Iarfhlaith Kelly - Code agus Craic

Earlier today over on the Webstrong Blog I launched the first phase of TrackPath. A simple web app to help you track your quotes and proposals. Below is a copy of the post. You can find the original one here.

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Today we’re launching the first phase of a little app called TrackPath. Available at http://ontrackpath.com, this simple tool lets you track your quotes and proposals. It measures their success rate and provides meaningful statistics to help you make better decisions so you can write more effective proposals in the future.

We’re quietly excited about this project because it scratches an itch we had in our own business and also because we managed to launch it less than 10 days after the idea came to mind.

The Pain

During a recent seminar, I (momentarily!) lost concentration on what was being said and instead started to think about all the proposals I had out at the moment. I tried to recall which ones I needed to follow up on and which ones still needed to be sent. But, I couldn’t remember them all.

I then started to wonder about proposals that had gone out in the past. How many had I won? How many had I lost? If so, why did I lose them? Was I too expensive? Did I not follow up fast enough? Did I have the wrong approach? Was it a cold lead?

All these questions came flooding in and I realised I didn’t have any answers. Moreover I had no easy way to get the answers because I wasn’t tracking the success /failure rate of my proposals.

The 10 Day App

So, I quickly scribbled down a basic wireframe for a simple app that would let me track my proposals.

The next day I booted up Photoshop and started turning the raw sketches into proper designs. I built 5 screens in all and made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t add any new features to these designs until I had launched the app as was laid out here.

To put myself under some pressure I set a launch date for July 6th, just 9 days later, and I setup a Twitter account, registered a domain and launched a teaser site announcing the project and launch date.

I handed the designs over to Phil, who started slicing and dicing the screens into proper code.

Meanwhile I began configuring the application framework. Things like login, registration, authentication, password reminders, etc.

Once I was all done, Phil had the dashboard coded up in HTML and CSS and it was ready to be ‘turned on’ with data driven content.

I quickly built a couple of database tables (one for users and the other to store the proposals). And then started coding up the PHP and SQL statements to pull everything in.

Each time I finished a page, Phil would have another UI screen ready to go,. And it went on like this until we had all 5 screens built.

The Business Model

No project is worthwhile without a business model, and while I accept that this is a very simple app I do think it’ll be a valuable addition to any small business in the B2B space and I think it’d probably be reasonable enough to charge a small fee for the app at some point in the future.

But for now, it’s completely free until we gauge people’s interest and see what the response is like.

Moving Forward

TrackPath is a single user app. But it’s very likely that we’ll flesh this out in the future to include multi-user accounts so each rep can each access their own proposals, with a managerial account overseeing these proposals and tracking the performance of each sales rep. We’ve a hundred different ideas about where to take this new project but we’ll carefully consider each one before including it in TrackPath. Because at it’s core it’s a simple app, and that’s how we want it to stay.

Please check it out at http://ontrackpath.com, we’d love any feedback you might have.

Almost everyone who succeeds, fails the first time. In fact they usually fail many times before they get it right. Failure, it seems, is a key ingredient in the success of any business, project or person.

What can we learn from this? Well, if anything it’s that failure is just a stepping stone to success. And there are few better examples of this than Abraham Lincoln. The man failed at almost every point in his life, right up until he became the U.S. President, and the most powerful man in the world at that time. See for yourself.

One of my heroes, Guy Kawasaki summed it up nicely when he said “if you succeeded at everything you did, what would you have learned along the way”?

This truth became clear to me when I tried to build my first pc. I naively went out and bought a processor and a motherboard, stupidly thinking they would just ‘work’ together. Of course they didn’t. I then bought a system fan and a few other bits and pieces like memory and a graphics card. There was problems with all of those too. But despite the challenges, I over came them and I learned a ton about computer hardware in doing so. And to be honest, I’m not so sure I would have learned as much if everything had worked together first time. The end result was a killer system that I knew inside out.

The bottom line is, don’t worry about failing, just make sure that when it happens you get up and try again. You’ll eventually get it. Remember, you’re always stronger and wiser the second time around.

Even Michael Jordan knows that failure is just a part of success: [Thanks Dave].

I’ve been planning the launch of the Webstrong Blog for a while now, and I’m delighted to say that I’ve finally kicked it off. The new blog will focus solely on developments within the web community and news relating to the company. It’ll be a platform for honest, transparent and inspiring stories on business in Ireland, building web apps, and running a software company.

I think the new blog comes at a good time because I’m at another stage of major change in the business. For one, my time in the Hothouse is coming to an end and I’m looking at expanding my team again. Plus I have a great new office lined up too, which I’ll announce as soon as I’ve signed the deal.

Keeping Up Two Blogs

A concern I had when deciding to launch the Webstrong Blog was that this blog, my personal blog, would suffer as a result. But the reality is that Webstrong is a lot more then just me now, and together with my team we’ll be writing posts from all angles and opinions. So it won’t be just me posting on it, which should make things a little more interesting.

The Big Brand Decision

One big decision that most bloggers must have to make is whether to brand their blog as a personal one or as a business. I reckon it depends which one has the bigger voice, is most important to you, most appealing to your audience and most marketable overall. For me, that used to be an easy decision, but I think it’s time now to give the company an identity all of its own.

I’ll be posting in both places now. So go check out http://webstrong.ie/blog for more information.

2008 was a great year for me. I doubled my income, I grew my business, I made some great friends, I learned a lot and I had a blast while doing it. Here’s a quick review of where I got my business from during the year.

This colourful graph is a hand drawn representation of where all my business came from in 2008. The main nodes off of me (in the middle) are:

• College / School
• Business Networking
• Friends / Family / Neighbours
• Web Traffic
• Mums Design Business
• Damson Technologies

The exercise produced some interesting information. For instance I discovered that out of the 60 clients I had in the last year, 40% of them originated from contacts I made through my mum’s design business. However, these 24 clients only accounted for 27% of my annual revenue.

I also discovered that my most lucrative deals in the year originated from contacts I’d made through Damson Technologies. Fin and Donal don’t know this yet, but a whopping 48% of my revenue in 2008 came from businesses they put me in touch with (thanks lads!). A few other interesting stats resulting from this graph are that I get a healthy amount of business from my website, about 18% of the total, and that the areas with the most referrals from existing customers were contacts originating from family or friends.

A Referral Continues To Be The Best Path To New Business

This brings me to my main point, which is that I now know I can get business from anywhere. This graph is relatively even and I can see that I get business from all areas of my life. And even better then that, over half of the business I got this year was a referral from a referral!

Some people poo poo the idea of using your friends and family as a source of business, but I think if you ignore these then you’re ignoring the best possible source of business you can have. Now I’m not suggesting that you lean on those closest to you to support your business, that’s just plain wrong. But what I am suggesting is that you use them and the people they know as a platform for launching your network of business contacts.

Word of Mouth Is Still King

Even in this day and age, the best source of new business for almost all small businesses is still word of mouth. Despite all the talk of viral marketing and using technology to grow sales, nothing but nothing seems to beat good old fashioned word of mouth for gaining new business (obviously though, word of mouth can happen online too!).

One final thing that strikes me about this graph is how many links there are. Over 70% of the business I got in the last year originated through referrals from existing clients. Long may this continue! I’m really interested to see how this graph evolves over the next 12 months. Where will my next big chunk of business come from? Will it be from a referral? Or possibly some web traffic? Who knows, maybe even from this blog!

The current economic crisis in Ireland is like nothing I’ve seen before in my lifetime. It’s my first recession, and it looks like it’s a serious one. People close to me are losing their jobs and/or leaving the country for better opportunities elsewhere. Things are looking fairly bleak and the country is in free fall. But we can’t all leave, and we can’t all hide from these problems. Some of us will have to step up and take part in fixing the country. In creating value in our economy once again.

Growing Exports from Indigenous Companies

The answer to this is to build up and expand our export market. We’re not competitive anymore in areas like production or manufacturing so we need to think outside the box. Much of our export economy right now is heavily reliant on the large US companies who have operations here. But the recent announcement from Dell to close their plant in Limerick with the loss of 1,900 jobs is a stark reminder that these large multi-nationals will only stay here for as long as it’s profitable to do so. What we really need is to nurture and expand our indigenous Irish owned export economy.

Technology To The Rescue

Right now, our best chance of success is in the technology sector. We’re a nation of brainiacs, full of great ideas, talent and motivation. We’re perfectly positioned to fix the current crisis. All we need is to organise, focus, prepare and then to just go out and do it.

There’s a growing community of Irish startups, each of them bringing passion, energy, innovation, and the right skills to execute their ideas. I believe that it’s this group of companies and others like them that will lead the way for the regeneration of the Irish export market.

Lets look at this crisis in another way, lets be more optimistic. This recession might not the nightmare it’s being made out to be. Instead, it could be the single biggest opportunity we’ve ever had to reshuffle, reorganise, reposition, regain our competitiveness and kick some serious ass in the international technology sector.

Now that all the stones have been unturned, there is nowhere to hide and we’ve got no choice but to hit this crisis head on with smiles on our faces. And I for one am looking forward to it.

A Plan For Success

I’ve got a three point plan to maximise my opportunities during the downturn. These are tips that anyone can adopt in their business, doesn’t matter what you do.

• Generate passive recurring income
• Export your skills and your products
• Focus on a niche and kick the ass out of it

Generate Passive Recurring Income

There were two main causes of the property bubble. The first was the fact that property development is a once off job. After a house is built and paid for, that’s it. No more revenue could be generated from it. The developer had to move onto another project and build yet more houses to keep his revenue up. The second problem was we were selling to each other, at ever increasing prices. And they were doing all this, just to stand still.

I hope that the lessons learned from these catastrophic business practices will mean we won’t be likely to repeat them again any time soon. So what else can we do? How can we guarantee a steady income stream into our businesses that are genuinely sustainable?

The answer is to generate passive recurring income.

Like most of you know, I work in the web industry and right now the big buzz is software as a service (or SaaS). This is the concept of renting software to your clients in return for a monthly fee. If your clients are happy to continue using your product, then they’ll be happy to continue to pay you. It’s a simple business model with one major advantage: the revenue is stable, recurring and can be expected to grow on into the future.

Even better, would be to build a product that required no interaction or ongoing work on your behalf. That’s where the ‘passive’ part comes in. This is a scalable simple idea that will become the norm in the software industry over the next 5 years (it already has to some extent).

If your business isn’t a web based business, don’t worry, there are loads of different ways to apply this and the web is just one of them. Try to think of how you can get your customers to ’subscribe’ to your service or product. Once you’ve figured that out, you’re half way there.

Export Your Skills and Your Products

Despite the fact that the whole world seems to be struggling economically now, nobody seems to be suffering quite as badly as we are (except maybe Iceland). This means that there’s money and customers waiting to buy your products literally just over the horizon.

If you’re struggling to pick up customers in your local area, why not broaden your geographic target and go after customers abroad? The Internet has levelled the playing field in loads of industries, and you’re just as likely to land a contract for a client with offices across town as you are with one who has offices half way round the world.

Stop thinking local and start thinking on a global scale.

Focus On A Niche And Kick The Ass Out Of It

Leave being all things to all people to the over zealous and the old school, pick a niche and kick the ass out of it.

Never before has there been a greater opportunity to build highly specific tools for small groups of people. Like Richard Feynman said in his famous speech in 1959, ‘there’s plenty of room at the bottom’, there are a massive number of problems for small groups of people that still needs to be solved. It’s these ‘verticals’ that provide the best opportunities for new business in times like these.

This is where we come in.

The barriers to entry and the cost of getting started with an online product are ridiculously low nowadays. Anyone can do it. All you need is a laptop and an idea.

Once you’ve got your niche, build products for it with razor sharp focus. Provide features designed just for them that no ‘off the shelf’ offering could possibly provide. Make your product indispensable to those people, so they couldn’t live without it. Fix all their problems for them and do it at a reasonable price.

You could only hope to do this in a really tiny niche, so don’t worry that it’s a small market. Once you’ve become indispensable to them other opportunities will pop up, I guarantee it.

Out Of Every Crisis Comes An Opportunity

This is how we will dig ourselves out of the hole we now find ourselves in. By taking advantage of the global market and building new products that solve simple problems.

This recession doesn’t have to be all doom and gloom. It’s a chance for us to become agile again. It’s an opportunity to reinvent ourselves.

If you doubt me, I’ll refer you to the Chinese people. They’ve known this for a millennium. That’s why their Mandarin symbol for the word ‘crisis’ is the exact same as it is for ‘opportunity’.

Now get out there and do something.