Category Archives: Technology Consulting

When you’re a new or growing business, when you’re ready to add employees, it may be better to hire temporary employees or what are called “virtual assistants”. Virtual assistants are workers who work by the hour on things you would have had to do yourself.

Depending on the firm, virtual assistants can help you with everything from checking your email and making appointments to web design or other web services. This is similar to the term, “long hallway”, which means a distributed company. I’ve provided a couple of different types here:

American Virtual Assistants:

eaHELP is the leader in sourcing busy professionals with high-quality American executive virtual assistants.

Longer Days provides a single point of contact called a team lead that enables customers to accomplish a wide variety of work that would traditionally require a half a dozen employees.

Overseas Virtual Assistants:

GetFriday is your personal virtual assistant. GetFriday can undertake any task, business or personal, that does not require our physical presence.

Brick Work India created a unique business solution, the virtual office, to cater to the specific needs of such companies and CXOs.

Other Types of eWorkers:

Elance allows you to post a job with a bid to get proposals from multiple freelance workers across the globe. Also consider Odesk, Guru and vWorker.

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I realize we just updated our logo a couple of months ago, but consider that an iteration on the way to the final product, which you can see here. The last logo was a circle of blue around an empty center, with a cutout at the bottom. It was meant to symbolize a ring of water encircling the customer, but some people just didn’t get it or thought it looked like an unfinished life preserver.

Our new logo essentially means the same thing as the old logo: it’s a water shawl surrounding the customer representing the suite of services we provide. But one peculiar thing happened once the new logo was created. I was on my way to Lafayette to visit a networking meeting and I realized that the “water shawl” could also represent a “cloud”. It was if a light bulb went off and I didn’t know how I had missed it before. Watershawl was a cloud consulting firm that specialized in WordPress web design and Google Apps integrations.

What is Watershawl?

Watershawl has helped small businesses around Indiana build cloud-powered, WordPress web sites; and cloud-based email, document, and sales management. Watershawl provides cloud technology consulting to help small businesses do more with cloud applications and platforms like WordPress, Google Apps, and Salesforce.com. Our services range from cloud marketing to cloud migration to cloud management. Cloud technology helps small businesses market their business, reduce spam, and be more productive all at a lower price point than traditional software.

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In April of 2009, Steve Blank and Eric Ries gave a presentation on Customer Development at a Startup2Startup Conference in Palo Alto, California. They called it The Customer Development Model, which stated that, “More startups fail from a lack of customers than from a failure of product development”.

But it’s not just startups, more companies fail from a lack of customers than from a lack of a great product, yet most of the time a company forms around a product and then tries to go out and find customers for that product. What if there was a way you could find the customers first, build a product for those customers, and then create a company? There is and it’s called Customer Development.

Customer Development is a rigorous methodology developed by Steve Blank to bring the scientific method to the typically chaotic, seemingly disorganized startup process. Blank’s first book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, detailed the Customer Development process and his second book, The Startup Owner’s Manual, is a step-by-step guide to building a successful startup, offering practical advice for any startup founder, entrepreneur, investor or educator.

According to Steve Blank, Customer Development involves four steps:

1. Customer Discovery – Create a hypotheses about who your customer might be and then ask those customers what they want, how they work, what they hate, and what they want more of.
2. Customer Validation - Develop a repeatable and scalable sales process. Only “earlyvangelists” are crazy enough to buy.
3. Customer Creation - After proof of sales, creation is where you “cross the chasm”. It is a strategy, not a tactic.
4. Company Building - (Re)build your company’s organization and management. Re-look at your mission.

Credit: Steve Blank and Eric Ries

But what if you’ve already started your company and you already have products? You can still use these same methods to find out who your target customer is, what they want, and how they talk in order to create custom marketing directly to them.

Steve Blank says, that “Customer Development is about testing the founder’s hypothesis about what constitutes product/market fit with the minimum feature set.” What is product/market fit? I would define product/market fit as the moment when the iterations of your product match the desires and needs of a market in a way that the customer would actually be mad at you if you didn’t let them have the product. Once you’ve achieved this state, it’s time to “fuel the engine” as Eric Ries says, and build it fast. This is the moment you’ll want to attract funding and start adding as many customers as possible (Customer Creation) in order to build a company. In this way, the entire company is built around the customer, not the [by]product.

Customer Discovery

Customer Discovery involves “getting out of the building” and doing Customer and Solution Interviews. Part of the Lean Startup methodology, which combines Customer Development and Agile Development to create a business model that values learning, these interviews are the best way to find out your customers wants and needs – so that you can solve them. Like Agile methodology, Lean methodology uses iterative processes and the Scientific Method to hypothesize, test, and learn in order to create a product that customers actually want before building it. Once they have this “product/market fit” they built it as fast as possible.

What are your customer’s pain points? What are they complaining about? Where do they hang out? What words do they use? It’s only when you know the answers to these questions that you can then determine if they are both able and willing to pay for the solution. The first part of that question is called a Customer Interview.

Here’s an example of a customer interview:

You “get out of the building” and meet with a potential customer in your market and ask them what sort of problems they run into on a daily basis. The business owner tells you about having too much spam in their email.

Now that you know the customer has a problem with too much spam, you create a hypothesis about what product might solve this problem for the customer and set up a second meeting called a Solution Interview to determine what the customer thinks of the solution, if they are willing to pay, and if they are able to pay for it.

Here’s an example of a solution interview:

You meet with the customer, present the solution to them, and ask if they would be willing to pay to have their spam reduced.

Write down any feedback you get because the point is not to sell the product at this point, the point is to learn as much as you can so you can go back and refine the product to create product/market fit. Even if you can’t change the product, you can still iterate your approach or how you you’re using the product to solve that problem. It could be that your product is a better answer to another problem or that a new product is needed.

Applying Customer Development and Lean Methodologies to Content Marketing

Joseph Dager, Lean Marketing consultant and author of Lean Marketing House, says that “Lean Sales and Marketing is about applying Customer Value to the Demand side of your business.”

If you’re solving clients problems you won’t have to do much marketing at all – the customers will seek you out. If they aren’t seeking you out, you might not be solving their problems. But how do you identify what your customers pain points are? The simplest answer is to ask your target client or existing client base what things are bothering them most and when you start to see a trend, you can start to ask if they’d be willing to pay for it to get fixed.

Content/Market Fit

We believe that content marketing is the best way to attract customers when marketing online.

We’ve adapted the customer development process for content marketing and developed a way to create content that achieves a product/market fit that we call content/market fit. We spend more time on content development so that our client’s customers find them. Why? Because the content we develop content that solves a problem for our client’s customers. Whenever they search for the problem they’re having, our client’s solutions are displayed as the answer. In this way, you’re working more in sync with Google’s goals of wanting to deliver the most relevant content to users seeking out answers to their problems.

We help business bloggers write content that answers their customer’s problems.

By spending more time finding out what problems your customers are having, you’ll spend less time in the customer creation process and more time making money in the company building process. How can Watershawl help you build your company? Contact us for one hour of free consultation. Just mention this code: CMF.

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If you’re using WP e-Commerce to turn your WordPress website into an online shopping cart, you may have ran into a Paypal error that says, “Error Detected, Your shopping cart is empty.”

This can happen when you’re trying to pass a required field like “Name” over to Paypal, but it’s blank. Why would it be blank? Because one of the fields in the Product page that Paypal needs to process the order is empty. It can happen when you start to add variations to an item, but you don’t name the variations.

You need to put in a name in the “Name” field under the “Variations” under each product in the Dashboard. Once you do that, that Name is what is sent to Paypal during the checkout process. It doesn’t work without that.

You can tell which product have variations by looking at the “Stock” category in the Dashboard > Product page. If the variations are turned on, it will show “0~”, other wise it will show “NA”. Once you go in to edit an individual product, you’ll see a “Variations” module. If the “Sizes” is checked, the “Name” field has to be filled in for it to work.

All products with variations need the name field filled in, in order to pass that name to Paypal.

If this doesn’t fix your problem, try one of these references instead:

http://getshopped.org/forums/topic/paypal-standard-2/
http://gallery.menalto.com/node/91326
http://getshopped.org/forums/topic/paypal-shopping-cart-is-empty-error-detected/
http://quirm.net/forum/topic.php?id=4376
http://www.webassist.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19706
http://getshopped.org/forums/topic/paypal-error-detected-your-shopping-cart-is-empty/

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According to Computer World, iCloud is Apple’s replacement for MobileMe, but what is/was MobileMe?

According to Wikipedia, “MobileMe is a subscription-based collection of online services and software offered by Apple Inc. Originally launched on January 5, 2000, as iTools, a free collection of Internet-based services for users of Mac OS 9, Apple relaunched it as .Mac on July 17, 2002, when it became a paid subscription service primarily designed for users of Mac OS X. Apple relaunched the service again as MobileMe at WWDC 2008 on July 9, 2008, now targeting Mac OS X, Windows, iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch users. On February 24, 2011, Apple discontinued offering MobileMe through its retail stores. The MobileMe retail boxes are also not offered through resellers anymore. Apple is also no longer accepting new subscribers for MobileMe. At the WWDC 2011, on June 6, Apple announced it will launch iCloud in the Northern Hemisphere Autumn 2011, which will replace MobileMe for new users. MobileMe itself will continue to function until June 30, 2012, at which point the service will no longer be available, although users are encouraged to migrate to iCloud before that date.”

Since iDisk from MobileMe is dead, that leaves services like DropBox and Microsoft’s SkyDrive winners. How does DropBox and SkyDrive differ from Carbonite and Mozy back-up services?

DropBox and SkyDrive are online storage services, but Carbonite and Mozy are online backups. So what is the difference between online storage and online backups? Automation and availability mostly. With DropBox and SkyDrive, you store files on a one-off basis, just as you would copying files to a flash drive, but with Carbonite and Mozy, you set up plans, syncs, and can file version – meaning you can save multiple versions of a file to capture older vs. later files. Essentially, you could use an online storage service as an online backup service, but it would be more work.

Read more about Dropbox for business and how it compares to SkyDrive.

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Is Google Docs Cloud Computing?

Google Docs is a free (with paid service options): Web-based word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, form, and data storage service offered by Google. It allows users to create and edit documents online while collaborating in real-time with other users. Google Docs is Google’s “software as a service” office suite. Documents, spreadsheets, presentations can be created with Google Docs, imported through the web interface, or sent via email. Documents can be saved to a user’s local computer in a variety of formats including: (ODF, HTML, PDF, RTF, Text, Microsoft Word). Documents are automatically saved to Google’s servers to prevent data loss, and a revision history is automatically kept. Documents can be tagged and archived for organizational purposes.

Google Docs serves as a collaborative tool for editing amongst users and non-users in real time. Documents can be shared, opened, and edited by multiple users at the same time. Users can be notified of changes to any specified regions via e-mail. The application supports two ISO standard document formats: OpenDocument (for both opening and exporting) and Office Open XML (for opening only). It also includes support for proprietary formats such as .doc and .xls. Google Docs is one of many cloud computing, document-sharing services like Microsoft Office Live. The majority of document-sharing services require user fees, but Google Docs is free (mostly). Its popularity amongst businesses is growing due to enhanced sharing features, accessibility, and stability (it’s no longer in beta). In addition, Google Docs has enjoyed a rapid rise in popularity among students and educational institutions.

Is Windows Live Cloud Computing?

Windows Live is the collective brand name for a set of services and software products from Microsoft, which is part of their “software plus services” platform. While a majority of these services are Web (cloud) applications, accessible from any browser, there are also client-side (binary) applications that require installation on a user’s PC.

There are three ways in which Windows Live services are offered:

1. Windows Live Essentials applications - Windows Live Messenger, Windows Mail, Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Movie Maker, and Windows Live Essentials
2. Web services – Hotmail, SkyDrive, Windows Live Contacts, Windows Live Calendar, and Windows Live Devices
3. Mobile services - Windows Phone Live

Windows Live is different and separate from Xbox LIVE, which is a multiplayer gaming and content delivery system for Microsoft’s Xbox and Xbox 360 as well as the Games for Windows – LIVE multiplayer gaming service for Microsoft Windows. However, formerly separate, Office Live, (Microsoft Office cloud) services are now part of Windows Live services.

So is Windows Live actually “cloud computing” like the commercial says? Some of it is and some of it isn’t. Find out more at Windows Cloud.

Read more on cloud storage solutions from Dropbox, Google, and Microsoft.

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The future of IT is in cloud computing, but how do you explain that to the “C” level executives? This model uses two specific business metrics and 5 ways that you can explain the ROI of cloud computing to your boss or to the board:

• IT capacity – storage (GB or TB), CPU cycles (GHz or THz), network bandwidth (Mbs or Gbs), and/or memory capacity (RAM) a measure of performance.

• IT utilization – uptime availability (% available per year) and volume of usage (# of requests) as indicators of activity and usability.

Effective cost/performance ratios and levels of usage activity do not necessarily imply proportional business benefits. They are just indicators of business activity that are not in themselves more valuable than lower operating costs. What is needed instead is a set of business metrics that build on the cloud computing model.

The following are business metrics that can help translate the indicators from the capacity-utilization curve to direct and indirect benefits to business and examples of how a CAPEX is different than an OPEX in cloud computing:

1. The speed and rate of change – Cost reduction and cost of adoption/de-adoption is faster in the cloud. Cloud computing creates additional cost transformation benefits by reducing delays in decision costs by adopting pre-built services and a faster rate of transition to new capabilities. This is a common goal for business improvement programs that are lacking resources and skills and that are time sensitive.

2. Total cost of ownership (TCO) optimization – In cloud computing, users-not just IT-can select, design, configure, and run infrastructure and applications that are best suited for their business needs. Traditionally this has often been strictly in the realm of IT even after projects are handed off to production services, but in cloud computing environments end users are more involved.

3. Rapid, elastic provisioning for dynamic usage – Resources can be scaled up and down to follow business activity as it expands and grows or is redirected. Provisioning time compression can go from weeks to hours. This service management affects end users and business needs as the scope of functionality and services for users evolve and seek new solutions.

4. Increased margin and cost control – Revenue growth and cost control opportunities allow companies to pursue new customers and markets for business growth and service improvement. And because it can scale, IT avoids over-and under-provisioning of IT services to allow for smarter business services. This is enhanced capacity utilization, the ability to add and use hardware on-demand without extra hardware or labor costs.

5. Business process improvement – Cloud computing capabilities can be leveraged through shared services. Users can have access to business capabilities allowing improvement or development of new skills and solutions through cloud sourcing and on demand solutions like Amazon Web Services, Google Apps, IBM Cloud Computing, Microsoft Azure, and HP Cloud Assure.

These five measures define a new set of business metrics that can be used to create a matrix and dashboard of your current and future operational business and IT service needs relating to your cloud computing potential return on investment.

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There are three good options for small businesses wanting to store and share documents in on the Internet in the cloud: Dropbox, Google Apps, and Microsoft’s Office 365, Docs for Facebook, and Windows Live SkyDrive.

Dropbox

Simplify your business and boost productivity with the freedom to use the same tools you work with daily. This means you don’t have to switch the programs you use, you just have to switch where you save and open your documents.

You can share Word documents, Powerpoint slides, and large files easily and securely with colleagues and/or clients. Collaborate across the hall or around the globe and get more work done on the go because your files are always available from Dropbox.

Dropbox works with Windows, Mac, Linux, iPad, iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry. It even works when you’re offline. You always have your files, whether or not you have a connection. Watch your changes synced instantly across shared folders.

With easy setup and control you can get started in minutes. Put Dropbox for your business on a single invoice for all of your employees and manage and migrate accounts with admin controls. If someone leaves, you can simply change their permissions online and if someone needs more space, use the admin panel to add more.

This is the same service trusted by tens of millions of personal users that’s now available for businesses. Enjoy dedicated phone support, bank grade AES-256 bit encryption, and unlimited version history for all your files. This means that you can view previous versions of your files if you need it.

Plans start at $795 for 5 users, but before you balk at the price think about all of the other hardware and software this one service is replacing. There are no more USB flash drives, external USB backups, taking backups to an off-site location, managing grandfather schemes to keep revisions, or buying expensive file servers. There is one more login account that users will have to manage, but that’s a minor inconvenience for what you’re getting.

Google Apps

Google’s web-based messaging and collaboration apps are more than just cloud storage, but they can do that too.

Google Apps requires no hardware or software and needs minimal administration, creating tremendous time and cost savings for businesses. Google allows email clients like Microsoft Outlook to have POP or IMAP access to email, contacts and calendar so the transition can even be seamless to your employees.

Each employee gets 25 GB for email storage, so they can keep important messages and find them instantly with built-in Google search. This is higher than what personal Google Mail users get, which is hovering around 8 GB right now. Google Docs lets you store documents in the cloud in a Dropbox-like way, but only 1 GB of storage is included with the plan. More storage can be added as needed for a nominal fee.

Gmail is designed so employees can spend less time managing their inboxes, and more time being productive. Time-saving features like message threading, message labels, fast message search and powerful spam filtering help employees work efficiently with high volumes of email. It’s spam protection is one of the primary reasons we recommend Google Apps for business.

With several options for accessing their information while on the go, employees can be productive with Google Apps even when they’re not at their desks. At no extra charge, Google Apps supports over-the-air mobile access on BlackBerry devices, the iPhone, Windows Mobile, Android and many less powerful phones.

With synchronous replication, your data and activity in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites is simultaneously preserved in multiple secure data centers. If one data center is unable to serve your requests, the system is designed to instantly fall back to another data center that can serve your account with no interruption in service.

Integration options let you connect Google Apps to your existing IT infrastructure if you’re business is already on a domain and support options include: phone support for critical issues, email support, and self-service online support. Plans start at $5 per user per month or $50 per user per year.

Microsoft Office 365, Docs for Facebook, and Windows Live SkyDrive

Office 365

For those who want the familiar Microsoft Office collaboration and productivity tools delivered through the cloud, Office 365 is the ideal solution. Everyone can work together easily with anywhere access to email, web conferencing, documents, and calendars. It includes business-class security and is backed by Microsoft. Whether you are a small business or multinational enterprise, Office 365 offers plans designed to fit your organization’s unique needs.

Microsoft Office 365 for professionals and small businesses is $6 per user per month subscription that lets your employees access email, documents, contacts, and calendar from virtually anywhere on almost any device. This plan is ideal for organizations with fewer than 25 employees that do not have IT staff or expertise. Compare Office 365 to Google Apps for Business.

Docs for Facebook

Built using Microsoft Office 2010, Docs for Facebook provides the best possible document service for the Facebook environment. Seamless integration with Facebook means that the service is all about sharing your documents. Docs enables Facebook users for the first time to create and share Microsoft Office documents directly with their Facebook friends, using the Office tools they already know. Docs uses the Facebook login and is intended for personal use, but can be used for business if it suits your needs.

Windows Live SkyDrive

Windows Live SkyDrive is a free cloud storage service that allows users to upload files to Internet file storage and then access them from a Web browser. It is part of Microsoft’s Windows Live range of online services, and uses Windows Live ID to control access to files, allowing users to keep the files private, share them with contacts, or make the files public. Publicly-shared files do not require a Windows Live ID to access. The service offers 25 GB of free personal storage, with individual files limited to 100 MB. Compare this service to Dropbox for Teams.

Watershawl Technology Consulting

If you need help choosing or deploying any of these solutions at your business, contact Indianapolis Technology Consultants, Watershawl, Inc. We serve the Greater Indianapolis area, but travel all over the state of Indiana helping small business owners get more out of their technology.

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We did a small test to see what were some of the biggest problems business owners had and what we found was the biggest problem was “How to Get More Customers“

We know that in order to get more customers you must first figure out what your customers pain points are – find out what are the things they are complaining about that you can fix – and then determine if they are both able and willing to pay for them. The first part of that question is called a customer interview.

Here’s an example: a business owner complains of having too much spam in their email. You respond by creating or finding a product that helps the client reduce their spam and then asking the customer if they would be willing to pay to have their spam reduced. This is called a solution interview.

Customer and Solution Interviews are part of the Lean Startup methodology, which combines Customer Development and Agile Development to create a more sound Business Model that values learning. Agile and Lean both use iterative processes and the Scientific Method to hypothesize, test, and learn in order to create a product that customers actually want before building it. Once they have this “product/market fit” they built it as fast as possible. Erich Stauffer talks more about this cycle here.

If you’re solving clients problems you won’t have to do much marketing at all – the customers will seek you out. If they aren’t seeking you out, you might not be solving their problems.

How do you identify what your customers pain points are?

The simplest answer is to ask your target client or existing client base what things are bothering them most and when you start to see a trend, you can start to ask if they’d be willing to pay for it to get fixed.

A less effective, but quicker route is to find out where your customers are complaining or seeking out solutions online. A good way to do this is by using Google Discussion Search to search for problems people are sharing on forums and other discussion groups.

We did a test search with the term “my business” and this is what we found:

• My business keeps disappearing from Google Places
• I need a slogan for my business
• I need a logo for my Business and possibly a website
• I need help getting payments to my business
• What is the best CRM software for my business?
• Anyone using Dropbox for business file storage?
• I need a really good name for my business
• I need help with my business card
• A client owes my business money… what to do?
• Can I request to remove my business from Yelp / Qype?
• I need help getting my business off the ground
• How to promote a new site?
• How many of you have tried Offline Marketing ?
• What’s your most effective marketing method?
• What is the most important points of business?
• How to get more customers?

Once we started noticing a trend, we started recording things we could blog about, solutions for problems like which CRM is best, how to use Dropbox for your business, and how to promote a new website. Our first post is this post, which addresses the last question

How to Get More Customers?

1. Identify a need by asking or searching.
2. Find a solution for that need.
3. Ask potential clients if they would pay for that solution.
4. If so, write about it. If not, find a different problem or solution.
5. Once you’ve written about it, promote it using SEO.

Essentially you start out with Lean methodologies, then do content marketing, then finish with SEO. So the key to getting more customers is not SEO, it’s knowing you have a product that solves a problem AND people are willing and able to pay for and then writing up content about it on your “home base” and only then doing search engine optimization.

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WordPress Scheduling and Online Estimators

Our Noblesville carpet cleaning client wanted a way to keep track of appointments and allow clients to schedule and possibly even pay on his website. His site runs on WordPress so we looked into a WordPress plugin for a calendar that we’ve used before successfully, however it has to be updated manually and doesn’t interact with other estimator scripts or even with Google Calendar. The All-in-One Event Calendar allows you to import a Google Calendar, but it didn’t meet all of his needs. The Appointy Scheduler said that it can 2-way sync with Google Calendar (meaning that if someone makes an appointment online, it can sync to your phone); allows someone to book an appointment; will send them an SMS alert prior to the appointment; and allows you to accept pre-payments. That sounded like what he was looking for, but it didn’t have an estimator. The WebReserv plugin and Booking Bug are other options similar to the Appointy Scheduler.

When we looked into a WordPress price estimator we only found the Thickthumb Price Calc, but it’s not very built out. To get a custom estimator script built, it meant hiring a programmer to make it for him as that’s not something we do, but we expected to pay around $200 for this based on what we saw at Freelancer. However, there is a estimator script that can be bought for $30 and customized here. Knowing all of this, it makes the WordPress Calculator plugin look quite reasonable and maybe the best bet.

Other Online Service Scheduling Software

The simple ability to schedule online is a something you can get for free from  Schedulicity. CEO, Jerry Nettuno, said ”We learned it’s not really the calendar. Anybody can have an online calendar. For a service-based business, the relationship with customers is much different than in other types of businesses. Giving them the tools to manage that relationship is where things get interesting.”

Marc Woodward, vice president of marketing for GenBook, concurs. “The sophistication of the average small business user demands a rich feature base,” he says. For example, “It has to be real-time. Can a customer schedule an appointment and get instant confirmation? They don’t want to wait to hear back or be presented with three choices. We’ve heard anecdotes of customers standing in front of the salon, wondering, ‘Can I get my hair cut now? Can I get a massage now?’”

In fact, Melody McCloskey, CEO of StyleSeat, says her service for beauty and wellness professionals is “a platform for people to run their entire business on, from maintaining a website to building word of mouth and retaining clients.”

For web design service and WordPress setup and configuration in the Indianapolis area, consider Watershawl Web Design and Technology Consulting where we make the web work better for you.

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