Skedsheet Blog

In the March 2nd Houston Chronicle, there was an article describing the constraints on President Obama’s time every day – because of the incredible demands on his schedule, he’s got an army of assistants who’s only job is to filter out the letters, phone calls, and meetings that he can pay attention to.

I think the point of the article was to give a glimpse into the day-to-day mechanics of being the president, but I honed in on the tiny paragraph that was related to how they actually do the scheduling:

The White House scheduling department logs all requests for Obama’s time, compiles a spreadsheet of options and asks a cadre of senior advisers for input.

Based on how they describe the process, it sounds like a good job for a skedsheet – they use a spreadsheet for scheduling, lots of people need access, and several are actually making the changes.  (I wonder how they track changes in a spreadsheet if a whole scheduling department is trying to move appointments?)  Then, after the advisors and the president agree, an official schedule is sent out via a press release.

Now, having every minute of your calendar full seems like an incredible amount of pressure, and I’m sure most people wouldn’t want a job like that.  But I wonder if having a skedsheet could make the president’s life better?

1. The product we had a year ago sucks. Every upgrade we do seems so small that it’s surprising that they add up. But when I look at our software from a year ago, I’m shocked by how much all of those little changes make a difference.
2. Everyone learns in a different way. I used to think that everyone learns like I do –by trying and making mistakes. Occasionally I break things, but it’s never a huge deal. I thought our customers would work the same way, but it turns out that some people actually do read the manual, some need videos, some need lots of hand-holding, and some are just like me.
3. Advertising burns $ fast. Advertising just costs way too much. It seems easier to make a better product that people can talk about and share. I’m always torn about print and web ads – you want make sure that people hear about you. But boy, it’s the most expensive mouth to feed in the company.
4. Trade shows work. There’s no substitute to shaking someone’s hand and being able to recognize them in a crowd. And as we show off new software, there’s no better way to get instant feedback – both listening to what our customers say and watching what they do on your computer.
5. Industry experts usually aren’t. I realized that many of the self-professed experts and gurus in an industry are actually the ones who are better speakers than doers. I still have lots of faith in my own personal set of experts and gurus, but I don’t have any proof that they really know what they’re talking about.
6. There’s no feature that’s a silver bullet. Early on, we kept thinking that “if we just add that one button, that’s when the big bucks will start rolling in.” And, it turned out there were some features that were incredibly valuable to our customers. But none of them opened the floodgates. Each one just knocked one more objection off of the list.
7. Being a nice guy pays off. Despite the company philosophy of brutal honesty, we’re all fundamentally nice people… meaning we all truly care about the success of our customers. Sometimes it’s obnoxious, because we probably over-agonize about trying to make things great, but it seems like in the long run it’s a much better approach than being a sleazy used-car salesman.
8. Balancing work and family is incredibly hard. I love my work. I love my family. I want to spend 100% of my time doing both, with some time for skiing, too. I guess this one is hard to complain about because I also feel incredibly lucky that I get to spend 200% of my time doing things I love.
9. It doesn’t get easier. When we were getting started, I thought that the business would get easier – and in some ways it has, but there’s always a new challenge. First it was – can we make a product? Then, can we make a product that someone will buy? Next, can we grow? Can we make another product? It’s never over.
10. This beats any other gig. I can’t imagine being in another business.  Software is great in terms of having low overhead, solving real problems for customers, and there are great folks to work with.  Our job scheduling software is the first product I’ve ever worked on that gives way more value than we charge for.

I’m reckless, for an engineer.  Sometimes this is handy, but when you’re day-to-day job is talking about scheduling software it’s not always the best thing. 

Luckily, Ted & I balance each other well, because he’s the  Felix to my Oscar.  It’s good to have a perfectionist as the guy in charge of development because we rarely run into bugs, our hardware infrastructure is totally overboard, and almost every feature we’ve added ends up being more powerful than any customer ever requested.

So when Ted asked me “where are you getting the images you’re posting on the blog?” my answer was “huh?”.  Because I just wanted it to look pretty, I had been searching for photos on the web, without paying attention to licensing or intellectual property.  Ironic, because those two things are critically important to our business.

In the past we’ve paid for stock photos for use in print ads and other marketing material – I’ve been happy with the selection on iStockphoto.  For a blog, I hope to be using new images every day, and I don’t want to spend our money on something that’s a little frivolous.  So, I got to looking at what the free options were.

1) Creative Commons photos on Flickr.  Searching is the way to go, because there are a bunch of pictures of random people out at bars, but there are also an incredible number of great photos.  Just giving attribution to the photographer isn’t a huge price to pay.

2) Free photo sites.  Stockvault, morgueFile, and Public-Domain-Photos all provide free photos that don’t require attribution or have any restrictions on editing or re-using pictures for commercial purposes.  More of the sites like that can be found here: http://www.digitalimagemagazine.com/blog/featured/25-free-stock-photo-sites/

3) Take pictures.   I’m going to start taking more pictures with the express purpose of putting them on the skedsheet blog.  Here’s an article I read on some ideas for good photos, since I’m not a professional photographer:  http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNK2603NP5A00POX.  It’s easy, fun, and can give me a wider range of photos in the areas I care about – calendars, clocks, whiteboards, and grids.

No doubt, I’ll continue to do things a little bit off-the-cuff.  Sometimes it’s just necessary to get things done and out the door, rather than having them perfect.  But, I’m going to make sure that the photos I use aren’t someone else’s property.

We work hard to make JobTracker support above and beyond what our customers expect, and occasionally we succeed.  I’m not sure if this is the Golden Rule, but we try.  What we try to do is:

1) Before a customer buys our software we give them a realistic expectation of what will be involved in implementation.

2) Make outgoing support calls to encourage our new customers to get started and call us for help.

3) Have the salesperson call the new customer to make sure they’re happy with the support they’re getting.

4) Different people learn in different ways, so we have a variety of video an printed help available on our website.

5) Being available by phone or email most of the time.

Providing this level of service has been instrumental to any success that we’ve had.  The way that we think about our business is that we want lots of happy customers who tell their friends about us.  The support we provide is usually instant and provided by someone who’s an expert in our software and pretty good at  understanding our customers business, so we avoid several pitfalls like these that Seth Godin talks about.

But at the same time, getting started with enterprise software is incredibly hard because it requires implementation.  To implement software that changes your business, you need to:

1. Review the business problems you intend to solve with everyone involved.
2. Designate an implementation manager who understands the business
3. Allocate time to develop a plan and implement software.
4. Phase the implementation so it’s not overwhelming, and set deadlines.
5. Train all of the users… both at the beginning and as an ongoing process.

With skedsheet, we want to skip all of this.  How?  Instead of building enterprise software or even “software for scheduling”, we’re just building a “utility” that mashes together a spreadsheet and a calendar.  By narrowing the scope of what we do, we want to make so that if you’re already using excel and outlook (or some web-version of either of those), there’s nothing new to learn.

This is good for the customer – you don’t need to think too hard about what you’re doing to still get value.  And, by making a scheduling spreadsheet that’s easy to use and share, it should be good for us – we can offer great customer service by eliminating the need to contact us at all.