uniiverse

“There is no delight in owning anything unshared”
                                                              - Seneca  

This Roman philosopher really had a solid head on his shoulders, and was very down-to-earth.  And that’s what we’re all about — bringing back joy to people through sharing, collaboration and trust.

Our vision really resonated this week.  Being ever close to launching your startup’s product is a perfect reason for one to reconnect with old friends, and catch-up.  We’d be happy to run you through what we’ve been up to, and share our business plan — let us know if you’d like to join us for lunch, coffee or a mojito.

Deliverables this week were a nice mixture of technical wizardry, artistic creations, exciting business planning / strategy, and practical financing approaches.  Our team produced everything from illustrations, to innovative sizing of TAM (total addressable market), and to state machines.  A great mix of disciplines across deliverables, but also within deliverables (everything is artful, everything is designed, and everything is technically sound). 

We’ve also had good response rate to our job postings.  We think we’re creating a really exciting and meaningful place to work, and are excited to grow our team (while staying lean).  We’re constantly interviewing in search of the gems out there.

Progress was also made in the realms of insurance, billing and offshore development infrastructure.  Everything’s been coming together and we’re very relieved that we’ll be able to get coverage, integrate with payment systems, and gain leverage from talented offshore developers in a unique way (some day soon we hope to write a blog post about how to share individual pieces of code in a safe way, while being able to operate the whole site and push back changes to the core code base for review).

It’s been another productive week for Uniiverse.  Our main focuses this week were on development (as ever), financing, and marketing.  It was a good week of using “fast lanes” to divide and conquer work.

Our product is closer than ever to being alpha-ready, and now that we’re further underway we managed to de-scope a few features from our MVP (minimum viable product).  

On the financing front, we focused on drafting a term sheet for our friends and family (F&F) round of financing.  We have decided to go with convertible debt since it’s too early to come up with a fair valuation – convertible notes offer a great alternative, aligning early investors’ incentives with ours. We explored a number of options to structure the terms, and met with several founders from other startups who provided got some great advice on their past financing rounds and what they would have done differently.  We started with a relatively simple term sheet.  As we got deeper into understanding what options were at our disposal, we began layering on terms to best align incentives and, in true management consultant fashion, built a financial model to assess our alternatives.. In the end, we made sure the terms remained simple enough, took into consideration hypothetical scenarios (e.g high valuation, delayed financing), while being highly attractive to our initial investors. 

We’ll be starting our F&F round in about two weeks. If you are interested, please get in touch with us and we will give you more information.

Marketing wise, we have strengthened our overall marketing strategy and defined our geographic expansion plans. We’ve also produced an exciting and artful concept for our “product video” (one that will explain how things work).  It’s very exciting, and we managed to find a talented local illustrator to bring it to life.

Things are moving very quickly!  The invention of the “fast lane” is already paying dividends, and we’ve able to focus and crank-out some quality product with this approach.

This week’s development initiatives involved a focus on scalability and building the core:

• by the beginning of the week, our platform was ready for expansion across categories, so we began rolling-out our product.  Doing so allowed us to realize a few clever / cleaner ways of architecting things.  The work this week will allow us to scale more rapidly and maintain our data more efficiently once the platform starts becoming heavily populated
• in addition to core scalability, we’re also building the platform in a way such that we can achieve the most leverage — we also explored building APIs to allow contracted developers (including our friend in Colombia) to focus on front-end builds without exposing our code base
• in other development news, we also built-out another core technology, focusing on the time dimension

We also refreshed out landing page — take a peek at www.uniiverse.com!

Things are moving very quickly on the business front as well:

• work continues to progress on our business plan — this week we conducted a deep dive on the competitive landscape, and our marketing needs for launch
• our hype video underwent another couple iterations and is refining into something we’re increasingly excited to share with you 
• our product video concept was defined, and is very close to being ready to begin production — we’ll begin crafting this masterpiece once our hype video becomes closer to completion
• as ever, we’re looking to expand our team if we can find the right people, and we conducted a few interviews with co-op students from the University of Waterloo — more interviews to come next week

More exciting news to come as our momentum continues - stay tuned!

Week three was incredibly satisfying.  On Friday, everything just came together.  The seeds we had planted the week prior all came to fruition, yielding us definition on our branding, a stunning front end design (including implementation), and some fantastic progress on one of our core “special sauce” technologies.  

This progress also enabled us to initiate work with a contractor to roll-out the above across the breadth of our site, perpetuating our already-strong momentum.

When we debriefed this week, some of our learnings included:

• The invention of the “fast lane” (a two hour block in the morning and afternoon, each to be devoted to “headphones on, heads down” uninterrupted work)
• An increased understanding of the importance of coffee machines
• The hazards of broad cc’ing, and the payoff that more focused messaging can have (even in a small team)
• The benefits of timeboxing discussions (read: use an egg timer)

These learnings are especially important when working in close quarters such as the perimeter of our ping pong table.

We’re excited to bring these to practice next week.  We’re still very excited and can’t wait for week four (even on a Monday)!

We opened the doors of our startup headquarters to host our friends Paul and Chris for an amazing coconut pad-thai and mojito lunch, and concluded our week on Friday with a barbecue dinner, then drinks with friends from BCG.

Week two was a blast.  We’re working hard, but loving the creative process, and are very fulfilled in seeing our vision starting to become a reality.

We kicked-off a session with UX shop to refine the look-and-feel of the platform.  We got some useful input, and cranked away for a few late night sessions to ensure we weren’t gating their progress.  One thing’s for sure about using a third party - it forces a deadline and implies a greater finality to designs.  Their advice was great, but we also discovered that sometimes the best advice you get is from your friends — perhaps it’s because they know you and the product more intimately, or perhaps it’s a different dynamic for feedback.  Regardless, we’re very happy with how our product progressed this week.

We’re always looking to recruit great talent, and this week spoke to prospective front end developers as far as Florida and Colombia.  

On the social front, our friends at Redwood moved into a new office space, along with North Strategic.  We attended their kickoff event and met some new people, caught-up with old friends, and were again inspired by Toronto’s startup community.

To cap the week off, on Friday Adam made a delicious ghetto pad thai for lunch with virtually no ingredients and Ben mixed-up some great mojitos to finish-off the week.  We can’t wait to have our platform built to bring these experiences to life for other people!

Week one was full of excitement, surprises and accomplishments.

Our fingers are crossed for the $20k “Business Accelerator Program” grant through MaRS that we submitted this week.  Special thanks to our advisors and friends at MaRS for guiding us through this.  We’d be very grateful if this falls into place — it would go a long way!

Through the course of writing this grant application, we met with a number of design shops to discuss how we could involve them for User Experience / User Interface strategic advice.  We were quite impressed — Toronto really has a burgeoning startup scene, and we ran into some really top talent with these firms. 

Needless to say, we’ve also been pushing our core product development.  We defined our MVP this week (hopefully not too ambitious) and plotted out our sitemap which translated nicely into stories on Pivotal.  

We left this week with two learnings:

- Having a head start before diving-in 100% is a great help — the switch didn’t feel very abrupt since we all already knew how to work with each other and already had momentum.  The main difference now is that we’re able to focus our attention squarely on the project. Very satisfying.

- Trust your gut on yellow flags and don’t take anything at face value — this week we interviewed a freelancer that we were initially very excited about (we saw him as a potential full time addition to our team).  We had great chemistry with him, he was sharp, provided great feedback, asked the right questions, and had an excellent portfolio. But was he too good to be true? After realizing he had almost no online presence, we did a little bit of digging into (what we thought were) mutual contacts, we discovered that he was likely wildly bending the truth.  When asked for references, he vanished. At first, we were disappointed. We could have started working with him, and he probably would have done a great job… but do we really want someone we can’t trust as part of our team? Definitely not. It was the right decision for us. We strongly believe having a team of motivated, talented individuals will be to be key to our success and a bad apple could spoil the bunch. We are still (as ever) looking for the right talent to join our team. But for our interim front-end needs, we may go with a leaner, smarter solution such as oDesk or Elance. 

Our goals for next week are to keep ramping up the velocity on our development, and nail our UX.  Perhaps most importantly, we aim to continue the stellar culture we’re building (that began with this week’s delicious kickoff breakfast).  We’re all very excited.

That’s all for now — stay tuned for more!