William Neill
Appearances
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
from a really different perspective of where we started the venture and building up the team we have now has taken time and it's an awesome team now. It's still very small. We've got about five engineers, designer, product manager, It's all about attitude and finding people that really want to be there because they believe in the product and where it's going.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
But they also are incredibly talented and awesome people to work with in a day-to-day. You could sit down in an airport and have a conversation with them and basically three hours ago pass super fast.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
When you think about the backend side of things that has to take in someone's bookmark and convert that to a rich product listing page, essentially, there's a couple of different ways to approach that. And a lot of them do on-device processing. So basically, when you just share something from the browser, there's a really easy way of just capturing a lot of that metadata and storing that.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
The problem with that is that it goes out of date pretty quick. And as we've learned through analytics, a lot of sites do actually change their product data weekly. And some of the major sites are changing it daily.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
And if you want to keep up with that, unless the user opens their app daily and you're able to use an in-app browser behind the scenes to scrape that data again and bring it in, it's not reliable. And it certainly doesn't scale in terms of if someone adds one product and then another person adds the same product. How do you know those two things are apples and basically match them?
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
There was a lot of really interesting stuff that had to happen to figure out how to get product data reliably and do that server side and then obviously plug into major product feeds and things like that where we could so that we didn't have to go and actually
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
spend resource on scraping or things like that that's soaked up a lot of focus and engineering time is yeah thinking about how do we scale that product data side because for most of our business a lot of things just hang off of the fact that we need really good product data to actually do almost anything else with the product okay so as you step out on the balcony you look across all that you've built what are you most proud of
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
You're proud of building the team, actually. Listening back to some of the other people that have been on your podcasts and the things they've said around people and team, I can't help but echo that because it is so essential. So I'm really proud of the way that we've managed to find people that are so passionate about what they do. The business takes on a life of its own.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
Being able to step back from the business and not be someone who has to work on it in terms of like day-to-day in the kind of grind mode that you have to be in the early days of getting the venture out the door and be able to look at more of the opportunities for where is the business going and... What are the things you want to do in six months time?
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
Having that space and opportunity to be able to do that now is all about building out a team that can go ahead and execute on the things that we've got to get done to get there. Just having that trust and the capability to do that is massive.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
There's obviously loads of things that you learn and you look back and you go cringe like that. Why did we do that? And how could we have thought that was the right thing at the time? If we think about the tech side of things, because I think people would pretty much trump anything on this learnings area in terms of building the team and things, but...
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
I think it's building out features without validating the use case or the analytics behind supporting that decision. So we've gone ahead and we've built things on hunches, which is sometimes you just got to do that because you've got to move on an opportunity where you go, yeah, I'm blending things together and I'm looking at this and going, yeah, this makes sense. Let's go ahead and do that.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
But ultimately launching something that has fallen short of the goals that you had for it. And in retrospect, seeing that there were cues in the analytics or I guess in the interviews that we were having at the time with customers that would have pointed to the fact that it wasn't something that was going to fly.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
I read a book recently and it was taking small bets and thinking back on the way that we've done things and the learnings on that. It's that we've probably made small bets that probably should have stayed small bets bigger and put more time in them that we actually probably should have instead of just shipping them and seeing what happened and then building more of those bets.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
I guess the biggest learning, like a mistake, would be to say, let's build three big bets in the next three months or so, rather than saying, let's build three bets in the next two weeks and launch those and then start optimizing from what we've learned from those three things.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
It comes back to the resourcing, motivation in the team, happiness of investors, and basically everything else in the business hangs off of that momentum. We've probably wasted too much time and lost momentum on things that we felt were important and big opportunities, but actually should have stayed as small bets that we just launched as something we could do in a week and then learn from that.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
There's a lot of really interesting stuff to do in the space. When you come back to the sort of nuts and bolts of what that's actually all about, it's about saving what we like to think about internally as purchase intent. And there's this kind of simple way of saying that. It's like you've got something that you have your eye on that you aspire to have or buy.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
What's the least friction to get you to have that thing? Our job at Basket is to essentially build a really good funnel or process that helps you as a user to have more of the things or better of the things that you really want to have around you in your life. I think more is actually a bit of a challenging word because I use it in the sense of like quality things rather than just more stuff.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
So yeah, a lot of our product now and our future is focused on how do we break down a lot of that friction that still exists in researching, finding products that you like. There's the recommendation side of things.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
There's the inspiration, discovery mechanisms of e-commerce, aggregating a lot of that into one place, making Basket a source of not only inspiration that you're finding individually, but that you're finding with your friends. And it's that kind of collaborative shopping.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
If you could take Figma and think about the way that design has evolved with a designer in a laptop's like isolated environment to now being this kind of like multi-user collaborative kind of space. So how do we bring that kind of sense of collaboration and stuff to the fore and make that really exciting? Building out ways that we can work better with the operating systems that exist.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
So looking at what Apple's doing with a lot of their product direction and saying we want to be on that journey and how do we basically support that ecosystem? Same with Android and looking at that and also web. We've got multi-platforms where we're looking at just basically deeper integrations with those to make shopping more seamless.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
For me, it's not really like one person or something, but I think it's probably people in my life that draw energy and ideas from. I would love to say something around some author or someone famous that inspires me, but the reality is not really. I think I look up to those people who consciously try to make a difference in the world that they can influence, the platform they've got to do that on.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
I think for me, the biggest thing is just to listen and for them to keep listening as well. When you're in that mode of being so excited about the next thing that you're launching and the passion for that thing, really, it's like a drug. It's incredibly powerful.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
It's very easy to get into this bubble where you sort of everything in your world is the thing that you know and you've built and you've created.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
But it's incredibly powerful to also be able to have that perspective of say, you know what, I'm still going to listen to what other people around me or to other influences that I have are telling me and maybe even people who I've never really met before. And having that roundedness to just step back a bit and go, yeah, I've built this awesome thing. I'm super proud of what I've built.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
But being able to, if you can, step outside that bubble and see it from the outside as well. And it gives you an amazing amount of perspective that you can then do all sorts of things with to improve the product.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
to think about some of the gaps that there are in the product and there will always be gaps in the product no matter how hard you try or work to stop them it's just keeping that that level head when things go really well and on that ride up the elevator i love it i think that's fantastic advice well william thank you for being on the show today thank you for telling the creation story of basket it's been a pleasure now thanks so much for having me
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
The MVP was purely just to get a sense of what's it like to save a link from a browser to an app and store it and then represent it. The UX around the saving process was really key. So we wanted to make sure that we could achieve this idea of share from the browser and the sharing intent of that browsing session could be captured really well and brought into a mobile app that was there.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
Basket is a smart wishlisting tool. So it allows you to save things that you're interested in and you can organize those things into various collections, share those with friends, family. There's a gifting functionality. There is a bunch of tools to help you to organize your shopping, which includes things like getting price drop notifications back in stock, that kind of thing.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
We are only in the UK right now. We've been building almost three years now. My co-founder and I met in a coffee shop in London after I'd moved there. We just got chatting about a whole bunch of things that we'd been working on prior to that. Yeah, we just found that there was a lot of overlap in terms of the things we were working on together and thinking about.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
And Lex went on to continue some other ventures for a couple of years after that initial meeting. But there was always this kind of, we should do something together. We should build something together.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
we started off with a bit of a couple of side hustles building a pitch deck tool actually for startups thinking that'd be fun it never really got off the ground and basket was something that i guess came off the back of my co-founder lex and i going there's a really interesting space in e-commerce aggregation place
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
So we built that, as I said, in two weeks. It worked really well and it just gave us a sense of something in our hand that we could feel and go, yeah, this is a thing. My name is William Neal. I'm the CTO and co-founder of Baskin.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
And he kicked off sort of the start of it with saying he's going to build this tool for families to create wish lists for their kids. And he's got three young kids. It's really frustrating as a parent when you're trying to raise your kids with things around them that
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
you want them to have around them sewing toys or gifts and things like that and you get a lot of plastic crap as a parent it's a thing you're trying to reduce the amount of plastic that you just can't recycle or put anywhere or just it's just literally like plastic crazies trying to just reduce that kind of gifting disconnect between friends of the family or whoever's doing things for birthday parties and stuff so anyway we lex actually started building this tool with his wife
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
called Kinderlist and I came in after that's built and maybe three or four months worth and jumped in as like a CTO role to help them out building up the rest of the platform. We'd got a platform out, got it live, had a good maybe 10 something thousand users and then COVID hit and all these people suddenly were at home and couldn't really mix and mingle.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
People started to use our tool for a whole bunch of other stuff than what we anticipated they'd use it for. We had people adding their household supplies, their wish list for when I get out of COVID, I'm going to go and buy this thing because it's going to be my release from the house kind of stuff.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
Or it was literally people just going, I'm sick of staring at this wall in my house for days on days. I'm going to have to do something and remodel this place. So they were buying paint, they were buying furniture, they were buying all kinds of things. And it was totally unrelated to kids. Of course, we're looking at this going, surely there's an opportunity here to do something.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
If people want to buy a three-seater sofa for five or six thousand pounds, why not clip the ticket? For sure, there's got to be something here we can do that helps people to find the stuff they're looking for, make that decision about, yeah, this is actually something I want.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
And then, I guess, three, find a way of making the introduction so that actually people get a good deal on the thing that they're looking for.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
Yeah, we built a really quick MVP in two weeks. We hired a guy from Central Europe to help us build that in native code. I think it was Objective-C at the time and Kotlin. And the MVP was purely just to get a sense of what's it like to save a link from a browser to an app and store it and then represent it, the UX around the saving process was really key.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
So we wanted to make sure that we could achieve this idea of share from the browser and the sharing intent of that browsing session could be captured really well and brought into a mobile app that was there. So we built that, as I said, in two weeks. It worked really well. And it just gave us a sense of something in our hand that we could feel and go, yeah, this is a thing.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
It's not massively novel at that point. There's other ways of like, you know, apps sharing to other apps and storing our data. But it gave us a sense of, yeah, we could feel how this would be if you found a product you liked and wanted to save it for later into a sort of a wishlisting tool and how fast that could be. Because that was probably the key thing is,
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
You're on a website and you're browsing. We don't want to get you out of that flow state. We want to keep you shopping and you want to stay shopping. So we don't want to interrupt. And so that process had to be as seamless as possible. So yeah, that was our MVP. From there, we looked at the process and the cost of building out an actual tool that would then give to the customers.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
We decided that actually going the native route was going to be both costly and also fairly high maintenance for a tiny team to take on. So we took on Flutter at the time and decided we're going to build out with Flutter. That was interesting. So we'd shopped around with a bunch of agencies and asked, what are your thoughts on this?
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
And we'd raised a little bit of capital at that point to say, look, we're going to go and tackle this problem. And we were getting told that React was the only way to go. And yeah, we decided we'll fly in the face of convention and we'll take a stab at Flutter because we felt the community was growing pretty well and there were some opportunities.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
So yeah, we dove into that and we're really actually happy we did. We felt like it's been a good decision. We've built out with, I guess, a lot of the Flutter tooling for the backend initially. Had to rewrite that quite often to make sure it stays fast and performant for all of the backend side of things. Yeah, we've crossed a lot of bridges to get to the point that we are now.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
And yeah, there's early days of MVP of getting it out, testing the waters, launching something and really seeing what happens. It took us probably almost a year, I think, to build something before we launched on the app stores and called it our launch version.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
Analytics, super key, getting some good analytics in place at the starting point. We had a roadmap of assumptions that we wanted to test. We had a feature backlog of things. We're going to go build this. Everything changes as soon as you launch and you start looking at what people are actually doing with the tool.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
We were looking at the kinds of product that people were adding and we were anticipating the furniture shopper or homewares at least, because that's what we'd experienced with COVID. But launching it, we discovered that it was fast fashion and the aesthetic of the app, the Scandinavian feel that we thought people were going to go for was really not the right thing.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
And so we had to pivot and change the direction of that and also think about the way that we were presenting the actual content back to people in the app. And so that made it more of a fast fashion focus. And also the audience are much younger, heavily female.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
And the way that we communicate, the way that we think about the product and its users has changed a lot since that sort of initial MVP launch. But yeah, all down to analytics, watching that really carefully.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
I think we've rebuilt our analytics stack three times now to this point where we've just gone, it's not giving us the fidelity that we need to make good decisions and rip it out, plug a new solution in. And it's really painful because you've got to make sure you've got that kind of historical data trend tracking along there to marry up.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
Good analytics makes or breaks a product, I think, at this stage in building tech. And then you've got a lot of other things you've got to be on top of with thinking about where is this product going? Why is it going there?
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
How are we going to shift not only the competitive strategy, but also the tech strategy so that we are ahead of certain things that might be coming, whether it's iOS releases, data privacy updates and things that are happening with that.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
That also had a huge impact on the way that we could or couldn't do things with tracking and also affiliate because we use at the moment and still do today quite a lot of affiliate links to build out the revenue side of our business. We don't have to worry about stock and inventory and all kind of stuff.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
It's been funny watching all the browsers introduce all of these cookie-less and privacy-focused features, which has made it more difficult to do quite a lot of the tracking that we were trying to do.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
Those are challenges you can roll with, and in terms of features, yeah, it's all been about serving to what people are doing and watching behavior, doing a lot of customer interviews, and trying to just be a really good place where they can store stuff for later.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
Team makes a race product. We did shop around for agencies originally. We'd been working with an agency, the previous guys of Basket as the kinder list piece. And we had a probably four person team, I think at the time, actually in-house, which literally was actually in-house. Like we were in someone's house at the time, like doing a lot of the stuff or coding or doing things like that.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
But yeah, we had an agency doing a lot of the additional code building side of things. Coming into Basket, we wanted to see if we could build something out really quick, but also make a couple of key hires that we would hope to keep with us for quite a long time.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
We decided to build out a lot of the backend first, as we felt that was actually the key thing to figure out, and then we'd come back to the user-facing problem second. So we actually spent a lot of time with agencies shopping around how we might build out an MVP with the backend. We went with, I guess, an agency we'd worked with before. as well as hiring two key positions.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
We hired a lead back engineer. We hired a designer and also a front-end engineer at the time. So we had a pretty lean small team and then also the external agency at the time. We went through probably three agencies by the time We got to about one year post-launch.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
We've had a fairly high team turnover, not because we engineered that way or anything, but we hired a lot for talent in the early days of the venture and didn't hire so well for attitude and interest. And it's really exciting to come and work on a project. I think for a lot of people where they go, there's some new tech, there's some new opportunities to build things.
Code Story
S10 E10: William Neill, Basket
But when you get stuck into the actual product and you get into things that there's always going to be walls that pop up with code and it gets hard. It's finding the people that can work through those walls and I'm doing it because I really think the product is awesome and I can see how it fits together. We've learned a lot about finding people and understanding that interviewing process.