SkrivaPå Weekly: Stream of Conciousness Special ed

Hello team!

Have been writing papers all weekend as usual so Ill try to keep this one short (as short as I´m capable of = medium) Last week status update and some praises from me and G to you all and to ourselves:

• Mariusz. Has done a heroic job with the front end stuff. Hell of a lot of code and almost all is implemented. We will have a wonderfully beautiful app by the end of this sprint.

• Andzej. Big up for all the bug cracking in the code. Awesome to have you so self going so fast. Extra praises from Gracjan.

• Eric. Finally done with e-leg! Jiiiiiha!!! 1 week early to schedule. You’re the king! Will be finally tested this week and then the last USP (Unique Selling Point) that our Swedish competition has over us will be gone. Also want to thank you for a beautiful letter that almost made me cry. I think it touched us all.

• Viktor. Producing speccs as madman. Testing like a pro. Also great work on the new sales partner that we will most probably land and will work their butts off to sell us. It will be a great test on how it works to have an external sales org really dedicating time to selling our service. Hopefully they will deliver.

• Emily. Thanks for the great security updates. Also great job with the CSV together with Viktor. The customer is super happy about not having to manually send the 100 docs and promised to be patient = he loves you. We love you too.

• Nazli. Really getting a hang of the security stuff and doing great job with Emily. Gracjan loved your input on the log sorting software.

• Bell. King of the policies! Keep up the good job!

• Alexander Yngling. New satellite to our team. Thanks for the great API speccing. Awesome job.

• Johannes Schildt. Thanks for delivering some high quality project management tips and tricks and reviewing our pricing strategy and app usability to simple users. It really will make a difference I believe. I have been fighting with that pricing strategy for a long time and I think we finally nailed it. Its just beautiful. For the ones that want to read it its in the latest upgrade of the biz plan that I did this weekend (yeah, its kind of becoming a bad weekend addiction upgrading that PPT).

• Patrik and Tim. Thanks for finally delivering the front end stuff! Its so beautiful. Customers are going crazy: “Where is this Tim? Can we have him?”. Btw, have a cool company that want to meet with you Tim, Martin and David.

• Magnus Carlsson for the great hands-on dev team inspiration and help with reviewing our code. I loved listening out to your code deep talk. I guess my appreciation wasn’t even close to that of the tech teams.

• Stefan Kanev. Thanks for the long awaited testing seminar! It was really appreciated (though I had to hang up as it got too techie). Looking forward to the followup on that.

• John Allberg for the great advice on how to set up the hack competition. It was really useful. Its always fun to call you, always some really interesting insights.

• Richard von Essen for all the contacts and the deep dedication to getting the brand development going. Just saw your email. Wow, I want to work with that guy that does Harvard Universities branding! =) Sry, haven’t called Laurenti yet. Will definitely do.

• Pär Lundgren. For all the great perspectives on presentation skills. And just general wise advice.

• Hannes Dernehl. For the awesome contacts to people and great ideas. Really look forward to arranging that 72h SkrivaPå Go Global Camp. I think it will be a real PR hit.

• Henrik Stridsberg. I want you on the board! Hope you are still up for the task.

• Samuel Johansson. See you on Tuesday. Look forward to talking scalability and getting the nitty gritty of your start-up insights.

• Mike Cappy. Thanks for all the great financial advice on this investment round.

• Mary. I just say: RightSignature!! Please keep up sending me all the market analysis stuff.

• Gracjan. Thanks for all the server fixes, logging and foremost the patience with the crazy amount of lawyers stuff that we have been having to work through for the investment. I love you my dear co-founder.

• Hm who else? Me! Great job Lukas at getting so many new customer leads this week and finally getting all the investment paperwork done.

• Ah! And Dominik of cause! Thanks for investing! Ill quadruple and then quintuple your money. I promise. I’m going to do everything in my power to make you a happy and extra rich investor. And also provide some extra fun on the way there. Welcome to join a stand-up whenever you have time. Its 8.45-9.00 every weekday morning.

Wow, that was a long list of people. Did I really talk to you all this week? Naa, only 95% =) Thanks all for your great contributions. You are SkrivaPå and SkrivaPå is nothing without you.

General comments

Launch

We are doing quite well with the launch schedule. How can I say that?! We are launching next week?! Naa, we are not. Because of all the customer involvement, the product dev, the investment and not having a really beautiful product to show off before all the front end was done (tomorrow!) we have decided to postpone the launch with two weeks to really be able to deliver something ready (as expected). This week I will start calling journalists. Please don’t slow down the pace though. There is still loads of stuff to be finished before launch as you might have noticed in the last weekly.

Hacker competition

1 April Chalmers is starting a course on hacking. We will be one of the main targets. Of cause not our main server. Emily and Nazli will be administrators of the project and John and Magnus will be judges of the competition. This will be fun!

Customers

Our customers customers just absolutely love our service! As soon as a customer tries it out with their customers they get awesome feedback back. So awesome that it just kills all their initial doubt. Also the viral strategy seems to work well as many customers customers soon become our direct customer leads. I had a fun twitter conversation with one of them while he was praising our service and we will book a meeting tomorrow to do some sales. Another interesting story is that UpSales, a sales CRM company that might want to integrate our service into their CRM (they have thousands of customers) started to test out our service this week. Actually contracts were signed by four of their sales people and they all love it and are amazed at the great customer feedback that they are getting. Im quite confident that we will land this deal unless we screw up royale. Another fun story is a friend of mine that works as a sales guy at MyNewsdesk that called me in panic saying he just had to sign a contract NOWNOWNOW! So I set up an account for him at the spot and he was also just amazed at the great customer feedback and his own app usability experience: ”Wow, Lukas, what you’ve built is really great.”. Finally I want to report that Im in this breakfast sales network that eat breakfast together on Fridays. On average people get 0.5 or less hot customer leads at each meeting. I get an average of 6-8 (based on 3 breakfasts). So = what we got is something general, something that everybody (in business at least) can understand the need for and I get constant reports on how easy it is to sell the stuff. People just love to recommend us and they feel its so easy. Again: VIRALITY! Yeah.

To sum up

We are doing something that customers find really useful and absolutely love. I’m proud, of you and of what we are building together. Also it seems like we have really reached the tip of the mountain. The first and hardest part of the journey seems to be coming to an end. The part where we wonder if we will ever be done with a product that people will be willing to pay for, use and love. I can see that the downhill seems to be starting. Don’t expect any magic with adoption exploding but I think the upward curve is really starting to kick in.

Ok, enuff