the goose

I’ve been getting a little sick of the sound of my own advice recently.  I’ve resolved to only write a blog if I’ve actually got something concrete to back up my opinions.  As a consequence, I’m pretty quiet.  I did do another survey for agtweet though using the questions recommended by Sean Ellis and survey.io.  I’d recommend it.  Super easy to set up and Sean has already worked out what to ask so you don’t have to.

Sean gave me this advice on how to interpret the results and what to do next.

If you have been using  the 085 agtweet number for the last while you have been experiencing a less than stellar experience.  In fact, it has been down since Friday and I’m having real problems getting it back on its feet.

Now, I should say, that it really shouldn’t take this long and I will admit to not giving it 100% attention as some day job issues are pretty pressing right now.  I guess I took on some responsibility when I launched the service and right now I don’t feel like I’m living up to that responsibility.  In part I am relying on the kindness of friends to keep agtweet running and I don’t want to abuse that by pestering them all the time for help.  I’ve been getting a lot of questions about when the 085 number will be back … to which I’ll say I’m not totally sure right now.

For the moment, accept my apologies and bear with me.

thanks

James

Agtweet has been going through the wars recently.  A combination of simple mistakes, expiring credit, tripping over cables, twitter connectivity issues and getting snowed in in the Wicklow mountains, all conspired to patchy service.  In my experience, these things come along like buses, in clumps of 3 or 4.  We’ve had about 7 months of pretty continuous service but over the last few months there have been problems.

All of which results in posts like …

and … Read the rest of this entry »

Right, so O2 have started offering Twitter from your mobile phone over SMS.

Now who do I know that does that?  Oh yeah – me.  So is this good news or bad news?   Well, the good news is that it means more people are using Twitter although I’m still detecting a slow down in the number of Irish Twitter sign ups.   Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick agtweet update.  I tried running a ‘double your texts’ promotion today to see if I could stimulate some sales.  Lets just say, it didn’t work – at all.  I guess its not always about price.

I am i n blood, steeped so far that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er

It has been just over a month since I started offering a way for people to pay for @replies on agtweet.  I went for a 3 tiered pricing plan of €3, €9 and €16.  Within a couple of days I had 3 €3 subscription and a week later there was my first €16 subscription.  Things were looking reasonable.  Full sure of its passive rise to stardom I pretty much headed off into the wilds of Argentina for month.

When I came back, there was some good news and some bad news. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Find out what they want:  @replies
2. Go and get it: Some of last week went into building credit card processing into Ag Tweet
3. Give it to them: 4 paying subscribers – whoop.

Ag Tweet did something last week that 99% of web applications fail to do.  It garnered some paying customers.  Four of them in fact, eaching shelling out €3 a month.  I’m writing up a brief explanation of how it was put together and why I made various choices including pricing models. Read the rest of this entry »

The only problem with having control over your own time is – no one tells you when you are spending too much time on a task.  Anyway.  This is done now.  A good while ago at the first Bizcamp in Dublin, I took part in a little game that involved putting together a pitch for a fake business in under 10 minutes.  I can’t remember what is was called.  Anyway, some bright spark came up with the idea of a collaborative subscription model planning tool.  I really liked it and I’ve spent the last day or two putting a lite version to further the discussion on what to do with Ag Tweet.

You can check out the (mostly javascript) tool at http://www.jameskennedy.ie/plannr.

So what does it do?  It aims to help you discuss price points for your subscription service.  It assumes there are 3 ‘levels’ of subscription and you can play with the figures ( prices, % of people on each plan, total number of subscribers etc).

When you are ready to you can add a comment at the bottom and email it off.  None of the data is saved on my server and all the information is held in the URL.

I’ve pre-populated the table with figures which look kind of like what I’m thinking of for AgTweet.  If you have any ideas on what pricing structure I should put in place for it, by all means fill out the sheet and let send it on to me.

I was pretty late to the twitter scene but I was convinced that it was going to be huge.  About 5 months ago I put together @agtweet as an exercise in getting my head around it all.  I had this marketing plan and I thought I’d review how things went.

First up it might be worth mentioning that it appears as though twitter take up in Ireland is slowing.  For the last three months I’ve been tracking new accounts and there seems to be a downward trend although the first months data could be skewed because I was busy finding all the new people. Read the rest of this entry »