Brynn Marie Evans

I’m not sure how old our company is officially. Tim was working on the seeds of the idea in July 2010. I remember this because I was “moonlighting” with them once a week after work (at an apartment in Pacific Heights), helping with design, strategy, and some early research into the idea. I joined him officially the last week of August 2010. It was just the two of us for about a month. Then Dan joined sometime in September.

This week our company just hired its 6th employee! With Tim as our founder, that makes 7 people! Kind of hard to believe — but amazing nonetheless, and they’re all bright and brilliant and seem to fill each of the key roles and skills that we need. (We have the CEO, the ops guy, now *two* engineers, the front end developer, me — the designer, and a jack-of-all trades who’s filling in a product manager. Pretty complete list there.)

So maybe we’re 6 months old? What’s more interesting is that we’re on our 2nd pivot! I’ve been thinking a lot about how “pivot” is a strange concept since it can mean a big shift in the product or it can be a smaller, internal shift in the way you *think* about and position your product. The first pivot of ours was more of the former. This is more of the latter.

But even though this is a smaller pivot, it’s going to have big ramifications for our product and we’ve decided to take this time and redesign everything from scratch (at least in the front-end). I’m actually really enjoying this time. We’ve learned a lot from getting our alpha product designed, built, out the door and tested with 50 users in 2.5 months in the fall. Phew, that was hard. But we learned a lot about what we want to be as a product and how to work together as a team.

As a result, we completely shifted around who works with whom (how, when, and how much) — so that this time around, our process is smooth like buttah. The product team (me, front-end guy, and our jack of all trades) has been on a roll going through tons of ideas and moving even faster than we were in the last 2.5 month round. I didn’t think it was possible.

I’m also willing to recognize that, since we learned a lot about our product in the fall, we now know better what we’re designing for. It no longer feels like a big experiment, hehe. I see reason in nearly everything I design now — I ask better research questions — and I am even better at managing my email, filtering out what’s simply not relevant and responding to the stuff that’s urgent and important for what I’m working on right now.

It’s a strange world, startups. But you just can’t have these kind of experiences and learnings as a consultant or at a mega company. So I’m enjoying it while it lasts