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.

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.

So what was the objective of this bit of development?  The real objective was to simply fuel the number of people who are using Ag Tweet.  @replies (text messages sent to phones when someone is mentioned on twitter) were the top request from users and I had a hunch that by providing the service it would improve the number of people that sign up.

Pricing

I am working on the theory that pricing for subscription services is not set by value but instead by what the customer has available in a budget to spend on that item.  This isn’t a theory that has any grounding other than my own whim.  A lot of people, and certainly the most vocal, using agtweet are between 14  – 20.  These guys are great – they shout about agtweet and badger their mates into signing up.  I also carried out a survey amongst the beta testers.  This is what they had to say about a price.

I was pretty happy with this response.  Of course I would have been happier if people had said they would pay 9 – 16 euro a month but I guess turkey’s don’t vote for Christmas.  So why pick €3 and not €5?  Three reasons.

1. Three euro really sounds like not a lot of money.  I’d expect a lot of people to give it a whirl and a lot of them won’t be bothered with unsubscribing for such a small amount.  They’d rather let their credit cards expire.
2. What I really wanted to do is test to see if anyone would bother taking out their credit card at all. I know a lot of people talk about pricing high and discounting – but really these €3 guys are just there to spread the word (by tweeting about the service) and and provide a funnel for the higher price plans.  I only plan on breaking even on them.
3. I knew from the test group that 67% of users would have enough replies in 50 / month while 30% would need 150 and the remainder would need 300 per month.  My long term goal would be for the subscriptions to break down in that fashion.

That would give me a subscription breakdown something like this.

So all this work for 80 lousy euros?  Well actually  – no.  It is worse than that.  50% of agtweet users are on meteor while the rest are on some othe network.  I can MMS the meteor guys for free.  This was the original brainchild of @jmccrohan. I’m selling the text messages to the other guys roughly at cost price which means I should clear a cool €40 a month if all goes according to plan.  I could cut out the SMS cost altogether by making it a Meteor only service but for now I’m effectively using them to subsidise the others and help build numbers.

So why bother?  Well that is a good question.  Its pretty clear that on these prices it is not going to make a lot of money any time soon.  Instead I’m just stoking the fire.  This way it won’t cost me anything to run and hopefully adding the functionality will help to build the subscriber base.  Eventually the subscribers will start upgrading  and at that stage we’ll see some more revenue.

Payment method

I originally intended to take payment by Paypal, mostly for ease of integration.  The problem with Paypal is that they don’t support Laser and I knew a lot of users didn’t have a credit card.  I decided to use my Worldpay account instead.  There was another reason to use worldpay.  I have found that PayPal subscriptions are fragile little things.  I’m not sure what they put in the subscription emails but they positively beg subscribers to unsubscribe.  I’ve found way lower unsubscription rates with Worldpay.  Worldpay does allow you unsubscibe but the agreements tend to live longer than Paypal for some reason.

So here we have it.  Three price plans.  The integration was fairly straightforward although I have been getting a lot of requests to take payment by debiting phone credit.  I’ve been looking into onebip.com which seem to have a pretty transparent and easy to understand intration.  The only challenge is that they take about 50% commission on all payments.  That means I’ll have to make it more expensive ot pay via this method – unless I made it a Meteor only option.  Now that I write that – it may not be a such a bad idea.  Maybe the Meteor customers can drive awareness with their cheap tweets.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.