Keep on building Scotland

This is a guest post from Callum Stuart COO of Mallzee.

A lot has changed here at MallzeeHQ over the past month. We’ve raised investment, moved into our own startup hub (@siliconwalk), hired a bunch of awesome people to drive forward our vision and last but by no means least – launched a product! Cue the fanfare…

We know it’s not perfect, we know it took longer than we wanted and we know there’s tons of ideas about how to improve it, but there’s something very satisfying about getting a product out there and seeing hundreds of people using it. Can you tell we’re pretty chuffed?

So what’s next? Well for us, we need to be a data driven company. It’s easy to say, but what exactly does that mean? It means the decisions we make about our product now and in the future need to be based on data. It means we’ve invested a lot of time before launch into our analytics platform to generate data about how people use Mallzee. In the real world that means we already know how many people who hit our landing page and watch the video to the end, go on to actually purchase a product. For us, for our investors and even for our customers that sort of data is absolutely critical to the product success and any future fund raising.

What have we learned? Consumer products are hard. Doing it in Edinburgh over London, Boston or The Valley probably makes it harder still. But there’s a movement happening up here and the rest of the world is starting to sit up and take notice, we’re proud to be part of it and proud to say we’re doing it from Scotland.

Our plan is to spend the next few months promoting what we’ve got, building the data on how people use it and analysing that data to shape the next version. Everything inline with our mission to make online shopping an experience.

Sometimes in our startup world of driving faster, pushing harder, doing more, just sometimes it’s nice to look back, take a moment and remind yourself what you’ve achieved and how far you’ve come. We’ve come a long way. Anyone who actually gets a product out there definately has our respect!

So check out our product at Mallzee.com and feel free to drop us a line with some feedback. Meanwhile, we’ll get back to crunching data and building wireframes for the next version – keep on building Scotland!