Still Not Getting the Message Right

Saturday Morning and time to reflect on another busy week of highs and lows. Had a couple of really constructive meetings, the first with my local Primary School looking to move to Academy status and the second with representatives of Coventry City Council.

Its great when you get the 'No brainer' comment unprompted, "Why wouldn't people buy your product, I can see that any cost is more than off-set by the potential savings in time". I've just got to send out the quotations now so hopefully we can move forward.

We have also completed the foundation elements to our social media strategy. All the analytics and back links seem to be working. We can take registrations of people visiting our sites and looking to progress there interest through our web-pages. The web-pages nownow have lots of nice content, videos and case studies for people to look at, read and hopefully gain a thorough understanding of what we do. 

We are also going to use our Demonstration Area to host a series of installation guides as we look to implement a 'sole-trader' self extract, click and go version of ProAct. The mechanics of the self extract will be in place by the end of the Month, we just need to finish off how to take payment and tidy up a few little things around licencing before we go live. This will give me lots to tweet about.

We've also just completed build 1.0.8 of ProAct which we are just putting through final testing. Picking up on user feedback, We have added extra buttons so you can quickly bring up month and year to view history of communication events in the details zone. We have also made the tool 2.5x faster in use so recovering records now almost instant. And we have the ability for remote users to access the database through a web-browser to post and edit data. Great for collecting Pupil Data from Parents or for registering on events.

So this is all good.
However, around the social media, I'm still struggling to get our message right and I think this is where I need to focus my efforts now that we have the means to share the message and track and analyse the results. I know mechanically the process works. Any tweet or mail-shot I issue does generate traffic back to the site so in respect of the AIDA principal, I can create Awareness. What I've got to do is resolve how we convert awareness into Interest, Desire and Action. At this time, I'm simply not creating the desire and urgency in our prospective customers minds.

So, if you have time to comment, please have a look at the new web-pages at www.progenitorsolutions.com, or the LinkeIn site Here and let me have your thoughts. There always appreciated and as you know, do get acted upon

Darren Gent

Rollercoaster

If I was to equate my overarching experience of business ownership, specifically running a start up, to any other of life's experiences it must be that of riding a large and very fast rollercoaster.

It is a constant thrill but the ups are very up and the downs very down. It seems to me that if your in that safe little bit in the middle your doing nothing. 

The analogy continues in that like a rollercoaster, there is so much of the experience that you can not control. Once you've paid your money, strapped yourself in and set off you are completely at the mercy of the ride for the next moments. Sure that ride will end and you can choose whether or not to get back on or find another ride to go on but for the duration of that particular cycle you are committed, good or bad.

I told you in the last blog that we had a couple of important meetings lined up. The first was really hard work. We presented ProAct and particularly the features around allowing parents to populate pupil data (medical authority, photography approval, trip approvals, principle and secondary contact numbers etc etc ) directly to the database via secure log-on through a web-browser. We know this is a real and consistent issue having spoken to lots of Schools up and down the country. We demonstrated how the changes were made, from the parents and schools perspective and we demonstrated how through a simple report, the changes could be applied back into Capita's SIMS product. "Are you a Capita Technical Partner"; "No" and the shutters came down.

For the second meeting where we talked about how the product could be used to work with local businesses to capture and match requirements around real estate and waste, exactly the same process in effect, two remote parties sharing and maintaining common data, we were pushing at an open door.

Perhaps we got our message wrong in the first meeting, we are certainly looking at the integration with Capita and have already got a quote for what the licencing will cost us. The irony is that we probably already know what the API looks like as we can already generate the CTF file structures from the products. The missing link is therefore Capita authority to let us write the file content directly into the SIMS database rather than upload through a report. One button press to replace two?

BUT, if this is what we need to do to get us back on the rollercoaster for the next ride, we may as well buy the ticket and hold on.

Darren Gent