Rather than share a handful of vanity metrics for the year, I figured we'd peel back a couple layers of the Tendrel onion and share a bit more about the core of our philosophy. And coming out of 2024, we've got a much crisper, much clearer picture of who we are... and who we're not.
I. Agility > Heavyweight
We're much more Floyd Mayweather than Mike Tyson (at any age, not just when he's a few years away from Medicare). At its purest, Tendrel is a platform that's about precision, focus, and speed... and less about raw knockout power.
There are products out there that do more than we do. But they're an order of magnitude more expensive, require an entire team of implementation specialists, and necessitate user training that warrants a comp sci degree. We've found that our users like us best when we minimize wasted energy, focusing only on what’s necessary to secure the win.
One of our challenges is choosing when to flex the capabilities of our platform vs. when to build a more opinionated product. To our engineers' credit, it takes humility to configure a simpler solution that gets you 90% of what you need, albeit at 10% of the effort.
II. Data ≠ Value
Perhaps a bit of an unexpected position to take for a data platform, but this isn't exactly a revelation. Mark and I have talked about this for years. The chain looks more like: data -> (operational) insight + (adaptive) reaction -> value.
The outcome might be worker hours saved, machine uptime increased, raw inputs replenished, or asset routing optimized... but we need to distill the data so that the value-driving insights bubble to the top. We don't want our customers doing spreadsheet acrobatics at 10pm; we want simple, impactful, beautiful dashboards that make the non-obvious, obvious.
A big part of our past year was parsing out the music from the noise: what are the metrics, charts, and views that give you the pulse of your business? Plenty left to do on this front, but every customer conversation gets us a step closer.
What's Next
But as an early stage start-up, spend too much time gazing nostalgically in the rearview mirror, and you inevitably smash into the brick wall right in front of you. So where do we go from here?
We've got three goals for the year ahead:
-
Accelerate onboarding: in our earliest deployments it would take us a couple days to launch our customers. With the
Tiny Tendies, you can be off the ground in an hour. By next year, we want onboarding in < 5 minutes via thoughtful automations & preconfigured templates.
-
Tighten the scope: to superserve our early adopters, we're going to double down on use cases across three key frontline verticals in Q1: i) manufacturing, ii) warehousing, and iii) emergency services (think ambulances, fire departments, etc.). More to come later in the year.
-
Engage the ecosystem: to make sure we're building the right thing, we want to spend more time onsite with customers, meeting folks at tradeshows, etc. We'll have booths at Manifest (Vegas in Feb) and ProMat (Chicago in Mar) -- let me know any other choice conferences you recommend.
One More Thing
And for those taking a slightly longer view, a bonus goal... open up the platform: this one's for the second half of 2025, but the objective is to let a handful of thoughtful tech partners play with some of our tooling to build their own custom modules... if this sounds interesting, drop me a line.
Until then, have a lovely holiday and see you next year.