Time Tracking with Chrometa

My good friend Adam Kalsey – Founder of many successful enterprises, including IMified (acquired last year by Voxeo) and SacStarts (Sacramento’s Startup Network) – dishes out some refreshing advice for new entrepreneurs over at the SacStarts blog:

I talk to a great many erstwhile entrepreneurs that tell me all about their ideas and all the things that they’re going to do when they start their company. Or people who have started but aren’t really getting anything done because they can’t find the right co-founder or they need to design every last detail first, or they don’t have the marketing copy for their web site quite right yet.

Entrepreneurs do. We take an idea and a market and drive to make it happen. Figure out what’s standing in the way of you getting stuff done and just go through it. Once you’re actually building your company, a lot of those things that looked insurmountable turn out to be no problem at all.

These are two paragraphs that any aspiring entrepreneur should read over and over again – this is the essence of why so many wannabe companies never get off the ground.  And why so many wannabe entrepreneurs are forever waiting for the stars to align for them to go whole hog after their vision.

Here’s an unfortunate fact of life: The stars will never align.  So if you’re waiting around for a few things to “fall into place”, you’re wasting time.  Just get started and get after it.

As Adam mentions, most problems you’re planning for right now will never come to fruition.  At least 95% of your planning time and energy is likely being wasted.

On the flip side, there are obstacles that you’ll never anticipate until you start off on your journey.  That’s OK – you’ll deal with them as they come.

The important thing is to “fail fast” – if something is not working, stop doing it, and start doing more things that are working.

But – what if nothing is working at all?  That’s OK too – actually it’s completely normal, especially for a startup.  See, you don’t have to be that far off for it to feel like nothing is lining up.

If I may, let me use Chrometa as an example.  One year ago at this time, we had very little working.  Our messaging and value proposition was not connecting with the market – people would go to our website, and wonder what the heck we (and our product) did.  Not good.

Our product itself was a little better.  It had evolved to the stage where trial and beta users would say “I can see where this is going.”

So we kept tweaking everything – our focus, the product itself, our messaging, etc.  It can be a maddening process, quite honestly, because you can make a lot of incremental improvements, and have nothing to show for it.

“How’s the startup going?” is a question people love to ask.  And it’s a question a pre-revenue company usually hates to answer!  Because it’s tough to say things are going well when you don’t yet have a product that people will gladly pay for.

But eventually, it came together for us.  We defined who we were.  We kept honing the product (and continue to do so).  And eventually things started to click.

Moral of the story – inaction is the enemy of the entrepreneur.  Get moving today.  You’ll figure out what works, what doesn’t (that’ll be a real long list initially), and most importantly, you’ll be able to go from there and start building something of real value.

A couple of weeks ago I picked up a copy of The Opportunity Maker, which was written by noted networking and business development expert Ari Kaplan.  This year I’ve had the good fortune to get to know Ari personally.  So I picked up the book out of curiosity – though I have to admit I’m usually not a fan of “how to” advice when it comes to networking, because often the insights are at a very obvious, high level (think Dr. Phil).

In fact, I’d almost go as far as to say that most of the networking advice out there ranks right up there with most time management advice – easy to say, much harder to do, as if delivered by Captain Obvious himself!

Well the beauty of Ari’s book and approach is that it’s very practical and down-to-earth.  It’s full of real-life stories, which makes it a fun, fast-paced read, with success stories that can be easily absorbed.  To be honest, I don’t know how Ari possibly pulled together all of the people that are quoted and mentioned in the book – over 100 in total!

His main point is that, in law school, you learn about the law, but you don’t really learn about the business of law.  And more specifically, you don’t learn how to build a successful career.  This is a task you must take upon yourself – to build your own personal brand, rise above the noise, and take responsibility for advancing your own career.

Make no mistake about it – Ari is a one-man public relations machine.  Go ahead and Google his name, and you’ll see what I mean.  If there’s anyone in the legal industry who knows how to build a personal brand, land press coverage, and establish thought leadership, it’s Kaplan.  And that’s the cool thing about spending 210 pages with him – he shares inside tips on such topics as finding a mentor, connecting with people in creative ways, and getting published – amongst others.

This is NOT a book to read once, and put on the shelf.  Instead, I’d suggest reading through it a first time – as it’s a pretty quick read – and then going back to it and working on implementing the tips that Ari shares, one chapter at a time.  It’s been shown that the best way to learn a new skill is by doing it, in parallel with reading about it, and that’s exactly how I’d recommend you use this resource.

Though I am not a lawyer (nor do I play one on TV), I did find this book to be extremely useful.  As the leader of a self-funded legal software company, Chrometa, I’m always on the lookout for ways that we can “rise above the noise” as a company.  We do not have the extensive sales and marketing resources that the bigger vendors do, so we must be more creative.  And there are no shortage of creative promotion tips and ideas in this book.

It’s the same for most individuals – since you probably don’t have extensive marketing and public relations team tasked with advancing your career, you need to get creative.  So I’d highly recommend you consider making an investment in The Opportunity Maker, as I have little doubt it will pay for itself many times over.

Additional Links:

• Ari Kaplan interviews Brett Owens about The ROI of Time Capture

While on a support call today, a new Chrometa user asked about how to choose an Email server for a small firm. Afterward, I thought I’d share our company’s story on picking an email service.

When we started Chrometa, one of the first things on our to-do list was to set up email address for everyone. Previously, when we worked at other firms, we used Exchange Server. This nifty email server from Microsoft also synced everyone’s contact list and calendars. But now things are different. We were a small company that didn’t have the time, dollars, and IT staff to maintain our own Exchange Server. Also, our needs didn’t warrant such an investment.

So off we went to find a bare-bones email service. First, we signed up for Yahoo Small Business Email  — after all, our domain name was already hosted on Yahoo so we were all set to go. During the early days of product development (read: coding and testing), we didn’t really need any advanced features, like contact sharing. For shared calendars, we synced our Google Calendars to Outlook — all in all, everything was fine. But for most businesses, Yahoo Mail just doesn’t cut it. This brings us back to Microsoft Exchange Server.

Microsoft Exchange Server

Let’s start with the top 5 reasons companies run Microsoft Exchange Server:

1. Outlook. Exchange Server was designed for Outlook.
2. Shared contacts. Need to get in touch with someone? Just do a contact search and you’ll get the details as long as it’s in the Exchange Server’s Active Directory. Neat.
3. Shared calendars
4. Shared resources. Need to book that conference room?
5. Webmail (run a web version of Outlook from your browser. Weeeee! It’s just not the same as Outlook for desktop)

This used to get pretty expensive, fast. Companies bought and ran their own Microsoft Exchange Server infrastructure. This meant that someone (and often more than one person) had to monitor it, upgrade it, and administer it. Their job was pretty important, as we all know what happens when either email or the Internet goes down (insert episode from the Office).

But wait, what’s all this ruckus I hear about Hosted Exchange?

Hosted Exchange

Hosted Exchange is a pretty good idea, and it really took off with the all the advancements in virtualization technologies. In plain English, virtualization means splitting a perfectly good computer into many little computers using software, and each one of those little computers can do its own thing independent of the others.

Hosted Exchange meant that your company can now *rent* the right to use an Exchange Server owned and administered by another company. That means you don’t have to buy the hardware, upgrade it, maintain it, or hire someone to look after it. Instead of spending $1,000’s/user/year on email, you’ve just cut that cost to $100’s/user/year. Pretty Awesome.

The other option you may not have considered is Google Apps. Last summer, we switched our company to Google Apps — and to this day I consider this one of the best decisions we’ve made.

Google Apps for Business

Why Google Apps? It does almost everything that Microsoft Exchange does, and a lot more! Plus it’s even more cost effective than Hosted Exchange.

1. Outlook: check
2. Shared Contacts: kind of, but it’s a hassle. You can easily share all your internal contacts (people within your company), but your company needs to maintain a separate LDAP server if you want shared address books. In other words, you can’t have a “universal address book” out-of-the-box just yet.
3. Shared Calendar: check (Google Calendar sync to Outlook)
4. Shared Resources: not really… but if you’re a small company, you probably don’t do a lot of conference room booking
5. Webmail: well that’s a given.

What else do you get? Let’s drill down:

1. Extremely simple email account setup and administration. This is really important if you’re a small firm. Wouldn’t it be nice to add accounts, forward email from one account to another, and set up “catch all” emails, without needing to call IT support?
2. A better webmail experience. It’s Gmail, plus you get 25 GB’s of storage.
3. Mobile access to Gmail on the iPhone. BlackBerry PUSH, Gmail Apps for BlackBerry and Android phones.
4. Continuous improvement. Google Apps are constantly adding new features and improvements. Microsoft Exchange does not.

Finally, let talk economics. Google Apps charges $50/user/year. That’s <50% the cost of Hosted Exchange.

In the lawyer community, there has been much debate about the security and privacy of Google Apps. I have to agree that web security is very important. But do realize that your Hosted Exchange server is also on the web, as is your computer when it is connected to the Internet. As with any technology, the best security algorithm sits between your ears. Log out of web apps if you’re using a public terminal. And please check the recipient list before hitting reply-all

Conclusion

For most small businesses, I’d recommend Google Apps. You’ll get all the key functionality of Hosted Exchange at a fraction of the cost. More importantly, you’ll enjoy far simpler setup and administration. Last but not least, you’ll gain access to Google’s expanding suite of continuously-improving products.

Everyone’s needs are different. If you don’t mind paying extra for complete control over your own mail server, and if you can’t live without a “universal address book”, go for hosted Exchange.

Special thanks to Andrew for inspiring this post.

Support for software, in general, stinks.  Why is that?  Is it an immutable law of nature, or something that’s evolved over time?

And more importantly – can software companies provide a good to great level of support, and stay profitable?  Or will their ship inevitably be flooded and sunk by a never-ending barrage of phone calls from users?

First, let’s split the software universe up into two categories – SaaS (Software as a Service), and traditional.  SaaS companies make their money by charging a monthly or yearly subscription for their product.  The advantage to a user is that you can “rent” the use of the product, which means that you can get started for a lower entry price.  The disadvantage being the flip side of the same coin – you’re paying month after month, it’s not a “rent to own” type of deal.

It’s a sweet deal for the software vendor, if they can pull off this model, thanks to the continuity.  And because of this, support from SaaS vendors is usually quite good, because they do have to work to keep your business, and they’ll factor support costs into the subscription price.

Traditional software is a different animal.  Generally the up front cost is a one-time fee.  After that, the user is generally regarded more as a liability to the company – we’ve got your money, now you’re on your own!

From the vendor’s perspective, support can easily spiral out of control if left unchecked.  While the software business does carry high margins, these can quickly erode if you’re spending a lot of time supporting users, especially if you’re not receiving any more revenue in the process.

But from the customer’s perspective, they paid for the product, so don’t they have a right to get help in making it work?

We wrestled with this question in the process of bringing our product to market.  We really wanted Chrometa to work great for everyone…in fact, we were convinced (and still are) that it had to.  Because we don’t have a big sales/marketing machine, so we need our users to be our feet on the street, our evangelists.

We don’t have a subscription based product.  It’s a one-time, $99 price.  So we received a lot of warnings from people that we’d “go broke on support” – especially if we didn’t charge an arm and a leg for it.

It never felt right to me to charge support for a product that’s supposed to work “out of the box”.  Nor to anyone on our team.  And really, when we launched, our potential problem of “going broke on support” hinged on us actually having product traction – so that’d be a good thing!  Let’s get the product out there, and worry about the support economics later.

So we advertised free email support with the purchase of a license.  In practice, though, not only did we gladly accept support phone calls, but we’d often call people back after receiving a support email, because it’s usually easier to speak live with someone.  That’s always a fun thing to do, because people just about fall out of their chairs when we call!  The bar on software support is SO low, that it’s not all that hard to step over

A few months after launch, we formalized the phone support, got an 1-800 number, and tossed it up prominently on our website.  A funny thing happened then – the number of phone calls we received actually dropped.

Why would this be?  I think it’s a combination of factors, which has included a consistent “beefing up” of our online help resources, and the general improvement of our product.  But having the phone # there seems to put people at ease – it’s there if they need it.

Overall we’ve observed that people are very good about searching for help on their own, before they contact us.  Inbound inquiries usually fall into one of the following categories:

1. Bug reports – this has tailed off for us significantly in the 6+ months since we launched, as we’ve been able to address many bugs, as well as enhancements, in product updates.  Bug reports are very valuable to us, we definitely want to know about these.  So the easier we can make the process, the better.
2. Questions about how to do something – We actually launched without a product help guide, videos, anything!  Not that this was a badge of honor for us – it’s just that when you’re bootstrapping a software product yourself, you need to just to the basics, and get it to market.  And ultimately these help resources were not absolute “must haves” before launch – though we sure scrambled to put them together after!  Again, inquiries of this nature are always accepted, and helpful to us, as we can see where people are getting stuck, what may be unclear, etc.
3. Feature and enhancement suggestions - The best part of getting a product to market is the user feedback.  All of the product enhancements we’ve implemented over the last six months have been based on feedback from our users.  If you’re a software vendor, I’d think you’d always want to hear these.  Of course it’s not possible to implement everything.  But knowing is at least half the battle!

We recently started giving free licenses to students – which in theory, would further complicate our support.  How can you support free users without any funding!  Thus far, not a problem at all.  Every student we hook up with a free license is about as nice as could be.  Sure it takes me a few seconds to ping them back with a license code, but then again, I’m not a programmer, so it’s not like I’d be doing something more productive with my time anyway

Overall our early results on the “Great Free Support Experiment” have been very promising.  Our support time continues to trend gently down as our user base grows.  And to be honest, we try to look at support as a marketing function as well.  I always found it ironic that vendors who won’t accept inbound calls from users often have a telemarketing arm pounding the phones for new business in the next room!

Personally I spent so much time groveling for phone calls and meetings in our very early days with prospective users – “please, just try my product!” – that I’m hardwired now to gladly speak with anyone who wants to speak with me!

If you’re a fellow startup or early stage software company, my advice would be to absolutely give the best support that you can.  Take care of your users now – you can always worry about “scaling” and taking over the world later.