BatchBook Blog
Posts by Pamela O'Hara
As our regular readers know, we are in the process of rewriting Batchbook. We are finishing up the first set of features to be released in the new BB2 product, so I want to give you all an update on where we stand.
First, I want to share with you a little of the philosophy behind the new Batchbook. As I have mentioned many times here on the blog, Batchbook is designed to help small businesses (like us! and you!) better keep up with the relationships that are most important to us: the ones we have with our existing customers. Seems like an obvious concept, but is actually counter to the traditional CRM model. Rather than focus our own sales efforts around the “funnel” management process of finding and converting unknowns, we focus our efforts around the relationships we have with those folks already familiar with our product and benefit from their efforts to help us spread the word on Batchbook. This has been extremely successful (and a lot of fun) for us, so the rewrite of Batchbook will reflect this customer friendly approach. With this release, we are introducing tools for Batchbook customers to more easily find and stay better connected with those folks already in your network who are eager to help you spread the word on your product or service.
But before we get too detailed on what is coming, a few important things to point out about the transition from the existing Batchbook to the new version:
- We will begin introducing the new Batchbook at the end next month. We will start migrating accounts shortly thereafter, and it may take up to several months for all existing accounts to be migrated.
- The initial release will contain those features used by the greatest number of account holders. We will continue developing the additional features and releasing them in the new Batchbook as they are available.
- We will prioritize the order in which existing accounts are migrated to the new design based on the feature set currently being utilized by that account.
- You will be notified directly and will be able to preview the new Batchbook before you are migrated, though you will not be able to switch back and forth between the old and new systems.
- We will be maintaining and supporting the old Batchbook accounts until all have been migrated.
- If you are using the Batchbook API, you will be given early access to the new API. We will be contacting those accounts in the next few weeks. If you do not hear from us, please write in to support@batchblue.com to let us know you need the access.
Please let me know if you have any questions on the migration process and schedule. We will keep you updated on the rollout of the new Batchbook and the release of features on the new system.
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Rather than sermonize to you all on the many ways that your CRM product, mobile device, social media networks, cloud applications, productivity tools and automation services can help you build better relationships with your customers, I spent my “work time” yesterday touching base with a very small group of people who have had a profound impact on me and my success this past year. I wanted to make sure they know how much I appreciate all they have done for me and for BatchBlue and how excited I am for what we have coming in 2012.
Because that is my resolution. To stay better connected with the people who matter most and make sure they know how important they are. I have many more people to reach, and many more thank yous to give. One at a time so that they each know I am talking to them and I mean what I say.
So sorry, no checklist to plug-and-play better customer relationships. But if you are of the “great relationships are built one conversation at a time” ilk like me, I have a good Book to recommend.
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This is the third installment of The New Batchbook series, a collection of blog posts intended to keep you all updated on the progress of our re-write of Batchbook. We’ve been extremely busy the last few months building the back-end architecture and core functionality. We’ve made some great progress on contacts, custom fields, a new import process, advanced search/lists and integrations all of which I will share shortly. But for now I want to tell you about the mobile version.
A major change in philosophy for this version of Batchbook is our approach to the mobile application. In the past, our mobile versions of Batchbook were built as separate applications native to the mobile platform and completely separate from each other or the web version of Batchbook. They launched months, or even years after the web application and relied entirely on the phone’s OS and database to store data and serve the application. This has meant that new features were not immediately available in the mobile application, customers with large number of contacts could not access them on the phone, maintenance has been time consuming and slow and the only mobile versions available are the iPhone and Android versions.
This time around we’re going with a mobile optimized view of the app. Phone browsers keep getting better and better and we think this is the best way to give you an excellent experience across multiple platforms. This means support for iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, and (newer) Blackberry devices on day one. It also means shifting the burden of large databases off your phones (don’t worry, we’ll cache stuff that makes sense) and onto our beefy new server infrastructure. And it means that we can more easily push out updates to all platforms simultaneously. Exciting stuff (for the right kind of person)!
We’re working hard to make the new Batchbook better across the board and this is an improvement we’re pretty psyched about. We’re excited to get it into your hands and hear your feedback. Stay Tuned!
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As you may know, we’ve experienced system slowness and occasional downtimes recently. We’re truly sorry for the disruption to your business. It’s unacceptable and we are working on a solution as fast as possible.
Why is this happening?
Well, there are a lot of people using Batchbook. While the system was certainly designed to scale, it has not kept up at a pace we find acceptable. We started to build the product over 5 years ago and in that time there have been significant upgrades to the programming language, hosting environment and back-end architecture. We realized that to truly take advantage of the strengths of our SaaS environment, we can’t just plug in some bigger, faster servers. We need to take a look at every line of code, every call to the database, every bit of data stored in memory and every process needed to hook them all together. So that’s what’s happening.
What are you doing about it?
We’re rebuilding the entire Batchbook product. It’s an extremely expensive undertaking, but we know that to continue to grow and serve our customers in the absolute fastest and most reliable way possible, we must go through this
short-term pain. There are a few blog posts about the new system and more coming very soon.
In the mean time, we’re also putting our best resources, and calling on outside best resources, to minimize the slowness and periodic outages. Our Systems Administrator is monitoring the system 24/7 and responds instantly when there are any issues. We tweet and update our status page when we do have an outage, and we usually have it resolved within minutes. But even this is unacceptable, so we’re now increasing the manual supervision of the servers and continuing to update processes on the existing Batchbook servers to improve speed and reliability.
What next?
We can’t promise that there won’t be any other problems, but we can promise that the entire Batchbook team and a number of other developers and partners are working as fast and hard as possible to build the new system, and keep your downtime to a minimum. We can also promise that the new Batchbook is well worth the wait and then some; you’re gonna love it.
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I’m crazy about new businesses. The passion, the excitement, the discovery involved in starting something new, figuring out what works, pursuing a passion. I’m known in the office for exuberant introductions to a favorite new customer. I carry pictures in my briefcase of my favorite old customers. Starting a new business is hard as hell (I have first hand experience), but it is a special breed of person who can weather that perfect storm. And those are the people I want to spend my professional life with.
So why, you might ask, would someone this loopey for the little guys hang out with the corporate suits? Do I want to get bought? Do I want to get financed? Do I want to get customers? Do I want to get free lunch? Yes to maybe a few of these things, but the real reason is that there are some amazing things that can be done when the industry stalwarts are working with the young innovators. And I want to be the small company in on the big conversations.
And so co-upstart Sunir Shah from FreshBooks.com and I are proposing a SXSW Conference panel presentation titled “Dancing with Giants: How Start-Ups Do Deals with Industry Titans”. Our plan (and you can support it by voting for our session) is to spend our hour talking with 3 of the mega giants in our industry; Google, Intuit and American Express about how small and big businesses can work together to build small business greatness.
There can be many pitfalls in doing “game-changing” deals with large corporations; they can disrupt your product plan, delay development efforts, cost money in legal fees, then change directions, abandon your project or launch a competing product. Not to mention your 3 person development team working with a 50 person “rule by committee” scenario on the other side. Not ideal.
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Tags: batchblue, small business, small business web, start-up, sxsw12, SXSWi
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