Comments:"The shit that TechCrunch doesn’t tell you…. - Teddle"
URL:http://blog.teddle.com/post/42016690099/the-shit-that-tech-crunch-doesnt-tell-you
We are hungover as we write this. Why? Well namely even when you don’t have any money you can still get drunk, but more so because of the day we had yesterday.
This isn’t a ‘3 easy steps to your first 1,000,000 users’ type post. Just a real life account of what a pretty average day in a young startup is actually like.
It’s only when we actually sit back and look at things that we realise how bizarre our lives have become. Rewind 18 months ago, and an eventful day comprised of sitting in a different desk than usual at our corporate head office job.
9.23am - SMS from customer letting us know one of our cleaners has failed to show for a booking.
9.45am - We finally make contact with the cleaner he has made it to the house.
9.58am - We receive an email out of the blue from a Rails dev we casually met the previous day. Turns out he like the cut of our gib and wants to invest. Awesome!
10.17am - We send our counter offer back to another big fish investor. He’s playing hard ball, we’re out of our league.
10.43am - We issue our first P45 (for those in the US, a pink slip). Feel like Donald Trump minus the comb over.
11.02am - Customer from earlier in the morning tells us they weren’t happy with the cleaner. Can they have another.
11.43am - Bug, system down. It’s the last day of the month and we are literally one booking away from hitting our monthly target. Fantastic timing.
12.00pm - Tom, our resident guy has to clear out so we can use the office for our weekly yoga class. It’s sounds poncy, but it is the only way we get exercise. Plus Jules will soon be able to touch her toes.
12.48pm - Mid Savasana (the quiet lie-y down-y bit) we can hear our phones buzzing on vibrate incessantly. Never a good sign.
13.01pm - Cause of vibrating found. Another cleaner failed to show for an interview the previous evening. The cleaner had finally learned the joys of texting and had got herself completely confused as to where she should be going.
13.02pm - Customer appeased, interview rescheduled for that evening.
14.15pm - Alex (very loud northern girl and Teddle co-founder), pitches the business to a fund over the phone. Her noise cancelling headphones only adding to her volume. Rest of office experiences some permanent hearing loss.
14.38pm - Deceptively simple support question, leads to a long tangential group discussion about our pricing model. Tom’s brain explodes. He starts to recode the payment logic. Again.
15.00pm - Alex visits PeerIndex’s offices armed with Lemsip, to plan out a joint marketing campaign we’ll be running in February.
15.15pm - Various reports come in about weird bugs on the site from people running older browsers. Jules starts down the black hole of shims, fills and JS trying to root out the culprit.
16.00pm - Receive a mail telling us we’ve been shortlisted for the Top 100 of something or other. Some more validation following on from our nice (albeit surprising) win at Barclay Wealth Capital’s event on Monday.
17.11pm - Tom is a broken man. He is on the floor of the office sorting out the documents in the filing cabinet, singing to himself. He’s traded our payment woes for tax payment woes.
18.42pm - We’ve decided a beer is necessary to try and lure Tom back to the land of the non criminally insane. Phone rings. It’s the cleaner from lunchtime. She is in someones back garden. Lost. Trying to climb over a fence…..
19.13pm- Alex rings from the pub asking where Jules and Tom are. Turns out they are in the office trying to work out how two people can provide cover for the entire tech side of the business 24/7 365 days a year. 2 into 365 doesn’t go.
19.39pm - Tom and Jules shut down laptop, turn out lights and meet the others in the pub for Teddle’s first team night out in 6 months. It was always going to be epic.
Amazingly, this has been our best month ever. In previous months we fretted and worried about how we would get anyone to use us. Now we fret and worry about how we can serve all of the people that do.
If you happen to fancy Thursdays like this, we are hiring. Get in touch at hello at teddle dot com.
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