Barking

I’ll be at the TechCrunch UK Meetup on Friday afternoon in London if anyone fancies catching up and finding out a little more about Tactile CRM. I’ll also have some Dragons to give away too!

We are currently looking for a new developer to join our team in Coventry. Full details are on the main website. We’re also offering a £200 thank you to anybody that suggests somebody we eventually appoint.

Shoeless Joe Jackson once famously said ”If you build it, he will come” (OK, technically he didn’t say it but his character, voiced by Ray Liotta,  in Field of Dreams did).

It may well have worked in Field of Dreams, but not so in the world of business.

I spent an enjoyable afternoon at the Kit Car Show today in Stoneleigh. I went along as I own a Caterham and needed to pick up a few bits for the car (I ended up spending the grand total of £1.10). As I walked around the show I was amazed at the number of small suppliers that also offer kit versions of the well established original 7 (it had its 50th birthday last year), and it just doesn’t make sense to me. The basic Caterham can be brought and assembled for under £13,000 for a new car - the others don’t really offer anything above and beyond this, and in most cases don’t offer half of what Caterham do - they are still developing new versions of the car, have recently been brought and launched the frankly awesome R500 last month, there is a massively active owners clubs and several racing series based around the car.

This got me thinking about what we do with our products and services - Tactile CRM in particular. Tactile CRM has several competitors (like most ideas it is not truly original - CRM has been around for a while), however we think our approach to our market space is unique and we have an offering that nobody else does. We don’t aim to copy and trail behind competitor products - we were first to launch Google Contacts API integration for example; our aim is to innovate and listen to customer comments and business problems and find a way we can help to alleviate some of their issues.

Second best is never good enough and won’t get you anywhere. A good product needs to have new ideas or a new approach to the space they are in. For unique/new concepts this is a given, but when launching into an already busy space, being different is the only way to get yourself noticed.

I am a stickler for perfection, anything less than perfect irritates me and I have to do something about it.

Today was no exception, I wrote a quick management script a while back to email me with the number of people who have signed up for Tactile CRM but not logged in 24 hours after signing up so that I can follow them up (I thought this was enough time to let them get the email Tactile CRM sends if the signed up in the evening and it hadn’t arrived before they signed off).

Today was the first time that it ran with only 1 user who hadn’t logged in - imagine my horror when the email said:

There are 1 people that could do with a nudge today to remind them to login to Tactile CRM.

Urgh - quickly logging into the server, updating the script, testing it and changing my neat 4 line bash script to 6 lines and my sense of well being has been restored. It now says:

There is 1 person that could do with a nudge today to remind them to login to Tactile CRM.

It is this level of detail that goes into the products we produce and hopefully makes them run just that bit better for users.