The Backstory
The Journey from Iridesco to Harvest
By 2002, the dot-com bust and the general economic downturn had wiped out most technology companies that had thrived just a few years prior. The internet consulting company I worked at was on its last legs before it too would be dismantled and sold. I would soon be laid off like many of people I knew, but that didn’t bother me. I had hobbies I wanted to spend more time with and living off of unemployment checks for awhile sounded good to my twenty-four year-old self.
That break didn’t last long though. It was during this time that my friend Shawn Liu and I would start a design and technology studio called Iridesco. Shawn and I first met in the late 90s while studying computer science at Cornell University. We partnered up for class projects and found that we both loved designing how our solutions are presented as much as solving the actual technical problems. In one instance, a professor, after being pleased with the printed book we designed as part of our final project, hired us to design his start-up’s first website. This planted a seed in our minds that one day we’d make this intersection of design and technology our work. Two years after graduation, we decided to follow through on that idea and formed our own design and technology studio.
Iridesco — Just Two Desks in a Living Room
The easiest part about starting a company was the logistics of starting one. We put in $5,000 each into a business bank account, filled out incorporation forms online, and legally we were in “business.” Keeping the company afloat would be the true test.
With no clients to speak of and just two desks and computers in the living room of the apartment we shared, we needed work. Our first project came from our third roommate’s aunt. She had a children’s educational video product and wanted to get an online presence. We worked with intensity, doing rounds of illustrations and even audio recording. After a few weeks, we launched her online presence for a humble fee of $600.
Slowly, former colleagues started to reach out to us with projects. We ended up doing a little bit of everything: general web design, Flash projects, promotional print materials and even a content management system. Our approach to new business was “luck” — we did little to pursue clients we wanted and instead responded to random leads that would come our way. We were hardly a stable business yet, but it was an exciting start.
SuprGlu — The First Product
Two years in, we had made our first hire and worked with a small, steady client base. Meanwhile, a phenomenon known as Web 2.0 also started to take shape. Products like delicious, Flickr, and Typepad were popular and became social destinations. Many friends and I had accounts on these services and we had one wish: how could we centralize a person’s data in one place? How could we create a more elaborate profile and online identity for someone who uses all these services? During nights and weekends, I prototyped the idea. Then, as a way to fill in some down time and to mix up our usual work, we decided to see if we can make it a product for others to use.
With limited time and money, we could only spare a bit of time to work on this alongside client work. Fortunately, it was a simple idea which required simple execution. After just four weeks, we introduced SuprGlu to the world. To our delight and surprise, thousands of people were using the product within a couple weeks. Early adopting techies used it to aggregate their online content. Educators used it with students in classrooms. Citizens in certain foreign countries used it to read otherwise censored news and stories. In a short period of time, SuprGlu attracted more attention than any work we’ve done to that point. It gave us a taste of building our own products and we wanted to do more.
While SuprGlu didn’t turn out to be a success for various reasons, it was an important pre-cursor to what we’d do next. SuprGlu showed us that we were capable taking an idea and bringing it to launch. It showed us that pursuing our own ideas can garner more attention for our budding company than our client work. It changed our thinking.
Harvest — A New Start
While SuprGlu brought us attention, we still had a big need to figure out how we’d make money. We decided whatever we created next, it’d have a clear business model. We turned to an idea which we long had in mind, one which would help us run our consulting studio: a product that’d provide simple, elegant web-based time tracking. As a consulting business, we were still tracking time in Excel and we wanted to find something designed for this task. Something on the web. Something simple to use.
In December of 2005, we began developing the first version of Harvest (some standouts from our “thankfully we didn’t choose that name” list include the limiting “Time Farm” and the completely inappropriate “Salaryman”). It would take us four months to bring the first version online. Over the last eight years, Harvest has grown from 3 to over 30 people. It went from powering one business (ours) to now tens of thousands of businesses around the world. The bumps and the lessons of building Harvest are many, and they’ll have to be told another time. But at the heart of things, it’s simple: Harvest would not have been possible without these early experiences from Iridesco.
