the goose

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 »

At various times I’ve been involved with developing or selling or trying to use a CRM system.  While the promise is great, the reality rarely matches up.

I first saw Michael mention his take on CRM on the Enterprise Ireland, eBusiness forum.  It was about to launch and while I like the idea of someone coming up to a fresh approach to CRM , I thought ‘oh dear’.  While I’ve always suspected there must be a better way than the traditional, Lead/Contact/Account/Opportunity model,  I’d never figured out what that would be myself.  I think Michael might have however.

Straight from the front page, there are a few things I should learn from, the next time I put a webapp together.

Signup really does take the 30 seconds promised and from the get go, I was liking what I saw inside.  One problem with webapp systems is that without any data, it is hard to get an idea of how the whole thing hangs together.  OnePageCRM pre-populates with a couple of contacts, but actually, I prefer to enter my own dummy data.  The 2 contacts provided don’t take long to delete however.  An add ‘Contact (or prospect)’ link was a good start.  I never quiet understood why contacts and leads were stored separately in systems like SugarCRM and vTiger.  The interactions on the site are pretty Ajax heavy which can be a bit distracting at times.  I personally like a slide effect but there is quiet a bit of fading in.  That might be a personal preference but it does mean that the site is fast to use.  This is a major issue.  Normally, CRM systems crawl (or the ones I have do anyway) and the last thing you want to be doing when a client calls up is be waiting for a new page to load.  Contacts are categorised as Client/Prospect/Inactive with a VIP check box to boot.

The concept of a VIP is a useful one.  We have certain clients who are more valuable to us in terms of the customers they refer or the amount of spend they build up with us.  It makes sense to keep these guys top of mind in the system and make sure they are getting an appropriate level of attention.

It is the task dialog which really has the key to what makes this system stand out of me.  Every time you check of a task in the system, it immediatly asks you what the next acttion will be.  Annoying but invaluable.  If you think about it – there is normally some next action even when the prospect has bought.  There may be a follow up to do or to ask for feedback.  This is what keeps the database from growing stale and makes sure that leads don’t get lost.

So, I’m siging up  - right?  Wrong.

There are a few things which stop me.  Only some of these are to do with OnepageCRM itself.  I love the simplicity but like all simple systems, I’m wondering how its going to look after the glow of initial newness of it all wears off, I’m wondering how it would look with a couple of thousand leads in there.  This is pretty much true for all CRM systems, but until OnePage has more of a track record, I’d be taking a risk.  More customer testimonials might help with this.  They’ll come in time.

One other nagging concern is, I get a bit jumpy about having our entire business process laid out in another companies arms.  I know this is an issue for all hosted systems, but I somehow don’t mind it so much when those arms are on the west coast of the USA rather than down the road in Dublin.

Personally, I’d like some keyboard shortcuts for common tasks such as searching contacts and adding notes and scrolling through the contacts.  Something along the lines of Gmail would do.

Of course the real reason I’m not signing up is that we’ve just been struggling with our CRM process and changing it AGAIN would likely lead to some kind of breakdown on our part.  I’m going ot be keeping an eye on this project though, and looking forward to seeing it make an impact.  I believe it deserves to.

Deciding what to spend your time on is tricky.  As an engineer, I just want to spend more time on the product.  As a sales guy, I agree with my engineer self and want to find out what the customer wants so we can go and give it to them – and make my sales life easier in the process.  As an accountant, all I want to do is get the sales me to spend more time selling and less fannying about.  The amount of ’stuff’ that I can spend my time on is bewildering.

At times I like this, I re-read some of Brad Sugars, Instant Cashflow.  There are only actually five things I can (or should) do.

1. Increase the number of leads:  For us that has meant appearing on national TV, spending money on adwords, giving lectures or public speaking, networking, building relationships with trainers etc etc.  Right now, I’d actually love to run a TV ad – if only for the craic.  My marketing self loves this one.
2. Improve conversion rate:  The engineer normally comes out for this one.  We cook up more features that we can add to entice people to join.  Right now this has been working on the audition system we built.  It also means working on our landing pages and, rather bluntly, following up on sales leads by phone.  Tweaking our aweber has also proved useful.
3. Increasing number of sales / customer:  This means going back to our database and cooking up new offers.
4. Increasing average sale: Doing some customer feedback to see if our pricing can be pushed (not likely in this environment).
5. Increasing profit margin:  Not very glamorous.  This just means sitting down and going through all our expenditure to see if we are paying for anything we don’t need, or could get cheaper somewhere else.  Off the top of my head, that probably means moving from aweber to something else and thinking about moving our hosting (ugh).  Other treats might include changing our VoIP provider. Read the rest of this entry »

Barney and Caelen have been going through what they consider you should not focus on when starting a business.  I really enjoy both of these blogs and but they reminded me of how useless general advice can sometimes be.  What is good for the goose is definitely not good for the gander.  Caelen advises against spending time developing a strong brand.

Logo: We still don’t have a logo and don’t have any plans to get a logo. We just typed out RevaHealth.com in a font that we liked and left it at that.

Piehole’s logo is key to getting us noticed and lets our customers know that we are different to the competition.  Much to my chagrin, design, is key when making a first impression.  As I keep repeating, Rob on Software’s “market -> marketing -> design -> product” approach to product development seems spot on.

Barney agrees with Caelen on business cards.

Business cards and your website are NOT the most important things to sort out on day one.

Crazy stuff.  Business cards take about 20 minutes to order on moo.com.  Well worth the time.  Here is on reason why.

If you still have a full set of cards after 3 months – you are not doing enough sales/networking.  Both profess to talking to your potential customer.  You can’t be taken seriously if you haven’t met the basic hygiene factor of having some cards.

So who is right?  Me or them?

Well, rather blandly, you could say we both are.  It just depends.  Obviously, an insurance salesman needs card and companies marketing to advertising agencies need brand.  Cards are useless if you are selling stuff on ebay and Google doesn’t consider how cool your logo is when pushing traffic to your site.

So here is my advice.

Find someone who has what you want, and copy what they did.

Which advice you listen to is critical.  Building a world-beating health index website?  Read Caelen’s blog posts.  Boot-strapping a piece of webapp software?  Subscribe to Barney’s blog.  Want to drink ridiculous amounts of red wine in a Mendoza, Argentina?  Visit troutandwine.com.

Well, it is the morning after the night before. Priscilla and I are trying not to be too hungover – mopping up email enquiries from last night.  In total, our Dragons Den appearance cost us

• two transatlantic flights from Argentina to Ireland
• 1 new suit
• the price of an A1 board from snap printing
• about a 200 hours of preparation
• a few quid for loadimpact.com

So what did we get?  Well – it is early days, but at the time of writing we haven’t had any sign ups on the site.   We have had

• a spike of almost a thousand unique visitors
• 46 subscriptions to our email responder
• 8 actor account registrations
• 2 expressions of interest in investing in us
• an inquiry to produce  a radio script

As far as all my work to try and make sure the site stayed up – it turns out there wasn’t as much stress ad I had feared.  I use Newrelic to monitor performance live and according to their stats, we never dipped below a score on 0.8 on their ‘appdex’ index.  To you and me, it means that the site responded just fine.

So that is it.  I’d heard a rumour that 25% of the television watching public, do so while surfing the web.  That certainly didn’t translate into traffic on our site . There are around 500,000 people watching the show and I had nightmares of 100,000 people baring down on the site.  A thousand uniques can probably be achieved with less effort on a continuous basis by simply blogging and tweeting.  Put another way, we got a half a months worth of traffic in one night – not really that huge.  Of course – it all comes down to the type of traffic and the conversion rate.

Having said that.  The whole experience was a hoot.  I would do it all over again.

Check out the piehole blog for a review of our pitch from Sean Gallagher.

What could be more embarrassing than appearing on national TV, begging for investment?  I’m not sure.  Maybe having your website fall over at exactly when you have a chance to make some much needed sales would be the cherry on the cake.

I wondered whether I should do some performance testing on the site before the air date.  Piehole is written in rails, which has a name for poor performance.  That coupled with my slightly ropey programming expertise, could be a recipe for disaster.  On recommendation, I signed up for loadimpact.com and starting using their free account.

The page I tested was on this page.  This is what I got.

Holy crap. Read the rest of this entry »

The Dragon’s Den is one of the only TV programs we watch.  Lampooning the contestants and guffawing at the terrible offers is addictive.  I have to say, it also makes you stop and think.  Would someone invest in our ‘business’?  How would we answer that question?  How could he possibly not know the answer to that? Read the rest of this entry »

In 1997, a freshly minted Saatchi & Saatchi were handed a brief by the Conservative government to discourage teens from smoking via the all-powerful medium of advertising.  Setting about the task, running focus groups and unleashing their creative juices, they started to realise a basic flaw in the traditional model.

Millions upon millions of pounds were spent, worldwide, telling young’un’s that “Cigaretets Kill”. Something we all know but mostly only those in their 30’s or older pay much attention to.

Why?

Dissonance

Telling young people that they will die from smoking contravenes a rather self-evident truth:  young people don’t die.  Certainly not in general and you would be unlucky to have reached the age of 13 (when most people start smoking) to have known anyone in your peer group that had passed on.

Saatchi & Saatchi changed tack and instead started running advertising pointing out how gross your breath smells after a cigarette.  Something that rings true and is oh so important when your still trying to get off your mark with Priscilla in 6b.

So here is the rub.  Entrepreneurs in Ireland don’t make it big.  We don’t really celebrate the successes and I think there is a tendency to expect failure.  This is especially acute when it comes to funded businesses.  At least two founders who raised multiple millions of dollars have both told me that they tell their founders that there was a 90% chance of failure.  Accurate and laudable as it may be – the intention can’t be helpful towards achieving success.

How can we plan on building world-class ‘google’ type businesses when there is no precedence for it?  It doesn’t make sense to encourage people to startup when the expectations for success are so low.

Contrast this with a plumber/accountant/solicitor/carpenter setting up a new business.  While they may be more ’self-employed’ than ‘running a business’ – it seems far more real and natural that these types of business make it.  We all know successful people in these fields.  Meanwhile I’ve been trying to build an online business for the last 10 years and I’ve met only a handful of successes (and believe me I had to dig to find them).

To encourage startups and avoid talking out of both sides of our mouths, we need to reset expectations of indigenous startups towards success.  Online businesses have a heritage in high risk funding backed ventures, but things have changed and the web has become more mature.  There is no reason that 90% of ventures should fail.  The business models that work are out there and available to be exploited.  Beyond that, even if individual ventures do not succeed, subsequent ventures by the same entrepreneur can and probably will.

Email gets a bad wrap.  Spam clogging up inboxs and untold hours of lost productivity.  Viagra and free visa’s to the US all go towards making it a touchy subject.  However, if email can elect an American president, I can’t afford to ignore it for developing a relationship with our customers.

Checking my own inbox, the oldest email newsletter I’m subscribed to goes back almost 10 years.  It is a technology newletter to do with MS Outlook, something I don’t work on anymore, but I stay subscribed in case some day I need it.  That is one hell of a relationship.

Read the rest of this entry »

CRM systems are behemoths.  No matter how many claim to be ’simple’ they all feature from feature creep.  The fact remains, if you are not using a CRM, you are probably only running at half your potential cash-flow if the ever-so helpful introductary video ad infusionsoft is anything to go by.  The good guys there go on to point out that on average, customers will buy from you after 7 interactions.  Most people give up after 3.  You can manage this to a certain extent using excel or google docs (as we have been for the last three years) but after a while it all get unwieldy.

To counter this I did a quick review of available products  before designing my own minimum viable CRM system (oh groan – another techy reinventing the wheel).  Here were the front runners. Read the rest of this entry »