There is an interesting panel discussion with Tim Ferriss and Derek Sivers at Tim’s blog and a transcript at Derek’s. For micro-ISV owners, business owners, or anyone looking to take a different approach to their career: Tim and Derek are two worthwhile people to watch. Being a New York Times best selling author, you’ve probably heard of Tim Ferris. You may not know Derek Sivers’ story though. From Tim’s Blog entry:

Derek is a programmer who lost his stage fright by doing more than 1,000 gigs as a circus ring leader. He is also the musician who started CD Baby, the world’s largest online music store for independent musicians. Here are some current numbers:

• 242,846 artists sell their music at CD Baby
• 4,574,622 CDs sold online to customers
• $83,590,381 paid directly to the artists

With more than 2 million digitized tracks under management, CD Baby is also the largest provider of independent music for iTunes… and it all started as a hobby.

I recommend listening to the discussion and reading The 4-Hour Workweek (less than $12) and Derek Siver’s e-book (free). Tim’s book is for anyone that wants to “escape 9-5, live anywhere, and join the new rich”. Siver’s advice is targeted at independent musicians, but is relevant to anyone that wants to get the most out of their time and talents.

Enhancement: Search results

Management of PlaybookIQ search results got some attention and enhancements this week. Details at the product blog.

SSL for All!

We added SSL to all accounts, even the 30 day free trials. Blogged here.

Lighthouse and Github

Moved the product’s repository to Github and our milestones and issue tracking to Lighthouse. Highly recommended products and also the tools used by Rails core team and contributors.

Twitter

Started playbookiq twittering at twitter.com/playbookiq

Sometimes, communication lacks because we do not want to take the time to crank up our blog editor or email client or we feel like a blog entry should be more substantial than just ‘system up!’. Twitter is the perfect mix of very fast to post to, easy to subscribe to, and with the expectation from the reader that entries will be short and focused.

Mor.ph

Investigating the reliability and scalability benefits of running in the cloud, and found Mor.ph to be a straightforward way to deploy Rails apps to a distributed environment. Their reliability history and 99.9% SLA gaurantee are encouraging. More details to come.

Looking for a more professional look to match our small business CRM target audience, the PlaybookIQ product site got a complete revamp this week.

The previous site was – in the tradition of web 2.0 – simple, sparse, and curvy. The new design is pleasant, yet more focused on the facts and geared toward business users. Out with simple, in with informative and useful.

It also includes plenty of blue – a color associated with business, trust, and reliability. The primary font is Georgia, a serif font that dresses the site up a bit from a t-shirt into business-casual, at least.

As a technical aside: Blueprint grid is used for css and layout. Images are heavily used for a consistent look across browsers.

Overall, our new product site more clearly communicates the small business crm and sales team collaboration benefits of PlaybookIQ.

As we continue to improve our products we added two new features to our small business CRM software, PlaybookIQ this week.

Message Templates

A consistent company image and messages to customers and prospects is an important part of your customer relationship and marketing efforts. PlaybookIQ now supports this aspect with Message Templates.

Use message templates to:

• Be efficient: no need to retype the same email over and over.
• Be consistent: ensure everyone on your team is putting forth a consistent company image.
• Be effective: spend your time writing well authored email responses that can be used over and over.
• Be personal: include the contact’s name in the message template.

Copy Playbooks

In PlaybookIQ, playbooks contain your sales team’s best practices. Each playbook is a series of repeatable and measurable steps that can be easily applied to a contact. Each step is assigned a timeline and responsible user. Now, we have made it super easy to duplicate the series of steps in a playbook, but assign tasks to different users

All the details are at the PlaybookIQ product blog.

Is 37signals jumping on the rich web site and rich applications bandwagon? With a wholesale redesign of their website in the works, and based on some recent 37signals blog “posts”: we can predict that rich product websites will be in the mix. This should not be surprising were it not for ….

I am done with “simple”. I say that even considering previous posts here about the virtues of simplicity, my enjoyment of books such as The Laws of Simplicity and Simplexity, and my respect for companies such as 37signals and Google (two companies commonly included in case studies on software simplicity). The word “simple” has several problems.

It is overused

‘Simple’ is a word that has become overused. You can take your pick from over 600,000 books on Amazon relating to ‘simple’. 64,000 in the business category alone. There’s over 46 million results for a Google search of “simple software”. In the CRM world, everyone seems to stake a claim to ‘simple CRM’.

It has no concise meaning

‘Simple’ is a word often used like ‘thing’. It is a good placeholder because it does not surprise people to see it and readers get some idea what you mean. But, like the word ‘thing’, ‘simple’ has too many definitions to provide concise meaning.

It has no impact

Instead of saying ‘simple’, let’s start saying what we really mean in a given context. Because it is overused and provides no concise meaning, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by dropping it from a product’s vocabulary. Instead of a word the readers skip right over because they see it on millions of sites, use a word or phrase that accurately makes your point.

Replace simple with what you really mean

‘Simple’ is sometimes used out of laziness. It is the first word that comes to mind and it is harder to come up with different, descriptive words. Yet, I think it is worth the effort for the reasons mentioned above.

So, I went through the PlaybookIQ website and removed any mention of simple or simplicity that I could find. It was an interesting exercise because it made me really think about what we are trying to communicate. Depending on the context, ‘simple’ got replaced with ‘fast’, ‘easy’, ‘concise’, or with an entirely new wording. Readers now get a much better idea of the product’s power and the benefit of a given feature or design decision. As another example, the application I wrote to try out Google App Engine is called “lightweight” instead of simple crm.

Don’t throw out the concepts

There is great value in the concepts talked about under the topic of ‘simplicity’. I agree with most of those and we continue to look for ways to implement ideas under the topic of ‘simplicity’. Yet when it comes to describing any given idea, product or product improvement it is time to use words that are more descriptive and concise and less overused and vague.

Today we announce the launch of PlaybookIQ, offering a unique combination of small business CRM, plus process best practices. Much more powerful than general-purpose contact managers and address books, PlaybookIQ is built from the ground up for sales teams. Simply stated: PlaybookIQ shows you what was last said to a contact and automatically schedules what needs to happen next.

With PlaybookIQ, sales teams:

• Implement consistent and repeatable sales processes with Playbooks.
• Keep a complete record of all contact touchpoints with Contact Management, including automatic creation of comments with each step completed.
• See upcoming activities on the shared Calendar.
• See what needs to be done today on the Dashboard.
• Gain insight into progress and make sure nothing gets dropped with real-time Reports.
• Control who can do what with permissions management.
• Record contact data to your needs with custom fields.
• Collaborate among multiple users with flexible task assignment
• Include the whole team with affordable pricing.

Initial response and feedback from early users has been promising and very positive. With new features being released every couple of days, we are excited about this product launch and look forward to continued feedback.

To find out more about this new small business CRM and sales team collaboration software, visit these links.

• PlaybookIQ.com – the product site.
• PlaybookIQ.com/tour – a quick overview of the product and small business CRM features.
• AboutPlaybookiq.com – the product blog that includes videos of new features as they become available.
• PlaybookIQ.com/signup – your free, 30-day trial.

You can email comments or questions to info@aboutplaybookiq.com.

Interested in an excuse to learn Python, and always on the lookout for production environments that are both stable and flexible, and I took a look at Google App Engine. To try it out, I created a simple contact and task manager that is live at http://bizz.appspot.com. I love the speed at which changes are deployed as well as the removal of environment maintenance tasks.

Python and Google’s webapp framework programming is rather straightforward too. I also find the constraints of Google App Engine really do steer me to keep things simple which leads to faster turn around time and less head-scratching.

With just a few hours of Python programming under my belt, I can see why Python programmers it as much as Ruby programmers enjoy Ruby. It really is an enjoyable language to work in and I’m looking forward to creating a couple more simple applications with Google App Engine.

Related to my previous post is this classic from Kathy Sierra, Be brave or go home. It’s worth a re-read now and then.

Two years ago I made the switch by buying a MacBook Pro for my primary development machine. Every day it seems I find another small reason to be glad to have switched.

A trip to the Apple store

Last week my laptop battery suddenly would not hold a charge for longer than 20 minutes. So, last night I went to my local Apple store for a 7:00pm Genius Bar appointment (made easily online). When I arrived I was immediately greeted by an Apple Store concierge who walked me to the Genius Bar and personally made sure I got checked in. Bing! 1 point.

A pleasant wait

It was evident though that there was going to be a wait. But I really did not mind because the store has tons of computers with wide-open internet access so I was able to get some work and email done (Bing! another point). The store had great lighting, chairs (1 point), and a buzz of people who are glad – or at least not mad – to be there (more points).

In line without standing in line

Here’s one other small thing that made a big difference. A giant screen behind the bar that listed customer’s first names reassuring me that, “yes”, I was next in line without having to stand in a line or continually asking someone when my turn is. Bing! More major points.

A great start and great finish

That’s a lot of positive experience there before someone even took a look at my machine. After 30 minutes of waiting, a technician who has been trained at Apple headquarters (more points) looked at my battery problem.

And here’s the great finish…Batteries are normally not covered under warranty, but because I had to wait, he gave me a new battery, no charge. Bing. Bang. Done. One happy customer who will continue to encourage friends, family, and associates to switch to Apple.

It’s No Secret

Apple is simply following well-proven best practices of customer service and being rewarded with loyal consumers.

Contrast my Apple experience to the news
that a New York state judge found that Dell unlawfully deprived consumers of customer service to which they were entitled.

It’s so, so, so simple. Basic business textbook stuff. Yet so elusive to other companies in the industry like Gateway, Dell, and CompUSA.