Code
Releasing early does not mean releasing half-baked code, or code that simply shouldn’t be released. If we have even a few users, it can become a big deal if we’re constantly releasing unstable and buggy code. It tells our users the type of quality (or lack thereof) they can expect from our product, our service, and our brand. Users in general are understanding of a few bugs and that the product may not be perfect, but almost all users today will not tolerate an unstable or otherwise unusable product. It is a good experiment to try — to see just how quickly your loyal users switch to your competitors, but one I prefer not to perform.
Segmenting Code Exposure
One of our methods for releasing early is to segment who we release the code to. What I mean by this is that sometimes we only want certain users to see certain features, allowing us to still test in-development or less-stable code to select parties. This allows us to gather broader data points outside of the individual developers themselves. For instance, I frequently release parts of code only to our admin staff, where there is greater tolerance for bugs and instability. The ability to expose certain parts of our code to certain users is built right into our application logic, which makes this type of controlled, “phased” releases very easy to do. We’re certainly not original, as quite a few companies do this, and do this well, and over time we plan on improving the granularity of our segmentation logic for maximum flexibility, and for better phased deployments.
Release Fast
In our early days, we were able to release code without much impact, good or bad. This is because we didn’t really have any users. While we never tried to release obviously buggy code, the reality is that there were definitely bugs that went live. Sometimes there were bugs that didn’t surface locally that appeared in production. And when we found out, we would quickly fix it and deploy the updates. Occasionally, a user would alert us of an issue they came across that they didn’t work properly, and we would very quickly fix it and deploy the updates.
If you intend to release early versions of code, the ability to repond, fix, and deploy quickly becomes critically important. At Conference Hound, we can deploy the entire codebase in several minutes. A lot of it is still manual, but we’re small enough still and don’t have many servers yet that we can still make it work. Longer term, we are actively working towards a “continuous deployment” setup that will allow automated builds and deploys.
As activity and traffic on our site continues to grow, we’ve tightened up on releasing less bugs but kept our speed high by releasing high-quality code in smaller chunks.
When I was at Yahoo!, one of the things we did really well was a testing method called R.I.T.E. (Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation). Basically, users would be invited to take a test in our controlled lab environment. We would ask them to use the product, and gather data points by observing the user behind a mirrored wall. In between user sessions, we would quickly make changes to the code based on our findings and test our changes on the next user, iteratively improving session after session. The take aways that we had from this type of testing proved invaluable in our final products. Now imagine doing this on a live site and with live users — and you tell me if you feel the data points you gather will be valuable or not.
Release Often
One of the challenges of releasing code early is that new offerings can often be minimal and light in features. For us, we gather our data points as soon as code is released, and quickly iterate over our learnings to improve our features. Sometimes the iteration works very well, and we’ll see features mature and become more robust. Other times, it works less well, and the features may or may not mature the way we would like. The important thing for us to remember is to keep releasing code, to do it often, and to keep improving.
Paul Graham states that “there is a lot more urgency once you release” and I can attest to this in our daily operations. The search feature that we released originally now needs sorting and filtering capabilities. Or the initial messaging system that just allowed for notifications is picking up traction, and now there’s pressure to add reply and threading capabilities. Or users logging in using our “Sign In with LinkedIn” feature now want better integrations with LinkedIn itself.
At Conference Hound, we release code at least weekly, and often multiple times a week. Occasionally, we also release multiple times a day. We’re still small so this hasn’t been a challenge, and we are intent on maintaining this nimbleness as our team and userbase grows. Getting our “continuous integration” system in place will be key.
Closing
In closing, I’d just like to add that while this is the way we operate at Conference Hound, this is usually not the case at various organizations I’ve worked for in the past or consult/advise currently. Sometimes there are forces outside of my control that are hard to get in line with this philosophy of code deployment. Often it’s because there is simply lots of opposition to this approach, usually around claims that this frequency of code updating introduces instability (for this latter item, I counter that it’s the execution of the process that’s questionable rather than the philosophy being questionable). One may argue that it’s a matter of education, socializing the benefits, and gaining the support necessary to carry this out, but in my experience, in certain companies and cultures, this is just too tall a task and any efforts towards this are ineffective and more for “show” than results.
In any case, happy to hear any comments anyone may wish to leave, although debates on the topic have been done plenty enough on the web and probably don’t need to happen here as well. Hopefully you found some of the above interesting to read.
Photo credits (in order of appearance): http://hubpages.com/hub/celerifere-first-bicycle and http://www.vintageculture.net/vintage-bicycles/
Posted: January 24th, 2011 | Author: Jay Hung | Filed under: Conference Hound, Startups | View Comments
Recently, I made two decisions: 1) leave the corporate world to rejoin the startup world, and 2) commit myself to blogging more. Historically, blogging has been a difficult task for me to do (I can nearly code a blog platform faster than I can write a blog post). To kick off my initial series of posts and make good on my resolution to blog more this year, I’ve decided it was easiest to talk about myself for a bit. Yes, I realize that sounds weird and narcissistic, but it really is not the intent. I am frequently reading about and learning from other entrepreneurs’ past experiences, successes, and even their mistakes, and I have definitely taken away a lot of value. Hopefully by blogging more and sharing my own thoughts and experiences, I will be able to contribute some of that value back into the ecosystem.
So, why startups again?
Although the past 5+ years of my career was spent in corporate America, I have always considered myself an entrepreneur at heart and by background. There were reasons I had back then for leaving startupland to go into corporate America (more on this in a future post), and there are reasons I have now for leaving corporate America and returning to startupland. Here are my primary reasons for my recent transition back to startupland.
- I have always considered myself an entrepreneur first and foremost
- I love working on new ideas, new models, and new markets
- I have always favored equity over salary
- I like to execute agilely and rapidly (which is generally rare in most corporate environments, despite what they say)
- I always get fired up when someone tells me I can’t do something (and I had a mentor I respect very much tell me not too long ago that I couldn’t/shouldn’t do a startup again)
- I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder (more on this later), which drives me to work harder than anyone else
- but most importantly, as I look back over my career, my happiest professional moments have been running my first startup, and I’ve missed that
Don’t get me wrong, I have had many enjoyable moments in the corporate world and worked with many great people. The road back has been a long and emotional one for me, but I feel in all ways it’s the right decision.
So, why Conference Hound?
photo from www.s-mcnamara.com
I am the CTO of Conference Hound. Many people have asked me why I chose Conference Hound over other opportunities. Those that know me closely will know that my professional life is now consumed with Conference Hound, and with the idea of “helping people find, research, and connect with the events that can help them grow their careers and enrich their professional lives”. Sure, I did my fair share of due diligence, but once I had decided – once I had committed to the fact that this is the right thing for me – I was all in.
But how can I be so sure, you ask? How did I know it’s the right thing? How did I calculate the risk? What happens if it doesn’t work out?
These are all great questions, and the fact of the matter is, I don’t know – not for sure anyways. Nobody has a crystal ball and can see the future. But what I do know is that:
- I like the CEO: our skills complement each other, we work very well together, we disagree amicably and constructively, but above all else, he is someone of integrity
- I like the idea: I like the problem we are solving (no easy way currently to find and research events if it’s not a top-tier event and if you don’t know the event name), I like the space that it’s in (professional events), I like that the product ultimately is a tool and service that is able to enrich people’s professional lives and make it just a little easier
- I feel confident that we can build something of value (how much value is what we are now working on)
- I feel the market is big enough and underserved: 30k-100k professional events each year (depending on who’s numbers you believe), 33M attendees annually in United States alone, $100B+ industry globally, and no dominant player yet
- I feel this is something I could devote myself to – seriously devote myself to, and I have
- I don’t want to over think too many what ifs: sure, I have to feel that I am making the right decision, but I have seen too many would-be entrepreneurs talk themselves out of doing something by over thinking it
So there you have it – the above reasons, coupled with the burning desire to “do my own thing” again, was enough for me to take the road back to Startupland, and the reason for me to choose
Conference Hound as my vehicle.
Entering Startupland
photo from innovationamerica.us
The road ahead for myself as well as for
Conference Hound will be rough and unpredictable. I am unable to tell you yet what type of success, if any, we will achieve. But I can most certainly tell you that it will be exciting – it will be challenging – but most importantly, it will be fun, and
I am effing jazzed about both of our futures.
Posted: January 3rd, 2011 | Author: Jay Hung | Filed under: Conference Hound, Random Thoughts | View Comments
Today is the first business day of 2011, and I felt it fitting to finally re-begin (yes, I know that’s not a real word) my blogging efforts. This has been a struggle for me historically – I currently have a few original posts nearly finished, in draft mode, for several months – and for one reason or another (probably “one excuse or another” is more accurate) I just never completed them. I am not one to make “New Years’ Resolutions”, preferring to act right away whenever I feel there is something worth doing, but this year I will make my one official resolution: to become a regular blogger and earn the right to accurately rename the “Unblog” qualifier of this blog to “Blog”.
This year will be different – it already feels different – because I actually have stuff I want to say, and to share publicly. For I am once again, back in the startup world, with a new business venture: Conference Hound, with my business partner Bruce Carlisle. And with this new venture, I have a new mission in my professional life – to help people find and connect with better conferences, and the professionals attending them.
In addition to the above, I look forward to sharing other anecdotes about my path from the corporate world back to startup world (yes, it can be done, and no, it may not be the right path for everyone), and some stark contrasts that I’ve seen, realized, and experienced between corporate America and startup America.
I wish everyone a happy, successful, and prosperous 2011, and look forward to conversations with you all this year.