Hello,

Since our last newsletter, we have completed our second funding round of £150,000. This guarantees us another year of building and, importantly, selling Sundog. We’ve been working out how to build a product in the world, and experimenting with different ways of sharing our product with biologists.

Alex Mitchell | CEO update

This summer, we’re doing a sort of marketing that is new to us: sharing Sundog with scientists in person, at conferences and other events.

Our first event of the summer was the Earlham Institute’s single-cell and spatial meeting. Spatial biology is the sort of domain for which Sundog works brilliantly. Tools for collaboration and consensus are invaluable when scientists have to come to complex understandings at every stage of working with the data. The Earlham were among the first in the UK to single-cell and spatial technologies, so they’re well embedded in a community that is on the cutting edge of this work.

I came away from this event enthused for the incredible work that’s happening in labs across the world: and just as enthused for how Sundog can support new experimental techniques and new ways of working with that data.

Jeffrey Moffitt shared his lab’s work imaging the microbe/host interface, using expansion microscopy to make investigating RNA in gut microbes actually viable. Expansion microscopy, as the name suggests, produces enormous files, so I was happy that Sundog is just as slick and snappy with huge files as with small ones; we are able to support the scientists who are pushing the boundaries of the experimental techniques available to them.

I took the opportunity to ask some of the biologists at the meeting what they enjoyed using. In our research, we often hear from scientists about the software they hate; what do they like? Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that many were sincerely excited about Claude Code.

It was a truism, 18 months ago, that there was the divide between biologists and bioinformaticians was huge. The biologists knew what they were looking for, but didn’t know quite enough Python or R to ask the question; the bioinformaticians knew how to ask, but often didn’t know the experiment in enough depth to get to the most interesting answers. Tools like Claude Code massively shrink that gap. For us at Sundog, it’s a strong signal that our planned programatic features (APIs and command-line tools) have an expectant audience.

And sometimes, it was just nice to hear about the extremely cool things scientists were learning and discovering. We heard from a PhD student who studies the brains of the labroides dimidiatus, a highly social reef fish that is the only fish known to recognise itself in a mirror. And not just a mirror: it can also recognise itself in photographs.

Having spent so many months deep in the product, it was great to soak in science for a few days, and see all the ways the work we’re doing can support incredible research.

Tom Armitage | CTO update

The story we’ve been telling in this newsletter since last year has been about getting off the ground. Last time I described this as

working out what working on Sundog with Sundog in the world now looks like.

Getting to launch meant building foundations. Not just “IT infrastructure”, but product foundations - the core functionality (labs, experiments, users, authentication) that the product relies on. Going beyond launch means building upon those foundations.

Working with Sundog with it in the world turns out to involve striking many balances. Balancing incremental change and improvement with more substantial work that adds new foundations to the product, or alters existing ones. Balancing customer feedback, emergent ideas, and work we planned in our post-launch planning workshop. Balancing thinking about the work and doing the work.

I think we’re striking a good balance for now. One thing that helps is balancing different scales of feature. The largest features, big-ticket items, radically change the product or open up new possibilities. Smaller plussings, improvements to what we already have, update existing work to better reflect user needs. And then there’s what I’ve come to term sanding - tiny tweaks that we’re slipping in as we work on other things, the sort of things you discover through repeated use of your own product. (And as we do it all: keeping the documentation up-to-date!)

Balancing these scales of work is good for our development team - it means we’re all working on a variety of scales, rather than lumping one person with all the UI sanding, or one person with every big-ticket feature.

It also means we can deliver these features at a healthy rate. Pre-launch, we were working to a huge initial delivery. We can’t do that ever again. Now, we aim to deploy regularly - currently, around every one or two weeks. A regular cadence isn’t just about fixing bugs quickly: it’s about delivering a steady stream of improvements to our paying customers. Delivery is as important as the doing.

And communicating that delivery is critical. We’re regularly publishing release notes to the blog on the recently overhauled public website. With the product in the wild, it became very necessary to have a place to be able to release and describe product updates.

We’ve done a lot since launch in April:

• adding selectable colours of annotations, and allowing users to choose names for these to enable for classification workflows
• notifications / mentions (”@-messaging”) in comments - which closes the interaction loop, allowing users to pull other users to a stack, rather than relying on them to log in to check for updates
• the ability to follow another user’s cursor on a stack
• area/dimension calculation for annotations
• overriding scale for an individual stack
• quicksearch (”Command+K”)

as well as small improvements, bug fixes, and upgrades.

The goal I suggested in the previous newsletter - doing more, smaller, things, more often - has come to pass, and I hope we’ll continue to stick to it.

As always, we’re so glad to have you following along with us as we build and sell Sundog. If you want to talk more, just reply to this newsletter or email alexandra@sundog.bio.