So, many people are asking me for updates, or to have a closer look at Mindquilt.
For them, the good news is that our beta is live (since more than a month now, actually); the (less good) news is that we are sending out invitations at a slower pace we would like to. It turned out that there are so many activities in running the company (paperwork, marketing, sales, product design, user interface, customer support and plain-old development) that we are constantly overwhelmed by the things to do. We have a plan to improve that anyway! more on that later
So, talking about updates.
Photo by Alex Dunne
The first, long due update, is about our participation in the Enteprise 2.0 Launchpad; as good ol’ Ceasar said “we came, we saw, and… we came second” (or something like that). Daniel went on stage on July 16th to present Mindquilt and, as you can guess from the diabolic grin, he was great. We had good feedbacks and a lot of interest, and 38% of the votes. So close to win.
Of course it hurts a bit to loose for a handful of votes, but we were by far the youngest company in the lot.
That’s the thing I like of my team mates: we are so excited to present our product and compete in startup competitions that we often forget we are competing against companies with 2-3 years of hard work behind, and hundreds or thousands of customers.
Photo by StewieD
Back to Europe, back to coding. We got together in Dusseldorf for a final hackathon before releasing a new beta version. Despite the crazy world cup german days, we were able to release a lot of bug fixes and new features in the new version, mostly driven by the early feedbacks of our beta and potential customers.
We also set up a blog where you can gain more insights on Mindquilt.
Shortly after, we participated in the Techcrunch Pitch Battle in London, hosted by the new TechHub. Again a great experience, we made it to the final 8 but not in the top 3. Anton was on stage this time, and he did a great job.
What’s next? Again, so many things I don’t even know where to start.
First thing, we have been selected for the Mini Seedcamp London. It will be again Anton turn to present Mindquilt in this 20-startup-20 competition, with most of the European VCs and angels as judges. The Mini Seedcamp is next tuesday so check my twitter account for almost-real-time updates.
Code wise, besides the omnipresent bug fixes, the payment integration (via Paypal) is almost ready; I also worked on the back office part to allow us to gather more usage statistics on the product.
The next big topic is enterprise system integration… huge topic, we will as usual go back to our users and potential customers to understand what are the priorities.
Finally, we all realised that Mindquilt is taking us every day more time, and we decided to progressively close our consultancy contracts to work full time on it. Daniel is already 100% on Mindquilt, and flying back to Austin, TX to take care of business in the USA. I’ll also end my long-lasting collaboration with ITHR and Vodafone in 3 weeks to dedicate 1(5)0% of my time to this new venture. Pretty exciting eh?
I’m not sure where I’ll be based at the moment. Getting a Visa for the USA seems to be very complicated, so I’ll probably be based still in Dusseldorf, with frequent flights to Austin.
