Barking

Had a great afternoon at the TechCrunch UK meetup yesterday, spoke to a lot of cool people and got a few people interested in Tactile CRM.

Blagged some swag, a couple of t-shirts, a bag and a frisbee too, and managed to snap Mike Butcher with one of our dragons on his head!

I had an interesting conversation with a few guys about usability and managed to get some good tips about Corsica for my trip in July! A few cheeky beers were had throughout the afternoon and everyone was really friendly.

Well done to Mike for organising the event and I look forward to the next one.

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.

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.

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

So we recently applied to be put on the Amazon Marketplace as we use S3 for file storage for Tactile CRM, and it must have gone through as it appeared on the Amazon Developer newsletter this month. A nice upshot is that we have had a peak in sign ups today as people are getting the newsletter and signing up.

The newsletter is online here and seems to have increased our traffic 10-fold on our daily average yesterday.

So we finally got a mention on one of the big blogs today - ReadWriteWeb mentioned about our Google Contacts API integration (Greg is putting the finishing touches to a tech post on this which will be up tomorrow) in one of their articles and a link through to the Tactile CRM. Next stage is an article about just Tactile CRM!

I also learnt a new word today - Socialprise - social tools + enterprise = “socialprise”. Thanks Sarah for that one too! I feel honored to think of Tatile CRM breaking these new boundaries!

So Pot Noodle have done a spoof of the excellent Guiness advert

This is one of those viral marketing ideas at its best - 160,000 hits in a week.

So how do we do the same thing for Tactile CRM? Well we can’t do the same for Tactile, but we are trying to build buzz and links with things like links and articles from Web Worker Daily. TechCrunch (UK) and Read Write Web are still proving elusive!

What with getting back into playing rugby and going to the gym after being ill last year, I have started to try and eat a bit more healthily - doing things like eating breakfast etc!

I popped into the local super market this morning to get some fruit loaf for breakfast and was half tempted by the hot cross buns (I know they aren’t the healthiest thing in the World), decided they wouldn’t fit in the toaster at work so carried onto get my fruit loaf. You can imagine my surprise when I was confronted by this:

Not only was it exactly what I wanted but also on special offer. I can’t imagine the meeting where they decided that this would be a good idea, a pure marketing gimic, but it got my attention and my money. They only thing is its not quite a hot cross bun loaf - in my excitement I didn’t pay full attention to the top, so mine is more a hot ‘T’ bun loaf:

Anyway it tasted great and I now have a full stomach to face the day with!