Situation
GoldMail had a simple, appealing vision: record a voice narration over a set of images or slides, save it as a link, and send it to anyone who could watch and listen in a browser. “Voice over images, delivered as a link” was novel in 2006. The company had raised seed money, but its first build was incomplete and did not work, and earlier attempts to raise a funding round had not closed.
Objective
Find out what the first build actually was, turn it into a working end-to-end product, and give the company something it could raise money on. After the round, scale the platform and the team behind it.
Approach
- An honest technical read. I did a full code and app review and gave a frank assessment: significant concerns about both the client app and the server-side components, and the code was clearly incomplete. That assessment is what got me hired on contract to fix it.
- Rebuilt from the studs up on the Microsoft stack. I kept the UI the company had already paid for and rebuilt everything behind and around it:
- the creator app, a desktop application for assembling images and slides and recording narration, in C# on .NET using MVC;
- the upload and hosting services, in C# on the ASP.NET .asmx web-services layer of the era;
- the viewer, a Flash player that let a recipient watch the narrated slides from a link;
- the databases, user login and accounts, and the full create, upload, share and view flow.
- The front end that helped land the round. A few days before an investor meeting at a Santa Rosa country club, I decided the product’s UI was not good enough to sell. On my own initiative I built an alternate creator front end, modern and slick. The team took the business plan and that new UI into the meeting and walked out with funding commitments and an incoming CEO.
- Grew into CTO. With funding in place the company promoted me to CTO. I stood up a dedicated development, QA and operations office in Pleasanton, built out the engineering, QA and operations organization, and set the technical direction while the company brought in branding and started making real sales.
- Built the mature platform.
- Landscape and portrait modes, and import of PDF, Word, Excel and PowerPoint files to narrate over.
- PowerPoint-to-image conversion. The converters of the day forced a trade between clean images with mangled text and clean text with degraded images. I converted each slide to a vector graphic at 2× resolution, then rendered that down to a scaled JPG, which kept both crisp text and clean images.
- Customized, interstitial advertising and branding inside the slideshow: pre-roll, post-roll and final-slide banner ads, plus white-label branding, seasonal themes, and personalization of the player and landing page. This became US 8,458,598 B1, with two co-inventors.
- Buffered, synchronized playback. A GoldMail was a series of images with an audio track and a timed script that advanced them. The viewer downloaded the structure as an XML file plus a separate audio file, then computed how much audio to pre-buffer so playback started as early as possible without stalling.
Net results
- Took a non-working, incomplete first build to a working end-to-end product.
- The company closed a funding round.
- GoldMail launched publicly as a consumer service around November 2007, with a Windows creator client and a paid and ad-supported model.
- Built a funded company’s engineering, QA and operations organization, with paying customers and a branded go-to-market.
- Delivered the platform and the granted advertising patent below. PointAcross later succeeded GoldMail.
Takeaway: in an early-stage company, the demo is the product; the engineering has to work, and the experience is what gets funded.
Sources: venturebeat.com/business/got-email/; techcrunch.com, Oct 2008; pitchbook.com/profiles/company/64100-17; patents.google.com/patent/US8458598; patents.justia.com/assignee/goldmail-inc.
Scope and technologies
C# / .NET for the creator app, MVC; ASP.NET web services, .asmx, for upload and hosting; Flash-based browser viewer with an XML-plus-audio, pre-buffered playback model; SQL database; user login and accounts; a vector-at-2× PowerPoint-to-JPG conversion pipeline. Microsoft stack end to end.
Patents
- US 8,458,598 B1, “Customized advertising for online slideshow.” Inventors: Thomas Hakel, David Andrew Simpson, Paul N. Vilevac. Assignee: GoldMail, Inc. Priority Jan 23, 2008; filed Jan 23, 2009; granted June 4, 2013. Covers customized pre-roll, post-roll and final-slide advertising and white-label, seasonal and personalized branding inside an audio-enhanced online slideshow player.