Last night, Pam, Michelle, and I gave a presentation at the June Providence Geek Dinner (Providence Business News covered it here). Good friend and Geeks Co-founder Brian Jepson interviewed Michelle and I after the event to ask us about BatchBook, our customer service strategy, and how we keep our social media sanity.
While the “work from home” stereotype of stubble-bearded zombies working in pajamas twenty hours a day doesn’t really apply to us (check that, most of it doesn’t), we at BatchBlue (a virtual company) still have to work extra hard to get the human interaction that most take for granted.
Every month, BatchBlue has some representation at the Providence Geek Dinner meetups. I’ve also recently started going to Web Development Lunch Hour meetups in Providence. And just last week, Michelle & I made the 182-mile round trip to a North Shore Web Geek Meetup in Newburyport, MA.
Why meetups? Let me give you a few reasons.
I didn’t attend a single meetup while I worked in Boston. The one Boston meetup that Michelle and I attended was what you may expect—huge, loud, and not conducive to having real conversations with people. That’s what I love about places like Providence and now Newburyport. They are the perfect size to have manageable communities.
Michelle of BatchBlue ran around the Providence Geek Dinner with her little video camera. She put her iMovie skills to work and put together this excellent wrapup video.
I promised you that I would provide images and video from the Providence Geek Dinner. Well, I managed to leave my camera in the charger that evening (d’oh!), but Michelle came through and will be providing a nice video recap soon. In the meantime, Brian Jepson interviewed BatchBlue’s own Pamela O’Hara and posted the video on YouTube (and blogged it on the Providence Geeks site).
Things are pushing forward on BatchBook as we approach beta. We’re starting to pull the mysterious white sheet back a little, exposing our work to the outside world. Tonight, Pamela and Sean will be showing BatchBook’s present state and some future plans to attendees of the Providence Geeks meeting at the AS220 in Providence. From the Providence Geeks site:
At next week’s Geek Dinner, find out how a local entrepreneur assembled a team of 4 ex-Amazonians in the “Biggest Little” to launch a new Ruby on Rails customizable contact organizer for micro-businesses (you know, the tech startup, the freelance consultant, the local florist or bakery…).
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