Barking

I made the trip to London on Friday afternoon for this month’s MiniBar. As always an excellent event, and I as I arrived a bit early (well an hour) I got to have a really good chat with Christian before hand and get some interesting ideas for marketing Tactile CRM.

I had a chat and dinner with Kai (a friend from university) from Webconverger (a great product with big potential I think); an interesting converstation with somebody who wanted $15m to model London in 3D on the web to then plonk geodata on it. Not sure of the viability of it and thought a Google Maps mashup might be a good starting ground to prove that it works. Nick Halstead from fav.or.it was also there (I first met him at Fuel Conference on the Sun Startup Essentials stand), he had some interesting ideas for marketing/sales as well as managing to have a stack of free drinks various people brought over for him when they went to the bar due to a mix up!

I met and spoke to loads of other interseting people, failed dismally trying to do a qik stream of one of the talks, but got an old fashion photo (below) of the guys from School of Everything presenting on stage.

The event was sponsored by Channel 4, and Matt Locke gave a quick couple of minutes to introduce the program they are working on. I first saw Matt Locke when I visited the Thinking Digital conference in Newcastle and the stuff he is in involved in with Channel 4 looks/sounds pretty cool.

Unfortunately I am not around for the next one, but keep an eye out on the meet us category of the blog for when we are next there.

UPDATE: Kai managed to video some of it:

My new set of moo cards arrived today, they aren’t my main business cards, more for social acquaintances I meet at events and friends etc. I thought I’d have a bit of fun with them this time. So as I always seem to make the coffee and Greg doesn’t let me code any more they say:

I’m the coffee boy at senokian.com, tactilecrm.com
& resolverm.com. Sometimes I’m allowed to code, but
not often. Mainly I work on marketing and biz stuff.
My name is Jake Stride, please keep in touch.
On the blower: +44 xxxx xxxxxx | Twitter: jstride
Email & GTalk: jake dot stride at senokian dot com

This is what the front and backs look like:

The more I think about what we are trying to do with Resolve RM (and indeed our other products), the more I realise that we need to be extraordinary as a company. Not just from the products that we offer, but the level of support and attention we give each and every customer.

So Whuffie is an important part of that plan.

I first came across Whuffie at the Fuel Conference, after Tara Hunt gave another one of her excellent presentations (the slides are available on the Fuel blog post I wrote).

In short Whuffie is the term Cory Doctrow uses in this book ‘down and out in the magic kingdom‘ for a replacement currency. A person’s Whuffie is a measurement of their overall reputation and goes up and down depending upon their actions (good or bad).

We can then apply this to Senokian, our products, and how we deal with people to give them an amazing experience which they will hopefully want to share and tell people about.

One of the problems we have traditionally had at Senokian has been dealing with customer support. We’ve been so busy with our work that sometimes we overlooked the support queue and forget to get back to people (that’s when we were using the old EGS based system).

It lead to me getting emails from customers along the lines of: ‘I submitted ticket #123 but haven’t heard anything for a while, what’s happening?’. Giving people a response and keeping them updated is a key part to our Whuffie based strategy and one that we are still trying to perfect (although we are getting better).

With the launch of Tactile CRM I realised we needed something better. We spent a lot of time looking around for a good, easy to use customer support system. All we could come up with were the expensive Remedy type systems, or the excellent, but fairly-difficult-interface-and-install-wise RT.

We played around with RT for a while and tried to give it a go, but it was just too overwhelming (and akward to set up), even for a software company such as ourselves. The idea of Resolve RM was planted and we decided to give it a proper think.

So Resolve RM was born - our Whuffie application. But there’s more to it than that. We realised we need to increase the amount of Whuffie we had at Senokian, but whilst we were at it, we thought we could help other people increase their Whuffie too. A Whuffie BOGOF if you will.

So we decided to build Resolve RM as an addition to our product range so that other people can make Whuffie too. We’ll keep you posted on how it goes!

We successfully launched Tactile CRM earlier this year and have lots of nice people onboard - thanks to everyone who is using it.

Work has now begun on our second application in the suite, Resolve RM, and we will be writing about the process of launching it on this blog. No holds bar’d, the good the bad and the ugly, warts and all, etc. etc.

The idea isn’t new, there are plenty of resources out there, Ryan Carson blogged about selling Drop Send, and put together a Web App, Guy Kawaski wrote about building a web app for about $12,000, I came across an interesting post title ‘Diary of a Failed Startup‘ yesterday, the list goes on.

What we aim to do is talk about our day to day problems, solutions, issues etc. that we come across and how we deal with them. We’ll also be applying things we learnt launching Tactile CRM.

This may be a resource for anybody interested in what we do, looking for tips, ideas, and pitfalls/mistakes we make along the way, or it may be of no interest to anybody. Time will tell.

Well trying to get the latest Tactile CRM newsletter sorted has lead me to buying my first windows machine in who knows how long (about 9 years I think). It is preloaded with Vista business, and apart from the arduous process of getting it started the first time (about 40 minutes for pre-installed windows to work out what it wanted to do, and the HP software too) seems OK.

It’s not going to replace the MacBook as a ‘no-holds-bar’d-on-the-move-desktop-replacement-machine’, but is certainly useful on the train due to its small size (it happily fits on the seat back trays you get on the Virgin trains, unlike the MacBook).

The main probelms I have with it so far are the sensitivity of the mouse, which I will be able to fix, and the huge power cable you get with it. Why design a nice small laptop, only to include a standard HP power supply that practically doubles the size of the thing!

I’m trying to steer clear of Vsta as much as possible, but will try to install Leopard (OS X) on it over the weekend and see what happens with that (note to self, find the restore procedure for the laptop before starting). In the meantime, here is my current screen shot of OS X Leopard on the HP 2133:

I saw this sign outside of my local pub. Brought a smile to my face:

It’s not very often that I get excited about startups (except for my own of course). But since the guys at Soocial did their presentation at Fuel Conference and I got on the private beta I have been giving it a go. I have to admit I think it is an awesome application.

The basic premise is simple - a way to sync your contacts, Mac, Mobile and 3rd party apps. I think the interface is great, the support is awesome (I like the fact that the support emails are replied to by the ‘Support Monkey’), and it just works (OK, it’s in beta so there are a few bugs, but they jump on them and get them sorted).

I think it has great potential to work with Tactile CRM as a way to sync contacts over the air to mobiles (and potentially Outlook) without much work from us. All we’d need to do is integrate the two APIs. It also has its use as a way to transfer numbers when you switch mobiles too without any hassle.

I’m going to keep an eye on this one - carry on with the beta, and see where it goes.

We already publish our roadmap of features - those that we are working on, and have already released; but we wanted to give you more say over what we do. After all, Tactile CRM is built for you.

We’ve set up a new page on the excellent Uservoice system (shown below) where you can add new feature requests and vote on those made by others. We’ll then take your suggestions to influence the way we develop Tactile CRM.

We’ll also give credit where credit is due. If you suggest a feature that we implement, we’ll give you an extra month for free (if you are on a paying plan) and give you a mention in the newsletter and blog post when we announce it.

I have the pleasure of putting together our company newsletters and also those for Tactile CRM. We currently use Campaign Monitor, which is a great piece of software, however Outlook 2007 isn’t.

Currently, I am redesigning and testing the Tactile CRM newsletter. It works fine in all browsers, until I come to Outlook 2007 - Campaign Monitor have an excellent tool for checking your email across a variety of clients. The first screenshot below is how it should look:

and this is how Outlook 2007 renders it:

Now as I am a bit of a perfectionist I needed to fix this. My next port of call was the MS website to get the Outlook 2007 trial. Signing up was a bit of a pain, but my frustration was complete when I got the following error message trying to do ‘Download 1′:

Of course I haven’t completed the second download. I have just come to the page and am trying to do the first one. If you want me to do the second one first, why have it as the second one?!

I still don’t have it installed but I have vented my frustration for the time being!

Senokian are pleased to announce what we believe to be the first ever Cat-5 dog lead - the item is for sale on E-Bay, and all proceeds will go to charity (the Lymphoma association in the UK).

UPDATE: After a few requests I am going to post a bit more about the chosen charity and why I chose them.

The proceeds of this charity auction will be going to the Lymphoma association in the UK. I have personally had first hand experience of the work they do, after my Father passed away from non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma over 4 years ago and I was diagnosed with, and now successfully in remission from, Hodgkin’s Lymphoma - the fact my father and I both had types of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma is not related and just chance.

The Lymphoma Association provide emotional support and information on a range of issues to anyone with lymphatic cancer and their families, carers and friends. They do a fantastic job and were one of the first organisations I came into contact with after my diagnosis. The support they offer is invaluable.

Today I forgot my dog’s lead when bringing him to work (Archie is on Twitter, he has been banned from Facebook for not being human, this blog is named after him, and he is mentioned in our ‘working with us‘ section on our website). As a result and after a quick bit of engineering in the office we came up with the hand crafted Cat-5 dog lead you see below:

We are fairly certain we have invented the first ever Cat-5 dog lead (please let us know if there is any prior art) and thought as other people have sold a load of old crap old rope on E-Bay, we’d give it a go too and sell our high quality Cat-5 dog lead on E-Bay and donate the profits to charity.