the goose

For the last 9 months or so, we have been hunkered down in Argentina, focusing on building up Piehole.  Overall, it has been a success.  Away from the distractions of networking events and County Enterprise Board grants, there has been nothing much to do other than grow our subscriber base and find more work for our artists.

I do have one big fear however.  It is all too each to get used to good wine, tasty empanadas and cheap meat.  You don’t need a lot of money to live a very nice lifestyle and there is a temptation to spin down a little bit and just coast.  I’m not against coasting and it has been wonderful to be able to focus on Piehole, giving it the love it deservers .  However, after a while the question becomes, ‘what next?’.

As we live in Mendoza, 18 hours away from the bright lights of Buenos Aires, there are limited networking opportunities.  There are local tech enthusiasts but it is hard to make the sort of network of contacts that can be useful in growing a business.  I’m somewhat wistfully looking on at all the great events being held back in Dublin these days.  I’m tempted to come back for a few.

However – why move back to Dublin – when we could go straight for gold and move to the Internet epi-centre – the Bay Area, California.  There are a couple of daunting reasons NOT to go.

• It will be at least 3 times as expensive.
• We won’t be able to afford the same quality of life.
• Hiring local talent will be out of our budget.
• GMT-8 is a long way from our Irish customers.  Starting work at 1am would be a toughie.

On the plus side – here are some of the benefits I imagine will flow

• Ready access to cutting edge talks and education on building web businesses
• An opportunity to set up a Piehole in the states, working with local artists.
• Potential to build relationships which made aid the eventual sale of Piehole.

So here is my question . Is it worth it and how would we get the most out of it?

Miller’s law states that

average human can hold in working memory is 7 ± 2

When I was in computers science school, this was pretty much the extent of our UX training.  Don’t put more than seven items in a menu and you’ll be fine.  It would probably be better off put in our business class.  Miller was a congnitive psychologist and his book on the limits of human congnition, was based on reasearch showing that, bascially, humans have limits on their ability to process information, and numbers.

This is a problem for me.  I’m trying to grow hundreds and thousands of customers, paying tens of euro a month for some service.  I can’t possibly keep each customer in mind and individually.  Also, there are hundreds of payments to keep track of – this needs to be simplified.  Most importantly, its hard to see the wood for the trees.  Some days, we only get 1 €18 payment in.  Its easy to freak out when something like that happens.  That is why we’ve been spending more time aggregating all the hundreads of transactions, from phone calls, to emails, to payments.  We’re fighting back against Miller’s law.

We built a pretty Minimum Viable CRM to gather the basic information.  It pretty much still works as described previously.  The only addition has been the ability to add notes by forwarding emails to a dropbox and the ability to initiate payments from the contacts home screen.

Thats not really what I’d like to blog about however.

On those €18 days, I tend to get a bit freaked out.  Because my brain is average and cannot really appreciate big numbers, percentages and more than 9 digits at a time, I need some way to ’see the wood for the trees’.   One of the most motivating (and therefore profitable) things about our CRM system is we are starting to have overview figures available to us.  How many calls were made this week, how many emails went out.  How many people upgraded.  Brian has a really nice post overviewing some of the fancier dashboards available online.

Aggregating live sales data down into average sale, average number of purchases per customer, conversion rate, really helps in the dark days.  Standing back, you can see how the whole thing comes together.  It makes the non-obvious, obvious.  Even though you might have had a terrible, day or week, having the total ‘broad view’ sales picture a click a way, can help you get back up and keep plugging away.  IMHO.

I applied for a technology voucher some time last year.  The process roughly runs like this …

• You apply for a voucher, outlining an area of expertise you would like assistance for from the University Sector.  In my case, I applied for a review of the literature related to medical compliance.
• Your proposal is approved or denied.  If you don’t have someone in particular in mind to help you then you are given a list of contacts in the major universities to whom you can send your proposal to.  I sent off a modified version of my proposal to about 10 designated contacts.  They then distribute the proposal internally and if someone is interested, they contact you directly.  I received one reply, although there wasn’t a fit in terms of what I was looking to have researched.

The Enterprise Ireland co-ordinator of the Innovation Voucher scheme is currently helping me to dig a little deeper and see if we can’t find someone who might be willing to help.  So far its been a pretty painless process.

Something has struck me as odd about the whole thing though.   Read the rest of this entry »