Hi, I'm Pawel from TeamStatus.TV

Hello,
I’m happy I found this community of like minded people. I hope to learn from you and help if I can.

I’m at the beginning of my path to become bootstrapped. Probably as many of you I’m a software developer. I have a regular job at Atlassian - I’m developing the best project management tool - JIRA.

But I’ve always dreamt about creating my own company. Being independent and so on :wink: We all share the same vision. So I’ve been trying for a few years, I have a few failed attempts behind me (personal money management site, iOS games for children).

I had a crash landing last year when I was so stressed out and tired that my health suffered badly. Funny thing it was when I felt the strongest of all time (I was trying to run a business, working, going to the gym and biking all the time). Being sick was a terrible experience back then (couldn’t walk), I thought I couldn’t make it and I’m done with this entrepreneurship thing (and normal life).

But guess what, I’ve recovered, took some rest and learned a lot about healthy food and health in general. Now 1,5 year after I feel smarter, stronger and still interested in doing my products. So being sick was actually great from the time perspective - it changed my life for better.

Currently I’m involved in:
Queued - Mac menu bar helper for Buffer a social media hub (I wish I had more time to polish it and finally push it to Mac App Store)

BetaRun.it - I needed a site where I could publish Queued updates (it’s a self updating Mac app) so I built it, but now I’m thinking about making it a set of tools helping people run beta versions of their Mac software

TeamStatus.TV - this is something I’m betting on - I noticed that at our small office (30 people) we have like 5 big smart TVs displaying different stuff from our build system, project management, etc. - all kinds of widgets to help us see what’s going on in the projects, at other Atlassian offices it’s the same - people are in love with this idea, Atlassian even released a proof of concept for everyone to try AtlasBoard - my idea is to take it and make a product out of it :smile:

I authored also a few JIRA plugings which bring me a few hundreds bucks from time to time.

Basically my strength is coding, my weakness is marketing (I’m not an outgoing person). For some time I was thinking about finding a co-founder but it didn’t work out. So I’m still on my own learning how to change my weaknesses into strengths :smile:

Nice to meet you all!

So, you’re basically like everyone else on here. Welcome to the forums! :smile:

1 Like

Haha, so I’m in the right place. Thanks Andrey!

Hi Pawel!

This:

and then this:

lead me to wonder why you don’t start TeamStatus.tv as a JIRA plugin? IIRC this is one way that Balsamiq Mockups started, and so would be a really easy way to get adoption fast, especially thanks to your close affiliation with Atlassian.

I can concur that at a big contract this year we had a similar pair of status boards in place, monitoring build status, traffic and counts of 404/500. Having a ‘mission control’ dashboard of all these displays is becoming a common theme in in-house dev/ops teams I’ve worked on over the past few years, so you’re definitely on to something!

In terms of marketing, have you considered using your contacts to get interviews with in-house developers to see what sort of things they want out of a system like this? It would be good also to survey the market for this in terms of competitors (I think there are a few out there, but the exact names escape me) to see how you can differentiate yourself.

Great advice Najaf!

I’m thinking about the same - to target Atlassian customers first, especially since there’s Marketplace where customers look for plugins.

I started with some landing page and was trying to gauge interest with adwords, but I’m thinking in this case it’s waste of time. Although I said that a few times before :wink:

I haven’t thought about contacting existing customers and that’s really a great advice!

I did some market research there are competitors but solutions I found needed either a lot of customization (to work with Atlassian tools) or were focused on other ecosystems (one working solely with 37signal’s products). So I believe I can start with Atlassian as a differentiator (and companies using Atlassian products are really keen on the idea of paying for an “integrated” solution) but then I’ll grow and cover different tools.

That actually makes me feel a little better myself… welcome Pawel :slight_smile:

Welcome Jesse, it’s encouraging isn’t? :smile: