If you are like me, you occassionaly get riled up by the state of this country and if you are slightly more self actualising you might actually attend a rally or chain yourself to a fence or something.  Of course you could just write a letter.  Much more effective than another email in your local TD’s spam folder.

Stamps are fiddly things of course and this is where writetoyourtd.ie comes into its own.  Surf on over and rant your little heart out.  Some suggested topics include:

• NAMA
• Broadband penetration
• the state of your footpath outside your house

Whatever you want to complain about can now be backed up with a reassuring physical letter that Richard himself will print off and post for you.  I helped put the code together and it includes a list of TD’s to get mad at including their addresses.  For €2.50 it’ll be in the post the next working day.  I think there is an extra charge for delivering it by brick.

PS:  I take no responsability for the design.  Richard got his graphic design qualificaiton while completing a Comp. Sci. masters.  Need I say more.

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 »

As I think I mention pretty much every second blog post, I’m a fan of the simple world view on building a business that Keith Cunningham expounds.  “Find out what people want, go get it and give it to them”.  The trick is, it is far harder to find out what people want (in my experience) than it is to go and get it.  Building a website/widget/service/car wash is easy and well understood.  Finding out what type of website/widget/service/car wash is the hard part.  That is why i was plesently suprised by my experiences with Ag Tweet so far.  I don’t have to bother asking people what they would want – they just tell me via twitter.  So here are the top 5 unexpected uses for “Ag Tweet”.

1. Updating for FREE with Meteor:  Meteor and a couple of other networks offer free on-network texting which means that there is no need for you to pay for your mobile tweeting at all.  I had started off with an 087 number but added the 085 after getting some feedback (aka: abuse ) by users.
2. Group Texting:  @trinitysailing have done something this afternoon I thought was very neat.  They are registering multiple mobile numbers against the same account so it means that anyone on the committee can text to update their twitter feed (and also their website as far as I know).
3. Sports Reportage:  @Orwell_Wheelers and @killorglinrowin have been busy updating from the field by text.  It has been fun to follow along even though I have no idea who they were talking about. This of course isn’t something you couldn’t do from a regular smart phone but I’m suprised by the number of sports clubs that seem to be using the service in this way.
4. Texting to Europe:  A few blogs has mentioned that they’d love the same service in other countries.  I know that peophaps no-one else is doing this because the anticipation is that Twitter will do it eventually but there is definite demand.
5. Broadband replacement:  Well – sort of.  Some proper nerd types with new-fangled smart-phones get caught out in the back of beyond without coverage from time to time.  I hadn’t expected anyone to use the service if they had an iPhone – but it seems AgTweet is a handy backup when emergency tweeting in far flung places is required.

I also hadn’t expected to do anything but avoid my tax returns and lose money on this.  However – it turns out that I have had generous offers of support in the form of sponsorship which I hope to go ahead with.  I am slightly worried that sponsorship might make the whole thing look a bit corporate and lose some of the great good-will we’ve been receiving.  Then again – bills to pay etc.

It has been a bit over a month now since I put agtweet.com together now.  It has been undoubtedly a bit of a distraction from the day job and if I were mercenary enough I’d shoot it dead.  On the other hand, it has been rather fun and I get little tweets every day thanking me for putting it out there which strokes my ego just nicely.

To date – here is the progress.

The marketing plan although having come under some criticism was made mostly up of a mix of off and online strategies from following other people to sending out a press release.  After some initial interest generated by following some ‘big twits’ like the IIA and EvertB things died off a little.  I had kind of hoped that I could put my feet up but although we have people using the service daily there was no growth.  No viral effect here.

So it was time to dust off MS Word and type out a press release.  First up I found it a little harder than expected to get a list of email addresses to send my release to.  Many news outlets don’t seem to have an obvious email address to send press releases to on their websites.  I did manage to get tweeted about by by Ewan from SMS Text News but the big success came via siliconrepublic.com.

I did consider using http://www.get2press.ie/ and http://www.irishpressreleases.ie/ but was defeated by their unclear pricing and bad user interfaces.  Overall I’m pretty impressed with PR.  It really didn’t take much to put a press release together.  I cogged one Priscilla put together for the everydayisasaturday.info website and just mailed it out.

I’m fascinated by price points.  I think they are a great place to start thinking about building a ‘value proposition’.  “What would you pay €10 for?” is a great question to get the creative juices flowing.  FREE is a price point I have never had much luck with.  We are constantly debating whether to introduce it at piehole.  It seems as though if it ain’t broke we shouldn’t try and fix it.  I did want to experiment however.  These guys seem to have mastered the art of offering something for ‘free’ in return for publicity.   Qwitter has been wildly successful and yet so far devoid of profit.

Or has it?  They seem to be busier than ever and I’m sure the good karma has something to do with that.  In an effort to experiement with the model myself, and as a means of finally getting on the social media bandwagon, I’ve produced agweet.com as a personal sprint.  It allows you to update your twitter status by sending a text to an Irish mobile number.  This is something our neighbours in the UK have been able to do since the get go.

Doubtless Twitter will introduce and Irish text number eventually but until then there is a nice little opportunity to give away a little bit of value for free.  Thanks for Ciaran McCarthy for digging us out with a layout and a logo.  Also thanks to piehole for letting me get this going on company time.

Date: 8am, 22^nd of September 2008

Team: Building contractor, Solicitor, Business Coach, Programmer

Objective: €6k in 6 months

Strategy: Intellectual Property product (eBook)

Expenditure: €30

Income to date: €20

Website: ip4dummies.com

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.

Writing this – I’m surrounded by a hive of activity as we put the finishing touches to the second golden goose sprint. For some reason, this time around, the attendees in this group all tended to have a HR background which wasn’t at all planned. Despite that – we didn’t come up with a product in any way related to HR. We had budgeted 40 hours for the project and a good quarter of that went just into brain storming ideas. We whipped out the white board and spent three hours going through about 10 potential ideas. We were searching for an idea that could be completed and available for sale in 40 hours, would continue to sell even after we had stopped working on it and would have a ‘route to market’ which we could take advantage of. In the first sprint we relied fairly heavily on ‘SEO’ to drive traffic to the site. You could say a ‘build it and they will come’ attitute was in play. That strategy is in fact paying off if a litttle slowly. This time around we searched for concepts which we could promote directly to our contact spheres. This is a little more costly in terms of the time required – but at least we had a little more control over how many sales we could generate.

The concept we plumbed for was a ‘How to Run a Speed Network’ ebook. Ebooks are great because you can create them quickly and if you have the right topic – its fairly easy for peole to understand why they should part with their had earned cash. While the plan worked out to be over 49 hours in total but in the end we only ended up spending 42.

After our initial brain storm, and had decided on our topic, it was then down to doing the work itself. We spent about 7 hours writing the book itself with the remainder of the time allocated to various types of promotion and sales activities.

With not much time to spare we had completed most of our tasks and http://www.how-to-speed-network.com was born to the world. The final step is to send out an sales email we have constructed to our contact base. Lets see how it goes!

There was a strong attendance at this months ‘mastermind’ forum. The room at the Quality Inn was just about big enough and there were a few new faces. We seem to be getting into our stride now and there was a good mix of attendees. We started off with an overview of show4training from Helen Tonetti. Helen explained the state of play for what is, by any standards, an ambitious project showing good signs of progress. Deciding to dump what might be considered to be a more traditional business in favour of seeking fortune online shows that there is good appetite to build new types of business online which don’t rely on huge helpings of capital to get started.

New to the group was Ana from Event Elephant who had some great contributions in the evaluation section of the forum. Des from WithU also made his first appearance.

What stood out at this event was a review of our first ’sprint’ event. A sprint is a small project of about 40 hours of work undertaken between meetings. In this case, Simona, Priscilla, Niall and myself kicked off by trying to come up with an intellectual property product to be sold online. Niall works as a voice-over actor and the plan was to find out of coypwrite material online, record it and sell the result online. It was inspired by an idea an old friend of mine had seen work successfully for printers off-line. We worked up a project plan …

The idea was to create a product that could generate an income long after we had finished spending our fourty hours on it. We had an initial meeting to decide on what material we would record. We were mostly working from titles found at http://www.gutenberg.org/. An initial plan was to chose of the popular self-help books like ‘The Prince’. We soon figured out that a book on world domination written by an italian might not go down all that well in an Irish accent. Instead, Simona did some research on popular search terms that would suit an Irish accent, such as ‘leprechaun’ and ‘banshee’. There was good traffic for these keywords so we chagned tack and selected a few old irish fairy tales.

Recording the stories themselves proved to be the most time consuming part of the exercise. We had a final project meeting on the night before the mastermind to try and pull everything together into a sellable product. The result was www.irish-story.com. How much money will we make? That is hard to say until some traffic has built up. We did at least get something up and running with not a lot of effort. Its just a question of how long it will take to recoup that effort.

So what shortcuts did we take? Well I guess you’d have to be there find out. Most of the project went according to plan apart from the fact that we had to abandon plans to sell the book on iTunes as only audible.com is allowed to supply books to the Apple company.