I guess there is more work to do on the name front. Thanks to everyone who dropped in to vote – but as your can see below the result was decidedly – er – indecisive.
What I’ve decided to do is engineer the app so that multiple domains can be pointed to the server allowing for a number of marketing messages. This way I can sell the same product in different ways and see which one does the best. Its a bit like a little less fancy version of what smileprint.ie and goodprint.co.uk.
The intention is to develop a consumer offering of the product focused on the ‘5 a day’ while a different domain name will focus on the peer angle. The idea came to me while listening to Ryan Deiss. You have to fess up your email address to watch the entire series – but I thought it was worth it.
It turns out picking a name isn’t as easy as I thought it might be for tha AppSchool project. I started off with 5tings.com. There is the obvious problems that this can be confused with 5things.com which has some german dude spouting on about something. Then Paul pointed out that it reads like ‘Strings’ – which I’m not entirely sure is a bad idea. Maybe ‘Stings’ is what the cool kids are calling some unmentionable body part or newfangled narcotic. I was too shy to ask. Anyway 5tings is out. So that leaves me with a conundrum.
When I heard that Contrast were going to go ahead and develop my latest project I started putting some requirements together. I’m not really a fan of verbose requirements specifications and while I think the easiest to work from are wireframes with notes, I just put together a list in a shared google spreadsheet. Here is what they were.
ID Description
1 A user registration system asks for two email addresses. One for the person registering and one for the person they would like to invite to be their buddy. Read the rest of this entry »
So the guys at contrast asked me to write few words on what my big idea was and why I’m pimping it. I’ve always liked the idea of writing some software that would whirr away on the internet spinning out money so that I could put my feet up on a beach somewhere. I’ve been making various attempts at bringing this about over the years and in that time I’ve started to narrow down exactly what type of money making machine I’d like to own. Before I start any project I measure them up against what I think of as ‘my investment criteria’. So here goes. Read the rest of this entry »
Well it seems as though while I’ve been schlepping my way though a 6 thousand line XML document, someone has built half my web app.I guess I it is only fair and proper to explain what it is now that bits of it are leaking out on to the web.Here is the original pitch email I sent to Eoghan.
Funny timing this – but I’ve just been for lunch with a guy who wants to have an online todo list written up. Not much of a challenge for the mighty contrast – but this one is a little different – it’ll get used.
Darrell O’Dea is a founder of www.theicesgroup.com. In recent months he has turned his hand to financial coaching and my partner and I have been meeting with him weekly to help grow our www.piehole.ie business. Anyway – Darrell
is considered by many to be pretty successful and he attributes that success to ‘doing five things a day’. He’s not ‘rolling in cash’ successful – but he is good at property investment and managed to ‘quit the day job’ by buying property on the side. If I thought the guy had any chance of shelling out the full fee for this I wouldn’t be writing to you.
Back to my story. It doesn’t really matter what the five things are – he just tries to get 5 done. Priscilla (that’s my partner) and I started out by trying the 5-a-day approach, tracking it all in a Google spreadsheet. It was VERY motivating to see how much work Priscilla had done in a day. If I was falling behind in the amount of items ‘ticked’ off, I’d feel real bad about it and get my arse into gear.
So you see where we are going here. We’d like to build a social todo list where two or more people can sign up and track their their ‘5 a day’ side by side.
Not that novel. So why pick this idea?
Darrell has access to a large database of wannabe entrepeneurs through theicesgroup.com and marketing is his specialty. He will build the system into his coaching business and charge people for telephone coaching using the system.
I know it’s frustrating to write something that never gets used. Pick this one and I guarantee it will.
I get this question a lot. ”How much should I pay for a website?”. Of course everyone really just wants to hear an answer like “you can get it for free” – which isn’t the case and even if I am about to talk about a way to get one for very cheap – that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth shelling out a few bucks for some professional design. It is true that you get what you pay for – but if you are running a sprint or just want to experiment, wordpress.com offers you an option that’ll get you 20% towards what you might consider to be a professional site.
Go to wordpress.com and sign up for a free account. Wordpress is a free blogging system. A blog is just a website that allows you to write a type of diary online. I really like wordpress because you can also use it to create webpages without having to know anything about how the guts of a website actually work.
Once you have an account, select Settings (on the right hand side) and then Domains (in the middle).
Now you’ll have to whip out your credit card and pay $15 for your domain name.
I just set up one this morning in about 15 minutes. Of course you will have to learn how to use wordpress but there are plenty of tutorials out there on wordpress.com.
I’ve just seen a most excellent marketing ploy rolled out by the guys at contrast.ie. They’re offering to build your app in a week for almost free. You have to stump up 900 euros for which you will get a week for grade A developer time. These guys are good and you won’t get a deal like this again. Also, they are in Ireland and are looking for ideas from Ireland, so this might be the best chance you’ve ever had to get your idea from zero to hero in no time at all.
I have to admit.I was a little nervous.This was our third sprint event – and I was starting to wonder if we’d fail to come up with an idea for income generation.It is a big asks.Four complete strangers in a room with nothing but our wits to magic cash up with.I needn’t have worried as it happens.There was a more diverse core group time around than ever before – but that only seemed to add to the mix.We met in the newly rebranded Maldron Hotel at 8am, and having installed the participants with coffee 1.0 and booted up the sticky pads and markers – we set about coming up with what turned out to be some cracking ideas.We had a review of the various different methods of building something people would pay for online and then got stuck into our ‘contact groups’.Something that I learnt from the second sprint was – without a route to market , the best ideas in the world are useless.With this in mind, having completed a primer on internet businesses, we started ‘auditing’ the contact groups we had in the room.Between us we had a fairly healthy mix.From lawyers to business owners and even the odd rock star, we had a good base to work from.By coming up with lists of people we know, the idea goes, that we have a defined path to selling our product, even if we didn’t know what that product was at this stage.
We had already come up with a list of ideas for products based on the primer session.The next step was to start whittling down the 40 some product ideas we had generated.We did this by matching up the ideas with contact groups. The logic went – that if an idea didn’t have an identifiable group of people to sell to – there wasn’t much point in developing it.”If a tree falls in the woods and no one was there to hear it – did it ever fall at all” or “if a product has no one to be sold to, was there any point in it in the first place?”.This process actually whittled down the remaining ideas pretty quickly.We then set about defining our ‘investment criteria’ as a group and used that to come up with a winner.In this case – the winner was an intellectual property product eBook called “IP 4 Dummies”. Using the solicitors specialized knowledge, the contact spheres of the other members and the technical know how of our programmer, we managed to get a site up pretty fast.By the following Saturday the product was pretty much there and we were able to concentrate on marketing.
The marketing plan this time around concentrated mainly on email.We only had a list of about 6,000 people – and we figured out that we weren’t going to hit our target income of 6k based on that list alone.A rogue’s gallery of promotional ideas was trotted out.Everything from PR to TV to Google adwords.Time will tell which work out.Funnily enough – we had our first sale before wee even started a marketing plan.We were using Tradebit to host our eBook.For 25% of the cover price, they handle emailing out the eBook to those purchasing the book as well as collecting the money via PayPal.They also list the book on their own index – and it was through this index that we had our first bite from a buyer in the UK.Unfortunately for us – we had set the price at 50c for testing purposes.Thankfully the first full price sale came the next day.
