Barking

Loic and Geraldine Le Meur announced LeWeb 08 today. I plan to go along but waiting for the registration to open.

When launching a new product, such as Tactile CRM, I have found there are two main areas that you need to work on. The first is obviously writing the software itself and the second is marketing that product and getting people to use/pay for it.

Tactile CRM has been live for a couple of months now and we are really pleased with the number of people signing up (we are currently on target for our projections). The main push now is twofold - development and sales/marketing - and more around the sales/marketing side of the application than the development.

Don’t get me wrong, Tactile CRM is an awesome piece of software from a technical/engineering perspective - it is really well built, easy to expand and add to, and the feedback we get from users is excellent. Obviously as Senokian we are comfortable with the development of an application like this as we do it on a regular basis for customers.

The new and unknown area for us however is the sales/marketing side of things. Adwords, and exhibitions/trade shows are easy to cost/plan, the difficult part is getting the buzz around the product - people and sites talking and discussing your application.

So far we have had a reasonable amount of success with our marketing, the graph below shows two decent spikes. The first was getting mentioned in the Amazon AWS newsletter, the second appearing on the new Google Solutions Marketplace. Both of these obviously drove a decent amount of traffic and sign ups to the site, however we need more people to talk about Tactile CRM.

Currently I am working on getting coverage on ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch. Which brings me on to my current dilemma. Do we add new features we think are useful, or go for the bigger ones that are likely to get more press coverage (and still be useful in the long run).

I’m thinking things like the Google Contacts API integration we did - we were doing import work that people had asked for and at the same time Google launched the new API. As a result we were the first CRM system to implement it and a few people picked it up. ReadWriteWeb included us in an article on Socialprise and helped to drive more traffic to the site. This wasn’t a feature people request but one we added for PR purposes.

So the dilemma I now face is should the next set of features we add be for PR/marketing purposes or customers. I know the answer to this question when a product has reached critical mass is to add features for users but as we are not there yet, the PR/marketing drives the users and is the most important thing at the moment.

A friend of mine emailed me last night to ask a few questions for a presentation she is doing for the Young Entrepreneurs Forum at Warwick University. I thought the answers may be of interest to some people so have posted them below:

Why did you set up in business?

Mainly because I was fed up with the crap quality of work the company I worked for produced in the web space. That and the fact that they never delivered on what they promised to staff.

What do you think of young people going straight from education into running their own business?

I worked for a year before starting Senokian. I don’t see any reason not too, the only things to bear in mind are that it can be lonely to start with (for example working in a company with existing employees will help you meet and make new friends), and also some experience you gain can be useful when you setup yourself.

The other thing to remember is that in general businesses are happy to spend more for piece of mind, for example as a student you may well build your own computer to save a bit of money. A business is more than happy to spend a few hundred quid extra, get one pre built and supported so employees don’t waste time on it.

What would you do differently if you started over?

Do it with a partner. I started Senokian on my own - with nobody to start with I didn’t have anyone to bounce ideas off or to help out when things got hectic

What would be your top 3 pieces of advice?

1. Don’t under charge yourself
2. Make the correct first impression - we don’t have a dress code, but I am always smart when I visit people for the first time, you can then use this to gauge what you can get away with the next time
3. Have fun, if running your own business isn’t fun, stop and think of another idea. Running your own business is going to consume your life for a while so you might as well enjoy it.

What are your top 3 big ‘no nos’?

1. Not having fun running your business
2. Poor branding - first impressions count, if you need to spend a few hundred quid getting a good logo etc. do it, it will pay dividends in the end
3. Don’t give people too much of a chance. You are paying their wage, if after 3-4 months they are not performing, get rid of them

What have you found scary?

How fast time flies by when you are having fun/running your own business

What have you found fun?

Meeting new people and working with businesses

Any funny or interesting/useful stories or anecdotes about setting up your business?

We have an office dog and that is always part of office negotiations when moving.

My macbook is starting to look a bit tired and I have decided to sticker it up! If you have any spare stickers you don’t need, or want to promote your product, please help me out and post them to:

Jake Stride, Senokian, Business Innovation Centre, Binley Business Park, Coventry CV3 2TX, UK

I’ll post updated photos here as the stickers start coming in and a link/thanks to everyone who sends one in.

Say hello to ‘Denver the Dragon’!

We are off to the BStartup Exhibition on Friday to exhibit Tactile CRM, our simple web-based contact and sales management system. We have done a few shows before and it gets a bit boring after you fill up your goody bag with free pens. So this time we put our heads together and decided ‘Denver the Tactile Dragon’ would be a good give away to people that sign up for Tactile CRM at the show.

I’m sure we will have some left to give to people after the show, so sign up for Tactile CRM and we’ll do a draw for some of the left overs afterwards.

Thanks to Ged at Amber Promotions for the fantastic job and swift turn around.

The Tactile CRM twitpitch (check out the original) - www.tactilecrm.com - easy, simple to use affordable web based CRM, sales & contact management system for small businesses.

The Telelgraph have been reporting on an interesting story about a £50 cup of coffee. I enjoy my coffee but not sure I would appreciate a £50 cup! The Telegraph and The BBC are my two main source of news online (and indeed I have stopped reading a paper, apart from at the weekends, now as they tend to be so out of date by the time they are printed), but every once in a while I take issue with the way they report stories.

For example, the £50 cup of coffee story is interesting but the fact that the proceeds from the sale of it go to MacMillan only gets a single line at the end of the article and should have been more prominent. Charities like MacMaillan do a fantastic job helping out those affected by Cancer, and if I am near by it might be enough to persuade me to buy a cup!

Love Tactile CRM, use FaceBook? Then join the new Tactile CRM FaceBook page and become a fan today!

They were still building The Baltic, when I was at university in Newcastle, but it has been finished and opened for a few years now. I always try and pop in whenever I am nearby, the building itself is a great space and the exhibitions are interesting.

I have to admit that I’m not always sure about the some of the things there. The video installations don’t always make sense to me, but I would thoroughly recommend it to anybody who is up in Newcastle/Gateshead (remember the Baltic itself is over the river in Gateshead), the suggested donation is only £3 and it’s a good way to spend a couple of hours.

The main reason for being that far up north was to take part in this year’s Allendale challenge, a good day out and a nice 25 mile stroll in the snow, sleet, hail and occassional spot of sunshine. A great way to spend your saturday!

Here we are before we realised about the snow:

And the conditions once we started!

The barking blog is currently 4th on Google for the singer Kate Rushby, it’s amazing how these things can happen and how quickly they can change. I wouldn’t have said that the blog post I wrote on my top 10 5 covers was hugely relevant, but obviously Google knows best!