Close-up of the front chain ring or crankwheel of a bicycle.

This part of your bike is called a crankwheel. Without it, your bike would suck.

I’m finally ready to blog about my startup, that I’m now working on full-time after developing it since last fall with my co-founder Þorgils (I’m the technologist, he’s the sales wizard). Our tagline is “CrankWheel: Power your Sales and Service,” we’re on Facebook and Twitter and you can sign up at https://www.crankwheel.com/ to get news (and a special offer) when we launch, which should be this summer.

In a nutshell, CrankWheel allows a customer service agent, a sales person, or anybody else who might have a customer or colleague on the phone, to enhance the phone call with the ability to communicate visually, as if you were sitting side by side in front of a computer screen, in ten seconds flat.

Why didn’t I blog about CrankWheel sooner? The truth is, I’ve been through the typical Valley of Doubt with this project.

It’s a trail that starts in the hills of “This is the Best Idea Ever,” meanders down to an outcrop called “Oh look, there’s competition doing something slightly similar but nowhere near as good” and further down to the still-happy foothills of “This will be hard but worth it.”

After an enjoyable start, the trail keeps descending into the Valley of Doubt, and just as it starts to rain, you hit the dense forest of “Ouch, we just found a lot more competition.” As a thunderstorm of the soul sets in, you end up at the bottom of the valley in the marsh of “I’ve just wasted months of my life with nothing to show for it!”

Luckily, in my case, I made it through to the green pasture of “Every customer we speak to wants our solution” just as the weather started to improve, up the knoll of “I’m sure there’s a better way” and after that, step by step up out of the valley until I’m now standing on a plateau called “Time to commit very publicly.” Hence this blog post.

Now that I’m on the other side of the Valley, I’m strongly convinced that we’ve figured out a much better way to solve the problem at hand than anything that’s out there today.

I made it through to the other side thanks to questions such as these:

  • Why would you ever force your customer to install software or an app on their computing device, just so you can show them something?
  • Why should you ever live in doubt about whether your customer is seeing exactly what you think you’re showing them?
  • Why should it take more than a couple of steps, ten seconds at most, to see something being shown to you? Why should you have to remember and type in ten-digit conference room codes?
  • Why should you be forced to care about what kind of network connection you’re using, or what browser version you have, or whether you’re using a tablet or a smartphone or a desktop computer, when what’s happening is something so simple to do in real life? Just to be shown something?

Those questions gave rise to CrankWheel. In ten seconds or less, your customer will see exactly what you want them to see, no need to worry about what kind of device or which browser they have, no need to install software on their end, and it’s extremely easy to join a presentation. It just works, every time.

I think CrankWheel will make the world a better place through happier customers, a more personal touch, and less need to burn gasoline while driving to places to receive the kind of service that can’t be delivered over the phone alone.

To give a hint about CrankWheel’s “secret sauce,” I’ll mention that the last project I worked on at Google was WebRTC. It’s great technology that makes an excellent foundation for a product such as CrankWheel, but it’s also very new technology, supported by only a handful of browsers, which on the face of things conflicts with some of CrankWheel’s main goals. I’ll leave it at that for now – more later.

Right now, Þorgils and I are finalising the lineup of our first several customers, one in each of a few different industries, all of them willing to run scientific trials with us to see how much CrankWheel increases sales, shortens support calls, increases customer satisfaction, etc.

We are also ready to hire employee number one, based in our Reykjavík office. The ideal candidate is a rockstar programmer interested in web technologies and real-time communications. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with me if you are one or you know one. I promise, this will be fun!

I really look forward to being able to show and tell you more about CrankWheel in the coming months, both here and on the yet-to-launch CrankWheel blog, as well as by email if you sign up at https://www.crankwheel.com/.

In the meantime, I’ll keep pedalling.