I’m pleased to say the Spend Meter got built for Operation Canine and it looks like an awesome application (if I do say so myself!).
Full details are on the Spend Meter website, and there’s a screenshot below of what it looks like:
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 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.
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!
Check out my guest post over at TechCrunch UK on using Collaboration Web Apps to Beat the Credit Crunch.
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.
We successfully launched Tactile CRM earlier this year and have lots of nice people onboard – thanks to everyone who is using it.
Work has now begun on our second application in the suite, Resolve RM, and we will be writing about the process of launching it on this blog. No holds bar’d, the good the bad and the ugly, warts and all, etc. etc.
The idea isn’t new, there are plenty of resources out there, Ryan Carson blogged about selling Drop Send, and put together a Web App, Guy Kawaski wrote about building a web app for about $12,000, I came across an interesting post title ‘Diary of a Failed Startup‘ yesterday, the list goes on.
What we aim to do is talk about our day to day problems, solutions, issues etc. that we come across and how we deal with them. We’ll also be applying things we learnt launching Tactile CRM.
This may be a resource for anybody interested in what we do, looking for tips, ideas, and pitfalls/mistakes we make along the way, or it may be of no interest to anybody. Time will tell.