You’re invited to join Blue by You, our virtual user group. We’re in the process of running our very first survey and would love to hear what you have to say.
With each survey, we’ll be giving away a Small Business Starter Kit or other cool prize to one randomly chosen responder. This survey’s Kit has got many great things including:
Kitty not included!
- a $100 gift card to Best Buy/Geek Squad
- the books “Word of Mouth Marketing”, “Small is the New Big” and “The E-Myth Revisited”
- a bag of BatchBrew coffee
- an IrisCard Mini card reader
- most exciting: a free one-year subscription BatchBook (once we start charging that is)
The survey runs through Friday, November 16th and the winner of the Small Business Starter Kit will be announced on the BatchBlue blog on Monday, November 19th.
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Tags: Blue By You, small business
BatchBook Beta version is officially live. So with great excitement and a little trepidation, we are sending our baby out into the world.
Like all good parents, we’ve had some challenges along the way. A few all-nighters, cranky e-mail servers and survey software that threw an occasional temper tantrum. Nothing our brilliant tech team couldn’t handle. But now it’s time for our little beta to stand on her own two feet. We’re sending this “rough around the edges” version of BatchBook out into the world and asking our fellow business owners to try it out. We have exciting new features in the works and are soliciting our users to help us make continual improvements.
Thank you to the Blue by You early advisors, the amazing folks who helped get us through early infancy. We could not have done it without you. It does indeed take a village.
Tags: batchbook, Blue By You
Our inaugural Blue by You user group has just completed its last survey and we’re now staring beta straight in the eye. The “early advisors” Blue by You group was comprised of over one hundred friends, family, colleagues and small business owners. This group gave us great feedback over the past few months, including helping us choose a logo for our company (see our rejects here), telling us what their specific business needs are, and improving the overall usability and design for our first product, BatchBook. We’re eternally grateful for their candor and support.
We’re now entering the next phase of testing to get the BatchBook product out there in the world. We’ve created a program called IncuBETA, where we’re partnering with a few select local businesses and customizing BatchBook to meet their specific needs. This means they’re getting one-on-one attention from our product development and programming staff to build something that’s highly customized for their business, and we get to test the product in a real-world setting.
The goal of this program is to put our products into action early in their development cycle and get direct feedback from our target customers. We take this feedback very seriously: happy customers mean better products and vice versa. You’ll be seeing more about the IncuBETA program on the web site in coming weeks.
In other BatchBlue product development news, two of us have had babies in as many months and another one is due any day! Welcome to Sadie Robin Ransom and Robert Mackey O’Hara, you are joining us at a fun, busy and exciting time. That said…could you guys work on the sleep thing?
Tags: batchbook, Blue By You, work/life
One of the founding principles here at BatchBlue is to create products that are easy for our customers to learn and use. We want an open dialogue with our customers, one that guides product development, promotes improvements and generally makes the world a better place for small business owners. With that goal in mind, we’ve created Blue by You, our inaugural community of testers, early adopters, geeky-smart friends and savvy small business owners. These folks are helping us determine what is and isn’t working, even though the paint’s not yet dry on our virtual shingle.
Over the past decade or so, in the world of big booming business, I’ve worked on far too many projects that were the result of somebody’s “brilliant” idea on how best to use the Web. The project team then scurries around, devoting tons of work and time to something they thought would improve a Web site, increase sales and/or improve customer satisfaction. I call these ill-conceived ideas the “high-fiving hamsters”: when someone who is very disconnected from customers wants to, say, put blinking, dancing hamsters across the top of every Web page. If you’ve ever watched a user try and navigate a site with such glaring distractions or other poor design choices (or have tried to use one of these sites yourself), you know how frustrating it is. As web content guru Gerry McGovern states in a recent article, “Not having a crystal clear understanding of the customer is like trying to build an house on quicksand.”
When researching new software, it can be difficult to witness how people actually work in their homes and offices (though we’re doing some of that, too). By showing our potential customers what we’re working on and soliciting their opinions, we’re including them in the process of building a truly useful, usable product. Going forward, feedback from this group will help us refine and add to our product offerings.
If you’re interested in joining Blue by You, let us know. We welcome your input on how we can help make the Internet hamster-free.
Tags: batchblue, Blue By You, small business
