Where did Meettrics come from?

Thanks for taking time to learn more about Meettrics (Meeting Metrics). Meettrics is the latest in a line of projects I have built over the years to help explore and become a master of web application development. I have been a software developer for over a decade. During this time, I can't even begin to count the arguments around meetings that have arisen. Some people feel they are pointless and others feel they are completely required.

Initially, I sided with those who leaned towards the pointless category. But after becoming a manager that perspective shifted. The simple reality is the truth is far more complicated and nuanced. If you have sales people that aren't meeting with exteral clients then you might have an issue with your pipeline in the near future. On the opposite side, a development team in frequent meetings means they might not have the time to complete their work and should be expected to miss deadlines. Different teams have different needs.

Lastly, meeting quality can vary from person to person. We have all encountered the persona of the person who schedules meetings needlessly in order to often avoid doing work. But how can we identify those meeting organizers that contribute in a positive way so they can share their knowledge? How can we help everyone get better at meetings?

Over the years I have not had access to the data to determine this. Meettrics is the application I plan to use to solve this for me. I hope you can enjoy it and gain some insights about your company as well.

What is the vision of Meettrics

Meettrics is the first step in a much larger goal to change how businesses are run. Software as a Service (SaaS) allows businesses to be launched with less capital than ever. No longer do you need to pay rent, or buy expensive tools. A simple computer and time is really all that is now needed. But the explosion of software just hasn't happened. Meettrics is an exploration around a new business model.

Quality over speed

In recent years I have noticed the increasing use of software terminology in common vernacular. As a software developer, this makes me a bit scared. After initially thinking it's cool, the process of how this is happening is quite scary. Software these days is shipping broken. Not accidently broken, but quite intentionally. A "fix it later" mentality has arisen from software developers that really is a "fix it never".

Meettrics is committed to delivering features that work. Every bug a customer experiences is a failure. It's a bad experience no matter how small of an inconvienance.

Value creation over production

Software development is about problem solving. The right answer is often counterintuitive to logic. It reminds me of the cars scene in which the main character "Lightening" McQueen is told that in order to "turn right in order to go left". In the same vein, I live in Amsterdam and bikes are the way of life. In order to turn left on a bike, it's best to pull the handlebars to the right and "counter steer".

Some people still don't believe me after I tell them this fact because it runs counter to what one first thinks. The same thing applies to businesses. Throughout history we have largely valued production. People are hired to perform a task and you do that task at the direction of the business.

I think this model of focusing on production no longer works as well as it used to. Production is a commodity, and if your employees are simply commodities, then it only makes sense to pay the lowest price. Or as we see in other industries, they may be automated away. Why bother have cashiers take your order when a nice touch screen is quicker and more accurate?

What is being missed is the tremendous value of an employee. People are more than one dimensional. They enjoy multiple disciplines and activities. People are natively curious and actively pursue learning new things. I want to focus on maximizing peoples potential value over maximizing their production. Monetizing value is relatively easy compared to creating value. By maximizing the value of Meettrics through realizing employees potential, we will have way more value to monetize. Over time hopefully this can be a feedback loop and invest this back into our people.

Masters over experts

All of this leads to masters over experts. I think that anyone can be an expert if you stay in one field long enough. Being an expert is simply a large amount of cumulated knowledge and experience in a subject areas.

What Meettrics needs is to be filled with is the best masters. A master is someone that can become an expert repeatedly. Meettrics aims to focus on how to make becoming an expert on a subject faster.

I don't want to hire production roles. I hope to never post a job for Software Developer or Customer Support Rep. I want to post a job for entrepreneurs that can help code their product or a yoga instructor that's interested in helping others. Being good at production alone isn't enough anymore.

Collaboration over individualism

By putting together a group of great people, the dynamic changes. I hope Meettrics can become a place for the best painters, artists, developers, musicians and more. These people need to be interested in leaning in to others problems and leveraging their mastery to build products impossible for one person to ever create.

A Meettrics employee seeks to give back. We build value by sharing our skills and contributing to each others dreams. I hope I can use my skills in software development to help out a painter or a dancer. And I hope in the process I can gain a bit more of their passion and skill-set.

How does Meettrics measure success?

The key metric I want to measure Meettrics success by is the total amount of hours invested in others. If a developer has an app idea that looks really promising, we should focus on getting the value delivered with as little effort as possible. If we have employees doing tasks that are manual labor and repetitive we need to automate that so they can do more valuable activities like learning a new skill or inventing a new feature/product. It's about the people.

Want to help?

What I want to achieve over the next decade or two is radical. It's almost a 100% probability that I fail. And maybe this seems impossible and overly optimistic to you as well. But, I believe together with others that share the same vision we can get there. It's easy to be discouraged because it feels like the end goal is not reachable. But all I and Meettrics can do is to ensure we ended today a bit closer to our goal than yesterday. I don't know when we will arrive, but we are on our way, and this is first step. Send a message and join us on our journey.