We all have a few old domains sitting around (don't we?). I was looking at mine and thought it may be interesting to share a story of a business that never was and may never be.
One of the first ideas I had years ago for a startup was to build a small business intranet application. I have two domains for this idea, sbintranet.com and smallbusinessintranet.com. I came up with this after having developed a few intranets for my job and clients. The intranets were immediately useful and I think a no brainer for any small business.
I even started coding this, but eventually lost steam. It was the end of the dotcom era and with so many intranet companies going under I figured it may be the wrong time. It was the wrong time in my life to take it on anyway so it's probably better off.
Looking back though I understand even better why it wouldn't have worked. The problem with intranets for a small business is that small businesses don't know about intranets and what they can do for you. Hence they're not looking for intranets. Hence it's damn hard to get sales! Especially in a bootstrapping scenario where finances for advertising would be limited to none.
I always keep this idea on the back burner though. I think the communication possibilities in a small business are huge, especially now with the rise of wiki's and ajax based chats. Perhaps in a few years the time will be right.
LibraryThing nails down a big investment by Abebooks. The LibraryThing blog has been the best MicroISV reading around the last few months. I hope he keeps it up.
A great take away for aspiring ISV's out there is that his site is not for geeks. Unbelievably there's actually money in other software niche's!
Mike Rohde the infamous designer of the UserScape and HelpSpot logos points out that his company has added a page about their identity design service. I was Mike's first client for this type of service and I couldn't be happier. Definitely check him out if you're in the market.
Doug dropped me a nice note today about HelpSpot. His site, BackupMyBlog, got featured on TechCrunch which sent him a huge amount of traffic and new clients. Of course with new clients comes new questions and he wanted to let me know that the RSS features of HelpSpot helped him make short work of the new requests. I love getting those kinds of emails, makes it all worthwhile.
On a side note, Doug is here on the east coast with me and we're thinking of building an Ark if anyone else wants in. As I noted to him I can't swim so I truly need one :-)
"As I evaluate new startups these days I’m finding it harder and harder to see the big ideas that will appeal to a large, non-geek consumer audience." - Redeye VC
I couldn't agree more. The problem is they're building products which don't solve problems. They're just "cool". Worse yet is that many of them are simply poor copies of other "cool" sites that had only the thinest purpose to being with.
I've always had a very strong customer service focus. I attribute this to the time I spent working in retail. My first jobs were all in retail and even my first job out of college.
Retail is a terrible way to make a living. The hours stink, wearing the little outfit stinks, the pay stinks. But if there's one thing they teach you in retail it's how to take care of a customer. That the customer is truly the only reason you're there, that the customer is a precious flower to be cared for, respected and nurtured.
The customer is the one thing you can least afford to put off when you start a business. Yet, I see so many articles talking about getting things done. Often recommending only checking your email in the morning and once in the afternoon. Only doing support at one set time a day.
I think this is horrible advice. See by doing that you're doing what everyone else is doing. You're providing the same mediocre service customers expect to get.
Why not be different? Why not be memorable? Why not answer emails right when they come in?
That's one of the things I try to do if it's at all possible. Most of the time I am able to respond within 10 minutes or so. Not always, but very often. Because of that my service stands out. I can't count how many times customers have responded and the first thing they note is how impressive that is.
The reason I'm thinking of this is that I had several large sales today and both mentioned the speed an quality of support as major factors in their purchase decision. I can't help but think that may not have factored so highly if support had not been faster than timely.
I say let the programming wait. Is that new class you're writing really more important than a prospective customers question? I don't think so and neither should you.
Cyndy with a really nice set of procedures for making sure things don't fall apart while you're gone:
" I don't know what your network "looks like"; mine is a law firm network (about 18 attorneys and 35 staff). I take the position that, barring something really unusual, the office should be able to function without my babysitting for a couple of weeks (what if I were hit by a bus!?), and that it's part of my job to make sure that works."
Atrixware is a provider of a wide variety of eLearning solutions. They just recently purchased HelpSpot and have really gone to town on portal customizations as you'll see below. They also were able to get me kick started on a script I've wanted to write for a long time. In their old support desk they used phpBB and wanted to transfer the old discussions to HelpSpot's forums. This lead to the development of the phpBB_to_HelpSpot script now available in the hacks section of the documentation.
They're also hosted by the good guys over at ValiantHost.
This is an interesting blog by this fellow who used to work at Yahoo but has quit and is now taking a year to tour around the world. I'd love to do that someday.