Well, I have to confess, it’s been a long week, exciting, but very stressful.  I’ll expound on that more in the next couple days, but right now I need your help.  I’m realizing that I’ve been doing this for a while, and every so often I just run out of good things to talk about.  So when I’ve run into this before, I turn to you, my faithful reader.

What would you like to hear about?  do you have specific questions on Service Management?  Variant Configuration?  or even small business questions?  What would you like to hear me write about?

I hope to hear from you and thanks for reading, because I do this for you.

I’m sure, with all great start up companies, the players hit walls from time to time.  I often ask myself, what did they to keep themselves going?  You look at guys like Gates, Jobs, Dell, and they all started with nothing.  And built empires.  Now don’t worry, I have no delusions of grandeur that our company will grow to that size…  but I have to believe they all started with the same obstacles we are encountering right now.  How to get the opening round of sales, how to get that illusive customer feedback to build credibility, how to earn enough money to make this our full time endeavor without going down the venture capital path.

For now, I’ve personally  pushed myself on belief.  Belief in my ideas, belief that others need what I can offer.  I’ve noticed though, this is getting harder to keep up.  With 2 kids, a day job and my wife, pushing myself night after night is starting to take it’s toll.  I keep hitting the proverbial wall more often.  I noticed that today I again lost my motivation.  I looked at my list of activities that I need to do, blogging, marketing, development…  it’s just never ending.  I know there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.  Eventually we can do this full time, and then grow it to the point of getting real people to do all these jobs.  But we aren’t there yet.  We can’t afford to outsource all of these tasks, and we can’t afford to hire people to offload much of the work…  yet.

So the million dollar question for me is:  “How do I keep going?”  How do I continue to push, night after night.  I have my goal of doing this full time, working from home on my projects, no longer consulting.  It’s still about perseverance.  So, here’s my question to all of you.  How do you keep yourself motivated?  And you do have any secrets I could tap into?  ha ha ha.

Thanks for reading,

Well, not that long ago, I got a really exciting text from my partner.  He had a presentation on Monday (he sent the text on Thursday night).  AWESOME.  But (why is there always a caveat?), the prospect is on an old version of SAP (older than any system I’ve built since I started this adventure.)  Yikes!!!

Well, what do you do in this situation?  One, get out front of the customer.  I had Mike make sure to explain that their system is on a version that we haven’t tested WMigo on (or any other app for that matter).  Next, I had Mike check to make sure all the standard SAP functions used in the application existed in their system.  While this isn’t a guarantee, at least it told me if we would be immediately disqualified.  He did a quick check for me, and found out they all existed.  So far so good.  But now is where the fun came in.  On Friday, Mike explained that their business was looking for some things that weren’t originally incorporated into WMigo.  Namely functionality around quality inspections, or good receipts from production orders/purchase orders.  These are all good things to include, but having a demo on Monday, and it was already Friday immediately made me push the panic button.  Luckily for me, I was able to defer some of the stuff that Mike requested until version 1.1, but there were still things that needed to be added before Monday.

So, with a late night on Friday, I was feeling reasonable confident.  Mike was working on the presentation, everything looked good.  Saturday night arrived, my wife went to bed so I walked up to the office to check on Mike’s progress.  That’s when things got ugly.  Unfortunately, the functionality that Mike intended to demo hadn’t been tested.  He assumed it was all there, and didn’t try it.  So we worked till 4AM, bug hunting, adding new functionality, and just generally enhancing WMigo to give Mike what he needed for the demo.

While there’s no better form of motivation than a time schedule, I’m hoping to avoid this in the future.  I learned a valuable lesson.  I need to find out up front exactly what functionality needs to be shown to the prospect ASAP.  That way I can make sure I can run a quick test, or let my partner know that I don’t really know how that part works (in this case, much of the functionality was round PS, a weak point for me), so I could’ve turned it over to him to try it immediately…  not wait an extra 2 days.

The moral of the story, even good news comes with consequences, and like any good boy scout, make sure you’re prepared for anything (even an all nighter).

Thanks for reading.

Well, based on some feedback, and just a general knowledge, I’ve learned I need some help.  So I’m sending out a distress signal for a marketing professional, or a recommendation from any of you.  Here’s some of the stuff I’m looking for…

1. Website Re-design.  We want to give it more of a professional look and feel.2. Website Content.  This is the most important one to me.  I want to take our content, which I think has plenty of substance, and mold it into landing pages that will convert to leads, sales pages that will convert to demo’s, etc.  In short, I need the sort of person that can turn our website into a lead generation website.  Right now, well, I don’t know what it is, aside for a good amateur attempt.
3. Direct Mail.  I’m looking at moving into the direct mail, for a change of pace in marketing.  But that means I need solid design, graphics, content, etc. to make a compelling postcard to send to someone to convince them to opt-in to our site, and request a demo.
4.  Logo design.  This one is more optional, but it would be nice to have a logo for each of our products, even if it’s a simple logo.
5.  Last but not least, help to integrate our marketing.  We want to make the direct mail, website, autoresponders, newsletters, etc. all have the same look and feel, so they can work in conjunction with each other.

I’ve been learning bits and pieces from the Remarkable Marketing Blueprint, and now I’ve stumbled upon Perry Marshall’s Basic Marketing Course (that I just started, so I have a long way to go).  Short story, I at least have some ideas of what I need, but I know I don’t have the expertise to pull it off on my own.

So I’m asking my audience, any of you out there that can help me with some or all of this or recommend someone that can, please get in touch with me.
Thanks in advance,

Hello again to all of my faithful readers ( I always keep hoping there are more than 4 or of 5 of you…  but I’ll take what I can get).  Today I’m back in the realm of marketing again…  and today I’m wondering about an idea that hit me a few days ago.  The concept is “Free Samples” of our products.  I’ll explain more in a minute…  but the idea is that we’ll give you the program for a limited time, and then the program will stop working, unless we provide you a support pack to unlock (which presumably, is when you buy it from us).

Now, I’m curious what you think of the idea.  The concept is very simple (yet tedious for me the developer).  I add in some code that exits the program after XX days.  You sign a legal document pretty much saying that you’ll use our application for it’s intended purpose, this is not for production, and you can’t copy it…  blah blah blah.  Then (in my mind) the customer falls in love, see how great our stuff is, and how excellent our service is, and buys it (along with all our other applications).  =)

Now, onto my questions for you.  First of all, would you ever see your company, or anyone you’ve worked with take this model?  would your organization be willing to apply code in their sandbox before they buy it?  If so, how long would they need to play with it?  (remember if it’s more than 3 shakes…  wait…  never mind, that’s something else).  Is 90 days long enough?  and do you go 90 days from today, or 90 days from installation?

Now the ethical question.  Perhaps I’m too trusting, but I have this belief that potential customers won’t copy my code into their own programs, and then say, “no thanks”.  But is a risk.  Do you think it’s likely that our apps will be pirated?  or do you believe that customers will pay for it if they like it?

Are there other risks I’m overlooking?  I’d love to hear you thoughts.  And thanks in advance.  I really do appreciate you being my sounding board.  Thanks for reading.

Well, if you remember, I recently got started with Google Adwords.  I thought I was doing ok.  I was getting some clicks, spending some money, but getting no results =(  obviously, this is bad.  I recently talked to a marketing professional, that took a quick look at my site, and hit me with reality.

My landing pages sucked.  He gave me what he called a “$10,000 piece of advise”…  shut Adwords immediately.  He said the way my landing pages were designed doomed me to failure.  I was never gonna get any conversions with the current setup.  He told some simple tricks, that I’ll share with you today.

1.  Tell your visitor what you want them to do in the first page, without any scrolling.  If you want them to sign up for something, contact you, or just click for more information, don’t expect them to scroll and scroll to find that call to action.  You need to show it right up front.

2.  If you’re offering a newsletter, an E-Class, a whitepaper, or whatever, explain why they should sign up right up front.  People aren’t going to sign up for some nebulous offer…  not in today’s world of spam and junk mail.  They need to know why they NEED to sign up for your stuff.

3.  If you have a contact us link at the top of your site…  explain why they want to contact you.  If you’re like me, you’re not offering tech support or something random on your site.  You want them to contact you for more information.  You’re building leads.  Well, the average user needs a reason to click on something.  Be sure to give it to them.

4.  Avoid using stock photos, especially if you can use photos of yourself at work.  If you have pics of you at a client, or on the job, add those instead of some random models in a conference room.  It adds credibility and increases trust.

All that being said, look for some major revamps to the JaveLLInSolutions.com website coming soon.  Anyway, that my learning things the hardway lesson for today (too bad it costed me nearly $1000 in adwords…  but better now than after $5000).  Thanks for reading.