Tech duo prove value of getting the basics right
OPINION: About five years ago two young guys came to see me with an idea for a company.
I liked them immediately, not just because their monikers JD and JB were both types of whisky, but because they already had a proven track record in tech businesses.
John-Daniel Trask (JD) and Jeremy Boyd (JB) both cut their tech teeth at respected software innovator Intergen.
Then they built their own company – Mindscape – focusing on tech tools for tech practitioners. This particular niche is not for the faint of heart, as techos aren’t known for suffering fools gladly. And these two blokes were nobody’s fools.
So when JB and JD came to chat, I took it seriously. What they had was a blueprint for a company that was a fascinating blend of complex and simple. It would analyse dizzying amounts of data to tell a company in blunt terms if its website was doing its job.
In other words, they had plans for a portfolio of tools that would help online companies do the basics well. And because their first tool would help software engineers zap bugs, they called themselves Raygun.
As people and companies increasingly felt compelled to create digital laurel wreaths to lay at the altar of their egos, it seemed to me that doing the basics well around online experiences was only going to get more important.
Five years later, I think it’s still true, with multiple examples of companies messing up the basics. This ranges from the eyewateringly bad search experience for addresses in www.whitepages.co.nz, to the way that the Flick Electric app keeps crashing, to Sky TV’s apparent inability to create a reliable streaming service and Westpac’s outages over Easter.
Then there are the epic failures around the basics, like Novopay’s apparent inability a few years ago to pay teachers. Not a good feature for a teachers’ payroll package.
So unsurprisingly the little company the boys called Raygun has taken off and it isn’t so little anymore. It now has offices in the US and has more than 2000 businesses using the service, from major ecommerce operations such as Nordstrom, to the likes of Domino’s Pizza and Microsoft.
What started as a bug-reporting service grew into a software intelligence platform that also includes real user monitoring and, as of this week, server side performance management.
But really what it’s about is helping companies get the basics right, highlighting potential problems and pinpointing the cause.
Local web entrepreneur and Red Peak flag-waver Rowan Simpson once famously noted that good websites were like electricity.
What he meant was that when you get up in the morning and flick a switch, you have no problem finding the switch, no doubt the light will turn on and no delay in the time between switch flick to lighted room.
So in other words, a great website is always on, obvious and fast.
The point about speed is a crucial one, even in these days of UFB. The average size for the HTML (consumer facing) layer of a website is 34kb according to seositecheckup.com, which on a reasonable-speed internet connection shouldn’t take more than about a second or two to load.
But there are plenty that are over 70kb (including a few major news websites and government agencies).
Not flash when you consider that for every two seconds spent waiting for a page to load you lose an estimated 20 per cent of visitors.
The funny thing about getting the basics right is that it is also the underlying philosophy behind Google’s approach to broader business management. Last year Google released its ‘‘secret formula’’ for management.
The secret formula covered a range of practices – from how to run meetings, to focus on one single thing to help deliver work/ life balance, through to unbiasing and accountability.
But the guts of the formula came down to the same thing – and it’s as boring as it is true. Doing the basics right.
Lots of New Zealand businesses do this every day. From the Bluebridge inter-island ferry business running ships on time with friendly staff, to Transpower delivering the national grid, through to Ryman Healthcare looking after older folk and the NZX executing thousands of trades every day.
Meanwhile, if you look at failed businesses, the opposite is also true. The stack of finance companies who failed the basics of risk, Solid Energy focusing on tomorrow to the detriment of today and Wynyard Group not being able to manage monthly cashflow.
Doing the basics well remains of key importance in any business, rather than looking for some kind of secret sauce.
There’s a great quote from Silicon Valley venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, who was asked if there was a silver bullet to help companies in trouble. He responded: ‘‘There is no silver bullet that’s going to fix that. No, we are going to have to use a lot of lead bullets and do it every day’’.
Getting the basics right, and doing it every day, are the lead bullets of business, I reckon.