Over the last month we’ve been using Webrequest for our own business. Walking our “talk” is important to us. We believe in our philosophy and know if we use our software for everything we can think of, we’ll come across limitations and work arounds before our users do. We’ll also try out new ways of doing things and pass these on. Our users get great software and they also get great ideas as to how they can use it, not from marketing people, but from people just like them – busy trying to build a business.
Our first Webrequest was pretty typical of the reason we built it. We wanted to find people who could help us in the new world of viral marketing, and, for various reasons, we wanted to do this in Scotland. Finding marketing agencies was simple, there are plenty listed in directories. It took us perhaps a couple of hours to add 53 agencies to our address book, although we only entered the company name, web site and email address. After that it took at the most ten minutes to write the Webrequest, populate the invite list with Tags and send the emails. It’s our software but we were still impressed. Even more so of course we weren’t going to have to consolidate the responses – Webrequest would do it for us.
That was the good news. The bad news was only nine invitees opened the response page, only four completed it and nobody offered us credible proposals. It turns out, not surprisingly, Scotland doesn’t understand Web 2.0. The response which cheered us up came from the impressively named Internet Marketing Associates who told us our plans were all wrong, there was too much competition and our demo system was “American” and needed to be “English”. Obviously Scotland isn’t “Open for Business”.
This week we managed to prove the lack of response was a feature of the invitees, not the software. We invited 30 businesses from the Ruby developers list to register for a copy of an RFP we’ll be issuing for management services. We had fourteen responses and have twelve who want a chance to bid for our business. Where are they? Four are in India, one in Ireland and the others in the USA, spanning the country from New York to San Diego. Not surprisingly these guys do understand Web 2.0 and are “Open for Business”.
We’ve also used the software to survey users opinion of our “blank state” and understand what more we can do to support user adoption. We’re going to use it to collect user registration information, including confirmation they accept our terms and conditions. The most innovative use we’ve come up with so far has been sending updates to our users. This sounds a little strange. Why not just use an email group? Firstly we don’t want to publish all our users addresses in the email header, second we’re concerned bcc. might not get through the spam filters, third we didn’t have time to send out individual emails and fourth we wanted to use Tags to populate the mailing list.
So feedback from this user is “the software is great and solves a bunch of problems”.
Now we just want everybody to use it, and show the world how good it is.
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