Many starting out as a business owner, particularly those who have worked in a company/companies before, can find it difficult to say “ok – we’re ready, time to launch”.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s launching a new restaurant, a new shop, a new product or a new service – the nerves kick in.

Fault is found in everything that is on offer.

• The product isn’t good enough.
• The competitions offerings suddenly look so much better than yours.
• Doubts creep in on the marketing and sales approach.
• Or worse, self-belief diminishes and self-doubt creeps in.

I would challenge any new business owner to say that they never felt like this at some point prior to going “live” and going out to the market.

At some point though, a decision has to be made to go into production mode. The time, effort and capital required to get any business off the ground – whether bootstrapped or with significant funding, means that the owner has to make that call and start on the process of making the business a financial success.

The chances of every little thing being 100% on launch are highly unlikely. However, the owner is usually the worst critic of the business and customers will almost certainly have a different perception.

So just go for it.

• You open the door.
• No customers/few customers come in – you tweak and adapt your sales and marketing strategy.
• You are not making sufficient profit per “widget” – you adapt your pricing.
• Your customer service is poor – you find out why and fix it.

Whatever the problem, you will have time to make things better.

Things will be tight but if you’ve put a solid foundation in place and ignored those nagging items that were preventing you getting on with it – things will work out.

For some, it will take a short length of time, for others – it can be a number of months or years before things gel.

So, put aside those niggling doubts.

Believe in what you’ve assembled and just get on with it!

Photo: Dougww

Marketing and sales, the key functions of any business to generate the revenues to keep you in operation. But when is the right time to start marketing and sales activity when you are a start-up business?

This question needs a bit of thought. When you are ready is the right answer, but what on earth does that actually mean?

Are those who shout their intentions from the roof-tops and let the world know that they are coming before they actually do correct?

Or is it more appropriate to stay quiet working away diligently in a “black box” only targeting a selected audience to achieve your purpose.

Marketing and Sales : Start early to raise awareness?

Conscious of the fact that marketing and sales are different functions, for the purpose of this article, I am going to discuss the two under the umbrella of “awareness”. For the experts in either – I apologise in advance for any misrepresentation.

I had an interesting chat with a colleague today about his previous life in a major start-up in the late 1980′s/early 1990′s. When they started out, the company had thirty people working for it all of whom were told to say absolutely nothing to anyone about what they are doing.

There was no marketing. Sales meetings with potential targeted clients were undertaken without fuss. This tactic was continued until the company floated in the stock exchange 10 years later and they are now making revenues of about $500million/quarter.

Essentially they operated black box and managed to grow without shouting their names from the roof tops when they were in start-up mode. They built a strong business by creating a very definite set of rules on their approach and sticking to their guns.

This contrasts strongly with the shout it from the roof-tops (e.g.  social media marketing) approach. This tactic is about raising the product/service awareness to as wide an audience as possible. Many newer businesses, ourselves included, have raised awareness even before commercial launch as a way of generating interest that will (hopefully) be converted into sales post launch.

So which is the right way to go?

For us, the decision to start our marketing and sales in advance was made for two reasons;

Firstly, to start generating an engagement with possible clients so that we were not starting blind at commercial launch.  Secondly because we are an open company and are happy to share our experiences as we progress with people who might be interested in such things. Openness is good currency in my view.

This does not necessarily make the decision we made the “right one” though. We are open for criticisms, potentially showing our hand to competitors etc. We are happy we made the right call for ourselves, but this does not make it right for you and your business.

What are your thoughts on when the right time to start marketing and sales is?

Photo : Suneko

We thought long and hard about going for an open beta test on MyProjectTracker. On the plus side we felt we’d get honest feedback from people who did not know us i.e. not the friends and family brigade. On the negative side, we were putting the product out there and leaving ourselves open to criticism.

We elected to go for it and opened up the product so anyone could sign up to and have a look around. We felt the benefits of open and honest feedback far outweighed the risk of exposing ourselves to potential criticisms.

We pushed the product for exactly one week directly to companies and via the usual social media channels. We decided to ease off once we had about 125 users signing up. We had a target of 20% of those people to actually go beyond the look around and actually get themselves setup and using the product in anger.

We hit our target in less than a fortnight – delighted. We got our sign-ups and our 20% of active users – a mix of businesses from single person consultancies to our largest, a company with 30+ employees. A good cross-section we felt.

We received some great feedback from people as well, both via email and also directly where users allowed us to sit with them and observe their interaction with the product. The open beta has given us the ability to see where people were going in the product, whether there were any stumbling points, how users were getting on setting themselves up, pretty much everything we needed to see.

We have benefited enormously and aspects that we have shared, such as the “shop” site needing to be clearer, are currently being re-worked prior to commercial launch.

Why are we doing the re-work before launch? Why not just go with what we have and tweak?

Well we could have done. However, negative experience is very difficult to overcome. If potential customers don’t want to move beyond the “shop” or are not happy with a user experience at a key point in the set-up process and leave us, they won’t be back.

It takes time to attract people to the site. We don’t want to waste that effort by putting them off after they arrive. We want to ensure that when potential customers arrive that we convert as many as we can. This is why, after we got our numbers for testing, we stopped pushing for sign-ups.

I am not sure there is a correct answer as to when the best time to show your wares to potential customers is. We have done it three times now; when we were defining the concept (market research), during a closed testing phase with selected customers and now the open beta. This has worked for us, but it may not be right for your business.

The one thing I would say is that you have to show your hand at some stage – putting it off because of nerves or concerns of negative criticism is most definitely not the right approach. If you do put it off, you may never open you shop door!

What experience have you had of proving your products and services to the market?

Photo : tasteful_tn

Hello Everyone.

We felt it was about time we shared a bit of an update with you to let you know what’s going on in MyProjectTracker world.

Where to begin… hmm!

Well, the beta testing is going well and we have had a great response from the folks who are “using it in anger” – of which there are a fair number. As expected, we have hit a few bumps in the road that we are working through at the moment, but thankfully nothing awkward – just a bit time consuming.

We are looking at our marketing site again. The message coming back is that it is brilliant in design but to subtle in its approach. We need it to be more like a shop than it is at the moment so we’re working hard to see what we can come up with. We’ll probably pop a couple of ideas up on Facebook at some point to see what you reckon – we’d love your opinions.

We were on the Irish version of Dragons Den the other day. Grateful for great editing. It was a fun experience and we’ll put up a post about it in due course.

What else. Ah yes, the road-map for the next while is effectively finished.  We have some exciting things in the pipeline and once we have our ball-park dates for when we are going to pop them into the product, we’ll let you know. If your using the product, let us know your thoughts for possible inclusion too!

We’re enjoying the blogging as well.  Hopefully you are as well. We tend to write a little about a lot of different things that come into our minds – but this means it’s from the heart and not contrived (we hope!). It also means we don’t run out of things to write about!

Commercial launch is approaching, but we need to iron out the bits and bobs first. We’ll keep you posted.

That’s about it. Looking for any information, sure let us know at info@myprojecttracker.com.

Best Regards

The MyProjectTracker Team.

Photo : Our own project on MyProjectTracker

We were contacted one afternoon by Des from Contrast to make the decision on the payment solution for MyProjectTracker. Payment Server Provider or Payment Bureau.

Myself and Barney sat down one afternoon to trash out the pro’s and con’s of using a Payment Server Provider (RealEx) or a Payment Bureau (PayPal). To be honest, Barney favoured PayPal and I favoured RealEx.

A well formulated guide that helped us make sense of the online payment choices was www.webpayments.ie. This should really be the first port of call for anyone creating a website that will be required to take payments.

Here is a summary based on our discussion that day and our discussion of this topic with others who have setup website that require payment:

Payment Server Providers: (RealEx)

• Higher quality system
• Better user experience
• No need for customers to visit other website for Credit Card verification
• No additional accounts required for customers
• Better system in the long term
• Tougher to set up with banking in the short term
• It may take a number of weeks to acquire a Merchant ID from the bank
• A Setup fee may be required with the Payment Service Provider

Payment Bureau: (PayPal)

• Messy user experience
• Customers must visit third party website to for Credit Card verification
• Messy administration of account
• Easier to set up in the short term

A number website designers we spoke to seem to seriously regret choosing PayPal as a solution, but their decision was made at the time due to time or financial constraints.

We plan to provide the best customer experience possible for MyProjectTracker customers, and this begins at the door. It’s all about first impressions, and we want a smooth credit transaction to be the start of a long customer relationship.

As we were not under anytime constraint with regards applying for a Merchant ID, we decided to go with the Payment Server Provider solution.

The fact that we had heard good things regarding RealEx’s customer support, we then decided to choose RealEx as our Payment Service Provider.

Did you decide to go down the Payment Service Provider or the Payment Bureau route?
What were the reasons for you decision?

MyProjectTracker is now open for business!!

This is a big day for us that has been 2 years in the making. We are opening MyProjectTracker for what in the industry is called “Open Beta”. In simple terms this just means you can start using MyProjectTracker for FREE. This final phase is to ensure there are no “funnies”. We will launch commercially over the coming months with some special deals for those of you who sign up now.

MyProjectTracker will help your business deliver projects more effectively. We encourage collaborative communication between your team and your customer. But just as importantly, we help you to manage and track your project costs.

We believe that accurate and real-time reporting is key to any business. With MyProjectTracker, we will let you know how the budget is doing, how the timelines are looking and whether you have any problems that you need to worry about for every project on our simple dashboard.

All of your projects and data will remain safe and sound once we GO-LIVE, so don’t worry about having to make changes. We’ll look after all of this.

If you have any questions, there is an area for support that includes some “How-To’s” that we are adding to all of the time. To access this area, simply click the “Support” link at the bottom of any page. Otherwise drop us an email at info@myprojecttracker.com and we’ll give you all the help you need.

Sometimes we get asked “Is this the right tool for me?” Our advice is simple, “Try it and see”. MyProjectTracker is designed for people who run multiple projects at a time or for companies that have projects involving more than one person.

We hope you like what you find and that it helps your business deliver projects more effectively.

We have all had one of those lightbulb moments which we think will translate into a viable business. The challenge is to have the drive, passion and determination to turn that idea into a reality.

Before an entrepeneur pours all of his or her energy into converting that idea, the most fundamental question that needs to be asked is “Is this a real business?” i.e. is there a market for my product?

The key to determining whether the idea is a viable business proposition is Research, with a capital “R”. How many businesses do we all know which sounded like a great idea, but failed before they were off the ground. The chicken came before the egg.

When we conceived the MyProjectTracker concept, we almost (but not quite) fell into that trap. Having worked in the murky world of IT, we were convinced that we had seen the light and that our idea for a straightfoward, online, hosted project management tool was unique. We had the product designed and quoted for before even thinking about checking had it been done before.

Then we spoke to some friends who mentioned a couple of well known hosted project management solutions and asked whether we could realistically take them on as competitors.

We realised the folly of our ways and put a screaming halt on the product design for a time while we went about doing some proper market and customer research.

The joy of being an e-business is that all of our competition is online i.e. we can see what they are up to without needing to ask customers (though of course we did), trying a bit of industrial espionage or any other trick. Google provided all that we needed to know about what they were up to – the good stuff and the bad.

We were happy with what we saw primarily because it supported our original view that the product had enough of a unique offering that it was possible to penetrate the market.

So if you have a lightbulb that won’t go out, do your research – if there is a market for it, take the jump and give it a go. It’s one of the most rewarding experiences you can have in business, to see your idea come to fruition and on the market!

Good luck!

Hi all,

Beta day, and for those signed up, a look into the new approach to business project management!

It’s taken some really hard work and not a small amount of drive and passion on behalf of the team to get to this point and this story will be told in future posts.

So what’s the plan for now?

We have had a huge number of requests to be part of the Beta process, which is great, and we would like to say a big thankyou for signing up.

We are going to introduce people over the next couple of weeks so don’t panic if you’ve signed up and not received the code just yet. Once we are happy with the way things are going, then we plan on opening up in earnest for a wider audience.

So what does beta mean?

It means different things to different people, but to us it means the following;

“Validating that the product holds true in the real world.”

Our market research says yes, but it’s always good to get this re-enforced!

For the beta testers it means you get to use our product for free until we feel ready to start charging for it – at which point you can stay on board with a chance to win a rather nice “to be announced” perk for your business for being a beta tester. The only thing we ask in return is that you provide some feedback (good or bad) via the feedback link at the bottom of each product page.

What about the product during beta?

From a project management and business management perspective, all of the key functions are in place. We have excluded some minor functions for the moment, but these will not limit the beta testers ability to use the product to help their business projects along.

You may see some aesthetic changes as we receive feedback and continue to include things that we want to see ourselves in the product.

In the interim, we hope you benefit from the product and like what you see!

And if I’m not signed up yet?

No problem. If you are not signed up for our Beta, but would like to be, just let us know by sending us a note to info@myprojecttracker.com and we will add you to the list. The more, the merrier in our view.