#litmos

Starting second time around with my latest company Revert, I’ve made a few mistakes. I’ve also made some great decisions; so on balance things are awesome. But that wouldn’t be as interesting to talk about, so let’s focus on the negative. :-)

The majority of mistakes I’ve made so far are related to getting too far ahead of myself. Perhaps it’s a curse of having started a successful company before and having some insight into the stresses and strains that a growing company encounters in the early years. The upshot is I’ve jumped ahead and covered many of the things we will need while scaling fast, while forgetting that there are a lot of small steps in between day one and when things start to pop.

Not to say things are all bad, but in retrospect the order of execution and therefore focus could have been slightly better.

A couple of examples…

Focusing on payment gateways, streamlining the accounting and reconciliation process before having customers.

Implementing A/B testing software before having loads of traffic.

Purchasing Helpdesk software before dealing with individual support email was a problem. 

Setting up analytics, error tracking, New Relic etc. before we even had one customer, no load and no problems.

Why did I do these things? I guess I believed that we would have traffic at the sort of scale we did with Litmos from day one so wanted to make sure we were ready for the big time. The reality is that Revert is a different beast, has a different growth pattern and of course Rome wasn’t built in a day, these things take time.

A couple of months on and we’re starting to have traffic and interest that warrants some of those decisions, so perhaps I’m being a little hard on myself. But it’s something to think about nonetheless.