2023 was a great year, full of the challenges and opportunities that really makes the rollercoaster adventure ride that is startup-land worthwhile. That's not to say that we didn't have trials to overcome but with the new year comes renewed purpose and the road ahead is looking particularly exciting! Let's take a peek backwards and see what happened...
There were quite a few major items that happened in the past year that have set the tone for 2024. First of all, we made the decision to revamp the way business owners and operators interact with the product - there had to be a "place" where the insights and interactions were consumed. Second was the recognition of Huddlify on the world stage via our invitation to SHRMLabs annual global incubator competition. Finally we've begun the makings of our recurring content production by setting up the recording studio for podcasts, interviews, speaker sessions, product updates and communicating across more channels as we grow.
Delving further into the points above, our initial method involved delivering reports and insights via email. While this approach got the job done, it became apparent that the value of these insights was often lost amid the deluge of emails and other information—a situation at odds with our core value of productivity. To address this, we took a bold step and developed an administrative dashboard. This platform empowered owners to effortlessly manage every aspect of our system, from user and account administration to web hooks and the initiation point for our API. It laid the foundation for future community plugins and cross-platform integration. This decision wasn't without its challenges; essentially, we committed to building another application with all the associated tasks—planning, scoping, developer cycles, vendor procurement, and testing. After careful consideration of various options, a thorough cost/benefit analysis, and a few spirited founder debates, the decision was made, and the die was cast.
I'll be the first to admit that, initially, I was against the idea of building more features—I've been a 'ship-it-then-fix-it' kind of guy for most of my career. However, Huddlify isn't your typical product. Unlike many digital products that are essentially derivatives, copying existing functionalities to get to market quickly, Huddlify challenges this norm. Most products prioritize time to market, but one of Huddlify's standout features challenges the established practice of what essentially amounts to commercial spyware—collecting and storing personal information without consent. Our research indicates that such data is traded and sold en masse more frequently than one might guess.
From the outset, we've prioritised transparency and made a steadfast commitment to never store personally identifiable data—an uncommon practice in the modern world, so much so that it can genuinely unsettle people.
Another point of contention revolved around time. Building features, particularly in a bootstrapped environment with limited resources had a direct impact on our launch schedule. Scaling back milestones to advocate for a different approach was a difficult decision, but as I mentioned earlier, when challenging entrenched opinions and viewpoints, there's no room for excuses that might lead our potential customers to overlook your product—they might just move on. It was precisely this realisation that pushed us toward the revised pathway. We are committed to delivering a seamless product that represents tangible organisational value, helping our customers build trust with their teams in the evolving landscape of this hybrid world.
I'm keeping it quite high level here, but if you'd like to read more about the Huddlify administrative portal (something we're calling the HQ these days), you can pick up more information here: https://www.huddlify.com/post/everyone-loves-a-dashboard
The next significant development unfolded in early November when we received a surprise contact from the team at SHRMLabs. It turns out they've been keeping a close eye on our progress and extended an invitation for us to participate in the Better Workplaces Challenge Cup in 2024. Frankly, this came out of nowhere. My co-founder, Alex, and I are no strangers to frequent outreach—however, 99.999% of it usually turns out to be thinly veiled attempts to sell us something or push various services, making it challenging to sift through the noise for genuine opportunities.
When I say this came out of nowhere, both Alex and I are quite lax in the content production department - we've been careful not to oversell the news as we've been sitting in closed beta for just on 12 months now and the decision to extend this while we finalise the HQ and re-engage our beta partners to go another round has created a vacuum of communication so-to-speak. The other side of it is - we are a startup - we wear all the hats, all of the time. So when we're deep in the abyss of R&D, juggling commitments means that some areas of the business don't get as much love as they should. Even with that, our narrative and product has been compelling enough to attract the attention of a global vendors like SHRM willing to reach out and start those crucial early discussions.
After some back-and-forth discussions with the SHRM team in Virginia, everything fell into place regarding timing and processes. Consequently, we've embarked on the journey of expanding our communication and exposure, gearing up for our launch of what hopefully will end up being a global product debut. We are thrilled to be part of this exciting opportunity working with the folks at SHRM, and with a bit of luck and a lot of hard work, it will culminate in our presenting at a TEDx-style setting in the US to a global audience in June of this year.
Its these types of interactions that let us know we're on the right path and what we're building is resonating along with the demands of the evolving workplace. We've got a lot to learn in this regard and 2024 is going to be the ground swell with our communications and our goal is to build a solid communication strategy, how we present ourselves and finally the narrative around what we think is a game changing product.
Which leads to the last big thing that happened in 2023. Being contacted by a multi-national organisation was all well and good, but it highlighted how little of ourselves was out there in the market and in-context. Building brand reputation and diversifying our existing communication channels is so critical to our journey. Given where we are in the roadmap, it makes perfect sense to start investing in this key element of content creation.
Alex, aside from being our co-founder, also happens to be our first customer. His story IS the anxiety felt in the market. His experiences are shared with you and his voice is the one you resonant and identify with when making the determination of whether Huddlify is right for you. This is something we needed to capture, as we quickly found out we can only be in so many places at once.
So we set up Studio v1.0 as best we could manage, earned our youtube diploma on how best to setup, record, edit, publish and ultimately released our first video. Its the first of many as we get comfortable presenting to a glass eyeball rather than the inter-personal meetings and conferences we've been used to up until now. The year ahead will see us capturing the feedback and the interactions we've had with our partners and advisors in the form of video, podcasts and interviews to really start cutting our teeth and aligning the platform, readying for imminent public release.
Like most years, 2023 definitely wasn't without its challenges. As a bootstrapped startup running on limited resources, we have to make sure the wheel keeps turning in our everyday lives - meaning we periodically had to step away, sometimes for months at a time for other commitments, jobs and family concerns. All this when you're in a peer-dependant development cycle, had the capacity to slows things right down - when it happened, it felt like we were in the doldrums.
Scope creep reared its ugly head along the way, some necessarily so, others could've been avoided or deferred until later in the product development cycle - all these things we now know in hindsight and its healthy to look over the good and the bad to keep the team grounded and motivated. Planning is something we need to get better at - R&D is super fun but it can cascade out of control and it manifests itself as scope creep and poor decision making when you're basically doing the software equivalent of performing live jazz.
I often say to Alex that looking after "future you" should always be a consideration when developing software as you're often called to fix your own mistakes or you become the dependancy in a team context - something you want to avoid like the plague. We often build software in a vacuum, even though we build it in teams, its quite personal and even between engineers who develop similar codebases, you can always tell who writes what. Documentation is crucial for integration when you're sprinting through development - often going to one side - we're getting better at this, and taking the time to learn the features and functions available on tools like github.com have proven to be a huge leg up in tracking issues, wiki creation, documentation, automation and projects. I highly recommend doing this if you've only scratched the surface of rudimentary git functions.
I've learnt a lot about this year and plenty about about myself. The only advice that I offer to startups out there is that frustration is often times misplaced - communicating openly and honestly with your peers almost always nets the superior result. Moreover its usually a product of "being in your own head" that gets you into trouble. Sometimes its the letting go in order to move forward that works best.
Sometimes its the letting go in order to move forward that works best.
We've definitely called in favours along the way and just like raising children, it takes a community to ensure success. Huddlify is no exception. Sometimes all we needed was a pep talk, someone to vent to, having the courage to ask for help and putting the egos aside and letting others jump in to write code we couldn't crack ourselves. We've got amazing families, peers, mentors and developer community around us that we've been able to lean on during the ups and downs - too many to mention but you know who you are and for your help in 2023, we are incredibly grateful.
It wouldn't be 2023 without mentioning AI. One of the biggest impacts felt across the entire world was the rapid evolution and implementation of Artificial intelligence across a huge number of industries - notably film and television have sparked riots and ongoing strikes in the US as a result. I think I penned more articles in 2023 on AI than any other topic combined. For Huddlify, this meant a seismic shift in the way we develop our product - all of a sudden, concepts, languages and features could be contextualised like never before. If we needed to explore alternate options, we weren't limited to our individual knowledge and our ability to learn the "syntax" in order to learn something new - something that is a huge barrier to entry when writing code and part of the reason why software engineering is extremely difficult.
AI didn't solve all of our problems, and especially in context of software development. You very much still need to know what you're doing - I have "conversations" with CoPilot when developing software - it gives me options, I'll explore one and that leads to more options and so on - it hasn't "done it all" for me based on having access to all my work. I watch endless videos showing AI writing all the code or these "no-code" AI solutions that are essentially scraping websites and filling in the plugin blanks. For certain I like it, I'm pretty sure Alex does as well and it's been a great addition to the team and our productivity and I'm excited to see how we leverage it further as we grow.
We make use of Canva, Figma and Creative Cloud, all of which have AI based tools to speed up our content development, consistency with tone of voice and without it, we wouldn't be half as far along as we are. Adaptability is a survival skill and I'm glad we have these tools to supercharge areas in the business we would otherwise to look outside the business for. In fact, ChatGPT has been looking over my shoulder as I write this article - what a time to be alive 🤓
2024 is shaping up to be a big year. We've made decisions that if successful, will propel us forward to market entry and grow as an organisation. Huddlify has gone from being something we built, to something taking on a life of its own which is really exciting to witness. With our commercial trials underway, we have a momentum and trajectory that's hard not to get all warm and fuzzy about.
From the development of our HQ portal, to being recognised and invited to participate in the Better Workplaces challenge cup and starting our content creation, its been nothing short of hard work to get to this point and there's plenty more to come. I'm super grateful for a co-founder like Alex because even though its unbelievably hard work, we've managed to laugh at ourselves and have fun while doing it along the way. We've met milestones, even exceeding some, also we've been knocked down by failures and setbacks only to dust ourselves off and keep going. We're constantly learning and breaking things along the way in the hope we can deliver something relevant and useful to market - because at the end of it all, the market will ultimately decide our fate.
So in closing, thanks for being a part of the journey in 2023. I'm super excited to still be on this train in 2024 and If you haven't already, I encourage you to follow us online as we start ramping up our content calendar and communicating more.
But for now, enjoy our first introductory video!
Alex - you handsome devil.