inside Traction IO

On wednesday we had a great evening at Berlin Tech Meetup where I gave a demo of what we do and a short talk on challenges we're facing. More on this plus a video of it after the weekend.

For now, here's a fun part we had planned with our friends at EyeEm for the meetup that didn't really work out, because of an overloaded wifi.

This is how it works:

Get the EyeEm app on your phone

take a photo of somebody

tag it with WhenADemo

wait a minute

hilarity!

This is how we did it:

Together with EyeEm we turned the photo updates of one of their albums into an event stream, WhenAUser will understand. Then we created a rule that for every photo update event, uses the photo URL and mustachifies it with mustachify.me (which is powered by face.com) and upload it back to EyeEm. We also title it 'mustachified!'.

This is why we did it:

"With great power comes great responsibility. "

For the technical team, event streams are at the heart of what we do here at traction.io. Now until recently, event stream processing was a rather esoteric topic, seemingly not having a great deal to offer the average web developer. So why do we find this so interesting?

You may have noticed that event streams are playing an increasingly important role in the architecture of major web platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. For these big applications, the motivating use cases for event stream processing are advanced features such as detecting fraud, identifying trending topics, and generating personalized recommendations. 

Most SaaS product teams aren’t building something on the scale of Facebook, or LinkedIn, but event streams can be useful for almost any web application. To demonstrate why, here are some simple examples (while we use JSON for all of our events, I wrote these examples in pseudo-English to make them easier to follow):

customer47 viewed product12 customer47 added product12 to shopping cart customer47 viewed check-out page customer47 viewed shipping-charges page ... 1 day later with no payment recorded ... customer47 has abandoned their shopping cart

[email protected] created an account [email protected] logged-in [email protected] followed user123 [email protected] followed user456 ... after following many more in a short period of time ... [email protected] unfollowed user123 [email protected] unfollowed user456 ... after unfollowing many more in a short period of time ... [email protected] is a suspicious character

As I mentioned in a previous post, "My co-founders and I have been spending most of the past 3 years working very closely together." I guess it might be time to tell a bit about who we are. 

traction.io is a team of three founders: David Anderson, Chris Weis and myself, Kevin Dykes. We also have a very senior product manager named Karsten Rieke and some amazing advisors on our team. (Shameless plug - we'll be hiring back-end developers and front-end developers soon - reach out if you are interested in learning more!)

  David Anderson

David is a founder and has spent 20 years as a scientist doing academic research in computer graphics and user interfaces, and has spent the last eight years leading engineering teams at some of the fastest growing technology companies in Europe.  His specialty is large-scale refactorings and architectural overhauls of busy websites.  He is the brilliant, crazy professor on the team, cracking the toughest development challenges thanks to his substantial depth of experience.

  Christian Weis

Chris is the young(-er than us :), super smart, self-taught rockstar of the team. He is a first time founder who brings a unique perspective to the company which is not otherwise readily available from the typical engineer I've encountered here. He’s an exceptionally gifted natural talent.

   Kevin Dykes 

 And my name is Kevin and I am the 3rd founder of this team. I have been building software companies since 1996 and have learned the thrill of success and pain of, well, you know… :) I've always been a bit of an API geek and love how best of breed SaaS apps can connect to solve huge problems for users. traction.io and WhenAUser is all about making that possible and easy - making a layer of glue for business SaaS. 

   Karsten Rieke 

My co-founders and I have spent most of the past 3 years working very closely together. We were first part of the core leadership and developer team building a cloud management platform for another German company. Things shifted rather suddenly in that company last Spring and we found ourselves needing to take a step in a new direction. 

We were working deep in the cloud stack at that time (IaaS). But, we realized that the real major action was happening a couple of levels above in SaaS. And, as we explored our respective future options, we knew we were great as a team. We trusted each other implicitly (really HUGE deal) and shared a strong vision in wanting to build a world class software company - something big and lasting. With an agreement to spend time exploring and learning as we built and tested product ideas, we launched Traction Labs last summer. 

We initially began by developing key projects for a few other funded startups to keep us warm and fed. But, in our hearts we knew were were a product team. So we ran down rabbit holes, created and tested theories, developed iterations of software ideas and spent many an hour in deep passionate 'discussion' on the 'what, who and why' of our team. We even focused in on one product called TractionStream, a sort of unified inbox for business SaaS tools. But, we found ourselves unhappy with the progress and feedback from beta users of that product. So, in early 2012 we decided to kill it completely. 

But, we had learned some things, explored the SaaS integrations market more deeply and found an exciting direction in which to direct our newfound wisdom. After spending about 9 months exploring and validating the entire problem space around SaaS adoption, early in 2012 we dialed in our focus.

As we now are going down a very clear path with exciting early market validation, we decided to change the name to traction.io. Our first product coming out is called WhenAUser - a simple rules engine for automating user retention and user engagement for web and mobile software teams.