The Clevergy´s journey. A startup logbook. Month 1
For how many centuries have we been working at Clevergy?
OMG, It feels like we’ve been working at Clevergy all our lives. When a company is starting a lot of things happen and that intensity can be deceptive. Weeks can seem like days.
But going back to the real world. Imagine that you are starting a startup, it is your second month, the ideas are endless and the work even more so. And worst of all, money is not. You can go crazy, or you can start prioritizing.
And what is the only way to prioritize? To have a strategy with clear goals.
Part of our strategy is building a modular product and we want to do that by working with design, product people, and engineers. These two keys have guided us to prioritize our first tasks. The other guiding light for our strategy is to align with our customers, so product iterations focused on improvement are a constant in our daily work.
So here you have the different things we were working on after month 0:
- The magic trident. We strongly think that for building a product like Clevergy, a product role, a product designer and engineers need to work closely. That’s why we have hired a new product designer and a new software engineer (she will start next month). In case you didn’t know, we are still hiring engineers, so please contact me if you are interested! (4-day weeks and an amazing team).
- First AI model running. It’s amazing how technology evolves. Since I wrote about continuous deployment in machine learning three years ago, cloud providers have worked a lot in the MLops field. After some data wrangling (the ugliest and heaviest part of data work that nobody wants to talk about) and training some models in our computers, with some clicks we have been able to (in the cloud) train (with big amounts of data) and deploy a new model in little time. In our case, we use Vertex AI in GCP: an incredible experience. Thanks to it, you can work in an agile way in AI tasks.
- We improved our prototype. We have a public prototype in order to get feedback from people. We don’t want to develop another energy dashboard that nobody understands, we want to do something that helps people save energy.
- We started building microfrontends. A part of our strategy is to have a modular product easy to use. There is nothing better than microfrontends to achieve that. Whenever we work more on that, we will tell you about our experience.
- Remote first culture involves async communication. We want to do this in the best way from the very beginning. We use Notion to document our processes, product, and tech. Regarding this last part, we use ADRs to document our architecture decisions and diagrams as code to document our architecture. We’re also giving Claap a shot; we believe that short videos with interactive feedback will help us become more involved in decisions.
- We started in a crazy way, and, we realized that we need to work on organizing ourselves. We have defined simple ways of working that we hope will help us in our daily work.
Stay tuned for the next edition!
