November Monthly Gathering (part 2)

I believe you already took a look at our latest post and know a bit more about us, our company goals and challenges for 2016. It’s now time to share what we have been up to in terms of Products, Investment Time and Audience.

QOLD

Qold is our cold chain temperature monitoring system, initially developed to face the regulations and needs of the food commerce sector. If you want to know more, visit qold.co or talk to us via email or on twitter. Our first version is already on the market, and we’re starting in Portugal, having some paying customers so far. For October, we had 3 main goals:

• Close 2 more paying clients;
• Finish the design of a new box for our gateways;
• Deploy system health check improvements we’ve been working on.

Of these, we failed the first, mostly because we are still fine tuning the sales process and gathering market info to better engage our prospects. This is our main effort (along with customer support and keep developing our hardware to reach a new version, hopefully by the start of 2017) and we’ve been putting much of ourselves in talking to prospects, documenting and analyzing the info we collect and turn that into concrete actions reflected in our sales strategy. This is no science and differs from market to market, so we’ve been learning much from it.

So for November the targets are:

• Close at least 2 new paying clients;
• Finish v2.1 sensor board design (we’ve been working on improving our sensors’ design and performance);
• Have all the market segmentation info we collected.

Do you wanna know more? Contact us: [email protected].

UNPLUGG

During October we published a blog post and finished another to better explain how our MLaaS platform can be applied to specific problems like power consumption.

We decided to invest on this as, while talking to prospect clients with all sorts of background, they frequently had some understanding of the general business value but not the technical aspects, how it can fit with existent products or vice versa. From those experiences, we believe that having a more complete case studies with some examples for specific use cases should make it easier to give context on how business, technology and integration with existing products can align together.

We also have been working on improving our forecast model to better handle the prediction of temperature. Our solution currently is fairly generic for time-series data, but we have been receiving feedback of the potential value of applying it to cold-chain monitoring and other temperature related problems. It’s also nice as it might create some synergy between Qold & Unplugg.

During October we also jump-started a new sales cycle, reaching out to 40 contacts in companies we believe could benefit from using Unplugg to increase the intelligence of their existing products.

In November, we plan to:

• Deploy the tuned model for temperature forecasting;
• Update our website so it’s easier for anyone test drive our service;
• Engage with more prospect clients, by email and in-person;
• Define a standard approach to professional services where we mix consulting with Unplugg licenses.

INVESTMENT TIME

Beyond a number of small things, as a company we have given priority to four projects that we expect to ship in the coming weeks:

Slackmarq

This resulted from one of our internal hackathons and helps manage bookmarks on slack, a recurring problem for us.

Soundy

Also the output of an internal hackathon which is like Giphy for sounds. You can test the live version, but we are making a big overhaul to make it extra nice. Check it out!

New whitesmith.co

We have a new site almost ready. This last couple of weeks have been dedicated to polishing things, adding case studies and taking a few more team photos. Should be out quite soon!

Qompany

This is an internal app to help manage our projects, people and support our internal network of services. We have a few of them that provide metrics about how things are doing and automate boring tasks.

Audience

The main purpose of “Audience” is to spread the word about Whitesmith across the internet. We want to increase our brand awareness sharing more about what we are working on, which technologies we are using or learning, our side projects, our people, and company culture.

Where can you find information about Whitesmith? Our main channels are our website, our blog and our social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Snapchat (whitesmith.co). On our website, you find all information related to our company (what we do, our clients, our people, and contacts) and in our blog, you find different blog posts related with problems we solve, our company culture, our side-projects, etc. Through social media, we spread the content we produce and share different moments in our office, events where we were, etc.

Our main challenge during this year is related to the content we produce for our blog, not only in terms of quantity but also in quality. If you spend some time on our blog you will see our effort to be more consistent in terms of quantity of blog posts and to have more quality content.

As you probably noticed we write about several themes that we categorised as technical, team & culture, product & management. All these blog posts are published on our blog, however, the last two types are also published on Medium accounts - Behind the Scenes and Paper Planes - to increase the reach.

In October, we published one technical blog post, two blog posts about our team & culture and two blog posts about product & management. For November, we really want to improve the number of technical blog posts (4) and maintain the number of blog posts about team & culture and product & management (2).

Finally, we also shared some of our Lunch-n-Learn slides on our SlideShare account and in November we will also add one more. Don’t forget to check it out!

See you in December

This two-part series on our November update is done now, hope you like it. We will be back in December to let you know how things evolved.

What else would you like for us to cover? Give us your feedback on twitter!