This is a blog post in a series written during the first fortnight of our participation in Techstars London 2015.
What did you do today?
We’ve been in London for four days now, but are still living in a hotel close to the office, trying to find somewhere to live in London, preferably that’s close to the office. After another few hours trawling the property listings (and joking with the program director that we’d be sleeping under the desks) we secured two property viewings. We talked about studio vs two-bedroom place with space for family/friends/”staff”, and decided the cost-benefit of the two-bedroom place was worth it so made an offer.
Although next week is ‘Mentor Madness’ (check out yesterdays post for more), we have a meeting with a TechStars mentor tomorrow so have been preparing for that, including working on possible high-level business models to get his opinion on.
Finally after doing our daily push-ups, sit-ups and squats, we decided that it was worth the investment to get Julie an iMac since we will be here for 6 months – a decision that took a very long time!
Sam: I had a CTO meeting at 8:30, where we talked about the issues CTO’s have apart from writing code – it’s a common misconception that all a CTO does in an early stage startup is write code, whereas in fact it can be quite a small part of the job. After that, I had the awesome surprise that one of the Hackstars (Eduard) had fixed another of the website tasks, fixing a broken (and difficult) animation and finishing a new interface for the mailing list sign-up.
I also made significant progress on the app, fixing up various functionality (the new app is now fully functional, but there’s still more UX stuff to add before it’s user-review ready).
What did you learn?
Sam: I learnt about Sequence Based Processing, from the context of using it in our Artificial Intelligence / Analysis application. I also saw first-hand the lengths some hackers will go to, to avoid paying Apple any extra money (photo on left).
Quotes?
Someone at TechStars: “Guys – we love you – but you still don’t have a business plan”
Reason why we have not fully developed our business plan yet:
Winston Churchill: “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”