This week we are building and launching a new product which we will donate 50% of the first year’s profits to charity. The product is called Spend Meter, and we’re live blogging progress at Operation Canine.
We’ve nominated ourselves for the Crunchies 2008! If you are feeling in a helpful mood, we’d love for you to help us out by nominating Tactile CRM in any, or all of the following categories:
We’ve recently been working on some exciting new features for Tactile CRM, which we doing final testing on and hope to release this month. Watch this space.
Whilst Team Tactile have been working on the underlying code, we’ve also been contemplating some interface changes. Now we don’t mess around with mockups in Photoshop, with some of the excellent plugins available for Firefox, including the Web Developer Tool Bar, Firebug, and Stylish, we can quickly and easily work on the interface and see how it actual works in the browser, so we can have some user testing thrown in for free.
One thing we’ve been thinking about is moving to a fixed width design. Mocking this up with the plugins in the browser took about half an hour and the result is below. This may never make it into production, but we’d love your feedback as to which you prefer.
As displays get bigger, presenting text in a fluid layout becomes more of a challenge as it has a tendency to spread out onto a single line. Working with a fixed width also gives us more potential when working on reporting/graphs.
The screenshot below is the current layout for comparision.
What are your thoughts, and which do you prefer?
First of all a big thanks to Stewart at Sun Startup Essentials for our stand at FOWA – it meant we increased our presence from myself, to a total of four of us each day. Not only that – we saw a significant increase in coverage of our Tactile CRM product online, via popular blogs such as Paul Carr, Iain Wallace, a decent amount of Twitter traffic, and a video interview by Dennis Howlett.
We met a lot of people interested in Tactile CRM, and the general consensus was that an API would be really useful; we caught up with the Soocial guys and would love to put something together with their product when we have our API in place, and many more.
As always Ben from Redcat Co was on-hand to take my blog photo for the day (see below)!
Highlights for me where Andy from Huddle, talking about life outside Silicon Valley, and Jason Calacanis with Tom Nixon talking about work/life balance.
Last week was spent preparing for, and going to FOWA to promote Tactile CRM. The weekend was therefore spent catching up on email, news, and life in general.
One thing that caught my eye (as I was reading my RSS feeds) was that a competitor has recently rolled out a long overdue feature in their ‘CRM’ product called deals. As a CRM veteran (I’ve been doing this for over 10 years), the concept of deals/opportunities is one of the key features to the CRM concept as it helps to manage and maintain your sales pipeline. Without this a CRM application is not so much a CRM solution, rather a complex address book.
Now the folks at 37 Signals have done a nice job in rolling out deals to their product – one thing they are often criticised about when talking with people is the lack of a roadmap (we have one at Tactile CRM) since people have been requesting this feature for a while.
However, on this occasion I feel they have missed two fundamental features. Firstly, their is no due date on the deal to help you build your pipeline, and secondly, there is no pipeline (graphs/reporting/etc). Without these features I feel they have missed the point. We’ve had these features since day one (see the screenshots below).
At Tactile CRM, we talk with our users, actively encourage them to leave comments and suggestions, and take on board what it is they want.
37 Signals know their market, and create some great applications for their customers, however at Tactile CRM we are after a difference market and hence why, although we like to keep our applications simple, we have a more featured product.
So to the 37 Signals team, congratulations on the new feature, and lets hope we can all help our customers get through the current economic mayhem with some apps to help them streamline their businesses.
I wrote a guest post on the Sun Startup Essentials Blog about the recent Digital Mission to New York that Tactile CRM took part in.
Is that too many acronyms for a Tuesday morning? If so, allow me to translate – ‘We’re off to Future of Web Apps thanks to Sun Startup Essentials‘.
We’re part of the excellent Startup Essentials program from Sun designed specifically to help startups get off the ground rapidly and at lower cost. We’ve taken advantage of some of the excellent discounts on hardware, and are going to be looking into to their expertise when it comes to some nifty hardware/software configuration/optimisation too.
We’ve won a stand to exhibit Tactile CRM at FOWA London next week and are now busy planning what to do on the stand. Our neighbouring stand, Fav.or.it have an awesome Lego Death Star to build, and I am hearing rumours of some beach and hawian shirt action from Stewart at Sun. So what do we have?
We’re still planning at the moment, but needless to say Denver the Tactile CRM dragon will be making a reappearance, we’ll have some beer, a demo of Tactile CRM, and more. So watch this space!
I sign up to, trial and test a higher than usual number of products on the web. Most are easy signups and not too onerous.
We’ve taken this to heart with our Tactile CRM product. You can sign up for the product for free, no credit card details required, and it’s free for as long as you like.
Here are the details we ask for if you sign up for the free version of Tactile CRM:
OK, it’s not the shortest sign up, but we need all those details to set up a new account – it’s not us trying to do data capture. The main point is we don’t ask for your card details on the free trial.
We want people to start using Tactile CRM, try the product and give us feedback.
As a start-up this feedback and exposure is just as important as the people that sign up for the paying plans. We really do want people to use the product and actively pursue feedback and suggestions we receive, so giving users an extra barrier to entry, such as entering credit card details is a no-no.
So sign up forms like the following from Apple’s Mobile Me is silly in my opinion:
I wanted to give the Mobile Me ‘Exchange for the rest of us’ feature a try with my email (I already have IMAP and wanted to see if it improved on it).
The old .mac service let you have a free trial without this step and I gave it a go. However, I can’t be bothered to complete the above form as I am likely to forget to cancel the trial if I don’t want to carry on.
I’m sure Apple aren’t worried about little old Jake not signing up, but for some of the smaller fish like ourselves we want as many people as we can get.
I have been keeping this under my belt for a week or so, but I was really pleased that Tactile CRM has been accepted onto the 2008 Digital Mission to New York. Full details are on the Chin Wag website, TechCrunch UK have done an initial post on it (they are one of the media partners), and the press release is here.
I’ve been trying to stalk follow people on Twitter that are going. So far I have found the following – companies & people with Twitter accounts first (those with two people have the person representing them on the digital mission first):
DM on Twitter or email me jake [at] tactilecrm dot com if I have missed you off.
So after reading Michael Arrington’s article on why voicemail is dead I thought I’d think about how I use mine.
I’ve come across Spinvox before – it’s a service that converts voicemail (speech) to SMS and/or email, and decided to sign up for the trial today. I’m one of those people that is fairly good at responding to email, but not so much at voicemail. So the idea of having my voicemail direct in my inbox as an SMS means I can respond things to things much quicker.
After signing up (thanks Whatleydude) I had a few SMS based issues caused by my mobile operator and had to call up Spinvox customer service. I spoke to a really nice chap called Craig who gave me some really helpful pointers to ask T-Mobile, spoke to them, and called back Spinvox a few hours later. I spoke to Craig (he remembered who I was), said he’d make a couple of changes and give me call back when they were done. I’ve heard this before and so was pleasently surprised when he called back later to let me know it was all fixed.
I happened to be away from my phone when it happened so he left me a voicemail that was converted to text and SMS’d and emailed to me. It all works perfectly now!
This is exactly how customer service should work. Slick, personal, quick and efficent. I never once felt like the problems were my fault, and everything was resolved satisfactorily and beyond my expectactions.
I’ve learnt a lot from my dealings with Spinvox in a day and will be taking away a lot of what I have experienced to put into the way we deal with things both for Tactile CRM and Resolve RM.
Once again, thanks Craig and Whatelydude at Spinvox, you’ve restored my faith in customer service, you have a great product and given me lots to think about.