William Neill

And yeah, there's early days of MVP of getting it out, testing the waters, launching something and really seeing what happens. It took us probably almost a year, I think, to build something before we launched on the app stores and called it our launch version.

Analytics, super key, getting some good analytics in place at the starting point. We had a roadmap of assumptions that we wanted to test. We had a feature backlog of things. We're going to go build this. Everything changes as soon as you launch and you start looking at what people are actually doing with the tool.

We were looking at the kinds of product that people were adding and we were anticipating the furniture shopper or homewares at least, because that's what we'd experienced with COVID. But launching it, we discovered that it was fast fashion and the aesthetic of the app, the Scandinavian feel that we thought people were going to go for was really not the right thing.

And so we had to pivot and change the direction of that and also think about the way that we were presenting the actual content back to people in the app. And so that made it more of a fast fashion focus. And also the audience are much younger, heavily female.

And the way that we communicate, the way that we think about the product and its users has changed a lot since that sort of initial MVP launch. But yeah, all down to analytics, watching that really carefully.

I think we've rebuilt our analytics stack three times now to this point where we've just gone, it's not giving us the fidelity that we need to make good decisions and rip it out, plug a new solution in. And it's really painful because you've got to make sure you've got that kind of historical data trend tracking along there to marry up.

Good analytics makes or breaks a product, I think, at this stage in building tech. And then you've got a lot of other things you've got to be on top of with thinking about where is this product going? Why is it going there?

How are we going to shift not only the competitive strategy, but also the tech strategy so that we are ahead of certain things that might be coming, whether it's iOS releases, data privacy updates and things that are happening with that.

That also had a huge impact on the way that we could or couldn't do things with tracking and also affiliate because we use at the moment and still do today quite a lot of affiliate links to build out the revenue side of our business. We don't have to worry about stock and inventory and all kind of stuff.

It's been funny watching all the browsers introduce all of these cookie-less and privacy-focused features, which has made it more difficult to do quite a lot of the tracking that we were trying to do.

Those are challenges you can roll with, and in terms of features, yeah, it's all been about serving to what people are doing and watching behavior, doing a lot of customer interviews, and trying to just be a really good place where they can store stuff for later.

Team makes a race product. We did shop around for agencies originally. We'd been working with an agency, the previous guys of Basket as the kinder list piece. And we had a probably four person team, I think at the time, actually in-house, which literally was actually in-house. Like we were in someone's house at the time, like doing a lot of the stuff or coding or doing things like that.

But yeah, we had an agency doing a lot of the additional code building side of things. Coming into Basket, we wanted to see if we could build something out really quick, but also make a couple of key hires that we would hope to keep with us for quite a long time.

We decided to build out a lot of the backend first, as we felt that was actually the key thing to figure out, and then we'd come back to the user-facing problem second. So we actually spent a lot of time with agencies shopping around how we might build out an MVP with the backend. We went with, I guess, an agency we'd worked with before. as well as hiring two key positions.

We hired a lead back engineer. We hired a designer and also a front-end engineer at the time. So we had a pretty lean small team and then also the external agency at the time. We went through probably three agencies by the time We got to about one year post-launch.

We've had a fairly high team turnover, not because we engineered that way or anything, but we hired a lot for talent in the early days of the venture and didn't hire so well for attitude and interest. And it's really exciting to come and work on a project. I think for a lot of people where they go, there's some new tech, there's some new opportunities to build things.

But when you get stuck into the actual product and you get into things that there's always going to be walls that pop up with code and it gets hard. It's finding the people that can work through those walls and I'm doing it because I really think the product is awesome and I can see how it fits together. We've learned a lot about finding people and understanding that interviewing process.

from a really different perspective of where we started the venture and building up the team we have now has taken time and it's an awesome team now. It's still very small. We've got about five engineers, designer, product manager, It's all about attitude and finding people that really want to be there because they believe in the product and where it's going.

But they also are incredibly talented and awesome people to work with in a day-to-day. You could sit down in an airport and have a conversation with them and basically three hours ago pass super fast.

When you think about the backend side of things that has to take in someone's bookmark and convert that to a rich product listing page, essentially, there's a couple of different ways to approach that. And a lot of them do on-device processing. So basically, when you just share something from the browser, there's a really easy way of just capturing a lot of that metadata and storing that.