Wednesday 28 July 2010

New Life

Hi all,

How are you today?

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It has been a while since my last post. Finally I have a great reason to write and I can talk about it :) I've been silent but really excited!

As a way of celebrating my 'New Life' I made some changes to the look and feel of my blog. I added my Stackoverflow profile (very supportive community), a simple way of giving feedback about what I say and made it easier to share posts, as well as some other updatesI hope you like it.

So... you're probably wondering what I mean when I say 'New Life', well, I said in a recent post I was "again ready to mess 'with the path'!" and that's exactly what I did.
I've recently started Wildbunny with Paul Firth. As a quick introduction, Wildbunny is a brand-new start up and we're focused on exploring different markets through technology-driven innovation. You will understand what all this means very soon, when we release our first service.

We're currently working on our first service called Kaaching, a place where you'll be able to make money while using Facebook.
There's a lot to tell about my (and Paul's) new project but I'll leave that for when we get closer to release date, after all having some surprises and managing the 'momentum' (word that I recently started using a lot) is very important. I'll leave that to another post, very soon.

Everything is going great with myself and especially with Wildbunny and I feel we owe that, in part, to the place where we are, Cambridge.
I discovered a new Cambridge (and a very good one) since we started Wildbunny, it is definitely a great place to start a company.

Everyone is very supportive here and I really mean everyone, from friends and the Cambridge Coffee Company guys to our Accountants and Lawyer. Every single time we speak about our new venture everyone shows interest. Most conversations end with a "that's amazing, you did the right thing, I wish I could do the same" independently of the person knowing or not what our projects are. The start-up spirit looks to be well respected and sometimes even 
admired in here, which is a great boost to our high motivation!
It is very impressive to speak with accounts, lawyers and bank managers and get loads of useful information with some feedback even before they knew if we're going to work with them. We spent a fair amount of time with our Account (Andrew Borland) and Lawyer (Alison Barr) discussing many details and possible traps of Kaaching with no initial commitment or payment at all.

As if it wasn't enough, for those like us that can't afford an office, Cambridge has plenty of cheap or even free places where to work. From many cafes to the Central Library, being the latter totally free and very close to the conditions of a very very good office (with loads of books and cheap lunches as well).
It's very acceptable, not to say expected, to spend the whole day in a cafe working on a Laptop with free broadband, plugs to charge your laptop and minimal cost (depending of what you want, a coffee and a lunch meal).
As for proper offices, I can't tell right now but there are many Science Parks in this city with nice looking stylish new buildings.
For now we've been working some days at home, some at the Library and one or two in a cafe.

Starting a company in Cambridge was an easy process, very easy actually. I felt that this gave us much more time for what really matters, the product!

Since this post is already long enough, I'll be writing other posts with details of what we had to do to open a company in here. I hope it can help you one day...

To finish, let me tell everyone that it has been a great pleasure to work with Paul and I believe the dynamics of our team (the two of us at the moment) is something very impressive and special. I'm very happy with the fact we're two patient but very different minds with the same goal. We're always looking for the win-win situation where both opinions match which, I believe, has an extremely high value to the company and to the future users!
Cheers to you Paul :)

I'll leave you with Wildbunny's links:
Webpage (under development): http://www.wildbunny.co.uk


See you later.

Cheers,
Diogo