BatchBook Blog
Posts by Pamela O'Hara
Several people sent me the link to NYC VC Fred Wilson’s blog post in which he asks his readership for suggestions for a “Family CRM” service. He explains that he and his wife Joanne Wilson a.k.a Gotham Gal are looking for a way to share basic contact/calendar information, build some e-mail lists for social correspondence, planning and general family-managing.
In the thread, a few BatchBook customers recommended our CRM BatchBook (thanks Boris, Sri, Stefano and Sandro!), so I’d talk about how I use my BatchBook account to help manage my busy family.
First, I should explain that BatchBook was not designed for managing families, but it WAS designed for those small businesses that are about the same size, shape and energy level of an on-the-go family. I think the folks who recommended us recognize that the flexibility of BatchBook makes it work for all sorts of situations, including the work/life balancing (or is it juggling?) act that we small business owners face every day. As we know all too well, the line between business owner and family member frequently blurs.
My other co-founders and I started BatchBlue so that we could build a business deeply integrated with our family lives (I have three small children; they have two). Part of the solution for me has been using a personal BatchBook account to manage my family life. Here’s how I do it:
- I use my personal BatchBook account for my holiday mailing list, I’ve created a separate record for each person in a couple and link them with a “spouse” affiliation. I also created a field for how I want to address the collective them – ie “Dr. and Mrs. Allen” for my best friend’s older parents vs. “Sean Ransom & Michelle Riggen-Ransom” for my modern dual-name friends. I also created a field for their kids names so I can include them in the addressing.
- I’ve created tags for #doctor (which includes custom fields for hospitals & medications – my son has medical issues), #poker (my husband organizes a monthly game), #house (I seem to always call the plumber from the road), #holiday list, #teachers (with comments for gifts given so I don’t duplicate as multiple kids go through the same classes), #coach (same as teachers), #travel (my sister and I plan our family’s annual vacation so I’m usually dealing with hotels, house rentals, etc.)
- I am now the official keeper of my extended family’s official birthday and anniversary list, so I’ve created custom date fields for birthdays and anniversaries. My husband and I share a Google calendar and events I create from these dates automatically feed to it.
- I don’t keep my daily task list in BatchBook, but I do add events for recitals, performances, doctors appointments, etc. that feeds into my professional and my husband’s calendars.
- If I wanted to I could see my friends’ and families’ most recent Tweets, Flickr images, blog posts, etc. from within BatchBook, but honestly I don’t use this feature much in my personal account. These are all the same people I have on my special private Twitter list and I tend to keep up over there.
- I keep these all synced to my Android (and before that Blackberry) through Gmail. There is also a mobile version of BatchBook, and we are working to release native apps for the iPhone and Android soon.
My favorite criteria listed in the comments of Fred’s post (from wife Gotham Gal) is that the application they need should be built by a mom (we have a lot of those at BatchBlue, though we would add that a busy Dad’s probably just fine too!)
When it comes down to it, running a family is about managing relationships. No need to pie chart the likelihood of closing the deal, or dole out sales scripts to new employees. Just give me my son’s last prescription data when I need it, help me manage three different soccer schedules and keep me in good graces with my elderly Southern relatives who expect to hear from me no matter how busy I might be with work. Thanks to BatchBook, all that I can do.
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Tags: batchbook, contact management, how-to, supertags, work/life
Things are looking up in the new BatchBlue offices these days. And by things, I mean myself who has to stand on tiptoes when talking to our two most recent hires, each of whom stand a foot above me. Not only are they doubling the size of our mighty tech team, they are helping us fill in the delightfully high ceilings in our new BatchHaüs. For a SaaS company it’s great to find smart guys with their heads in the clouds.
Let me introduce you to:
Alex Taylor (pronounced “tay-lor” and found at @goldenmeanie) is the talent behind the recent BatchBook redesign. Alex is a long time friend of the BatchBlue team, largely because of his excellent taste in footwear. He is our senior designer who will be pushing BatchBook, HTML5 and loungewear to the limits in our super secret new project.
Eric Krause (pronounced “krow-zee” and found at @erickrause) is our new RoR master. We found Eric through the local Ruby group and won his heart with a giant pile of M&Ms (we often bribe with chocolate). Eric will be syncing up some batch integrations and helping train the new recruits as we continue to grow our elite team.
Join us in welcoming Alex and Eric to the BatchBlue family. We have some very exciting projects in the works, so are thrilled to have their tall talents supporting us.
Editor’s note: Wow, KrauSAY! really is taller than Alex!!
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Tags: batchblue, batchhaus
We’ve spent the early part of this month painting, painting and a little more painting of the two new floors of heavenly blueness that is now BatchHaus, the new home of the @batchblue crew. We’re still in the same eclectic Providence neighborhood that we’ve called our “communal space for the virtual team” for the past few years. But with five new hires in the past four months, we had outgrown the part-time meeting space and needed a proper office.
We found the perfect new home for our growing BatchFamily in the top two floors of a large brick Tudor home turned cloud-computing idea factory. Luckily, it just happens to be across the street from the local Starbucks, around the corner from The Edge cafe and near one of our favorite restaurants Red Stripe. Plenty of caffeine and good food to keep us motivated!
Co-working Thursdays at the BatchHaüs
To keep the same informal, tech-talking, coffee-sharing vibe that our virtual team has grown accustomed to, we’re opening up the new BatchHaüs common room as a co-working space for any local designers, entrepreneurs or other engaging geeks who care to join us once a week for some co-working action. We launched our first co-working day last Thursday and were thrilled to have local cultural leaders and fashion icons TJ Sondermann (@tsondermann), Anisa Raoof (@kidoinfo), Allan Tear (@aptuscollab), Jen Robbins (@jenville) and Jan Dane (from @tizra) join us for the inaugural event. Yummy Seven Stars pastries were enjoyed by all thanks to Jan!
Though we will always be a virtual company at heart, we’re excited to be putting down a few more roots and growing into our new home-away-from-the-home-office. Pam Slim wrote a great article explaining that her move into an off-site office was a dream come true. We could not agree more!
BatchBlue invites anyone who wants to share in our entrepreneurial adventures to stop by the BatchHaus at 10 Elmgrove Ave (2nd floor) on any given Thursday. We’ll save a cup of joe for you. And you never know who you might meet – it could be the start (up) of a beautiful relationship.
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Tags: batchhaus, co-working, hot ladies, virtual office
You may have noticed a few new shiny links and buttons that we snuck into the BatchBook redesign. My favorite of these is a bright green “Search Social Network” button found under every individual’s name and title information. But don’t be fooled by the unassuming manner of this image – it actually wields a mighty power when clicked.
The “Search Social Network” activates a search through Sociotoco.com. Using the first/last name and relevant location information of your contact, the application searches through the Twitter, Flickr and LinkedIn sites and returns anyone that it thinks matches your contact. You might see a few erroneous people returned especially if you contact has a fairly common name, but you can use the included pictures and location information to help you find the right contact.
Once you’ve selected the radio button next to the matching social media accounts, click the “Save” button. Your contact will now have the social media SuperTag attached to this record and will pull the most recent Tweets, Flickr pictures and LinkedIn profile and display it on the contact page.
With this new integration, the click of a button now richly populates your contact’s profile with social media content that includes the observations, images, and relationships that make up their online world. Powerful stuff indeed.
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You may have noticed our big announcement yesterday that BatchBook is now listed in the Google Apps Marketplace. We’ve since gotten a number of people (including reporters, other SaaS companies and even a few customers) asking us simply, “Why did you join?” So I thought I would share my response with you all.
As I explained to Mike Pearson who wrote an article about the new Marketplace for the E-Commerce Times, it just felt like the right thing to do. Let me explain why.
Google understands the value of giving customers control of their own information. All of the Google Apps business products have a publicly available API. You may think this is only important to tech addicts and uber geeks. But THIS IS HUGE for every entrepreneur who cares about growing their business. You see, this is Google’s way of saying (and something BatchBook says as well), “the business information that you trust to our care is yours – do what you need to do with it to succeed.” Yes, Google Apps let you send e-mails, schedule events and create spreadsheets. But they’ve just increased 20 fold what else you can easily do with YOUR information including tracking deals, sending newsletters, generating invoices, scheduling appointments, managing your projects, sending surveys and so much more.
And they were able to do that because a few years ago they made the decision to make their API, the gateway to the data stored within the Google applications, available to anyone their customers chose to grant access to it. They did it in a smart way, in a secure way and honestly, in a pretty gusty way. They knew customers might take their data and run. They knew competitors would have a peek at their inner workings. But they focused on empowering their users to take control of their own data, whether through a geeky friend, a trusted reseller, or another SaaS product. And their users are now benefiting immensely.
This idea is a founding principle of the Small Business Web, a movement we co-founded a year ago to bring together like-minded, customer-obsessed software companies to integrate our respective products and make life easier for small businesses. With more than 70 companies now participating, many of which are part of the new Google Apps Marketplace, we feel that the growing trend towards open integrations can only benefit small businesses.
So yes, the decision to join the new Google Apps Marketplace was a no brainer. They’ve made it easier for their users to access the growing number of applications they can use to run their business. We, of course, wanted BatchBook to be the first in line.
We are in this to help small businesses. And we know this is the right way to do it.
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Tags: api, batchblue, batchbook, google apps marketplace, small business web
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