the goose

I’m well and truly in the groove when it comes to using taskfive.com these days. Funnily enough, I’m also not doing too shabbily when it comes to gyming either. Although some days are better than others, all in all, my discipline has been building up. The best exponent of this approach puts it like this. “Ordinary things, done consistently, produce extraordinary results”. Keith is coming to Dublin next week and although it’ll probably be the same spiel he had last time, a bit of time reaffirming how important it is to be consistent will be worth while.

Ironically – while I expound the virtues of sprinting a business idea, I’m a bigger fan of following that up with consistent effort that ebbs and flows up against your objective, wearing it away. Maybe a fartlek would be a better way to describe it.

I met up with my TaskFive partner over the weekend and we took stock of what we have on our hands.  Its been a pretty unreal experience being involved in the whole experiment and despite one or two challenges – it has been an unprecedented success.  Well – maybe it would be a little more unprecedented when we have some money coming in.  Now its time to roll up our slieves and start making that happen.

When I met Darrell on Saturday morning we started working on a spreadsheet to figure out how we could move this along.  We have a big leg up in terms of the amount of PR we’ve received but that is a long way from making a sale.  We have made two direct sales and direct marketing it the ‘break even’ plan.  Whatever happens online is going to happen and we don’t have so much control over that.

But I digress – the reason I started this post was so that I could post up our targets spreadsheet.  The basic idea here is that there are 3 price points which have been demonstrated to work.

Instead of trying to figure out what our app is ‘worth’ – we’re first deciding on the price points and then coming up with a value proposition to justify those price points.  I like this approach because it helps get the creative juices flowing in terms of coming up with ideas.  Its not so much how much would X be worth – but instead – would you pay €9 if you got X in return or would it take X + Y + Z?

Anyway – here is the spreadsheet.  Have a look and let me know what you think.

We’ve been focusing a lot more on our SEO effort for www.piehole.ie recently and there is a LOT to do.  Besides writing the blog and upgrading various parts of the site there is a tonne of work to be done.  The worst thing about it is that you are not guaranteed any success and success may only come months later.  In order to keep the moral up on the treck to Google stardome we have been using the website grader.  THe mysteries of SEO are manyfold and this is a useful tool for measuring success along the way.  While all this doesn’t wave a magic wand it does help us get out of our own way and make sure that we take advantage of any easy wins.

Darrell O’Dee (the origniator of the taskfive.com idea) came to the internet recently with his own blog on all things financial coaching. His latest article goes a little more in depth on his own personal mantra for guaranteed success. I’ve been using the ’system’ for the past six months now and personally I’ve found it transformational. I guess you could say that any task management system that you stick with will work. It just so happens this is the only one I’ve managed to keep up with.