by Scott on August 10, 2008
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.
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by Scott on August 09, 2008
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.
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by Scott on August 01, 2008
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.
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by Scott on July 25, 2008
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.
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by Scott on July 02, 2008
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.
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