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    Two days ago our beta request site went live

    Late Friday afternoon we soft-launched our teaser website and have been blown away by the interest we’ve seen so far. The teaser site was put together in just six days (from zero to live) to have a placeholder while in stealth mode. I’m proud of the passion and experience the team brought to deliver such quality in so litte time. It’s still very early but we thought we’d share some quick stats and lessons learned so far.

    Early results

    We’re super happy with the results so far. The big surprise is having more than 10% conversion from visitor to sign up, given the fact people had extra obstacles (we ask for Linkedin authorization). Also, folks have spent an average of about 2 minutes per visit, so they’re spending time with the story.

     

     

    Productivity tools we used:

    The teaser site started while we were literally around the world from each other (I was in Bali for my wedding). Being 15 hours and +1 day away from each other made for around-the-clock work. Not surprisingly, we used these same tools even when we ended up in the same office.

    Skitch

    We’re fans (and friends) with the guys at Skitch, which is the ultimate visual grok machine– a super rapid way to asynchronously collaborate on the stuff on your screen. Just snap a pic of a part of your screen or drag a url into the app, annotate on top of it, and click “share.” Skitch then gives you a url you can share with anyone who can see just what you mean in seconds. Here’s a pic of one day of my Skitch history.

    Evernote

    I had never used folders or even shared folders before in Evernote. My personal Evernote is just one massive dump of inspiration or forget-me-nots, so this was the first time I had used Evernote collaboratively. We had a number of shared folders set up to grab inspiration, work on the script, and pull a-lot of our formative assets.

    Dropbox

    File sharing and iteration really hit hard the last 3 days (out of 6) as the web assets were getting assembled and needed to be in one place. As we gave feedback or changes to Jason (our designer), he’d simply replace the file in Dropbox so we always had the most up-to-date stuff.  Matt & team then used a script to automatically pull the latest and publish to the sandbox environment. From new graphic update to sandbox typically took < 1 minute.  This allowed us to review and approve new updates, within the live site structure, instantaneously.

    Github

    Matt & team had over 230 commits to GitHub over the 6 days it took to build the teaser site and integrate with our back-end engine over REST.  Being this agile and leveraging a slew of new technologies required constant code review, merges, and sandbox pushes.  As we aggressively hire engineers (ping Matt if you got what it takes), we will continue to leverage GitHub’s distributed collaborative infrastructure to organize, store, share, and iterate on our fast evolving code base.

    Inspiration

    We wanted a way to tell the story of two ways to land business, so we imagined two different downtowns: Goosechase (the old way) and New Business City (the new way). Jason’s original visual inspiration for the city came from Grand Theft Auto for iPad (I attached his first screenshot). He then found some awesome scrolling interaction sites like Ben the Bodyguard, We Bleed Design, and  Bullet PR.

    Vehicle-wise, we looked through Google at a number of cool steampunk-styled contraptions. Originally we were going to use more of a parade float for the “new business” side vehicle. For the final design, Jason fused a float with an iPhone.

    Other sites with cool interaction design that inspired us:

     

     

    Lessons

    As soon as we went live, a number of people reached out to help make our beta site better. One of them was our friend, Justin Kistner (who’s way smarter than we are when it comes to social media marketing).

    He recommended a number of things:

    - If we added the ability to comment on the FB like button we’ll get full posts with a picture and text (and folks see these posts more than others)

    - We hadn’t thought through how to track twitter referrals from folks clicking links via the Twitter client.

    - If we use campaign IDs on links from the Like button, our integration with LinkedIn could separate out how much traffic came from those sites because of links published from people seeing posts from those buttons vs. organic visits from those sites from people sharing without using our share buttons.

     

    Reporting from here

    We’ve made most of the recommended changes and will continue to respond to advice and ideas from those who want to help. You can bet that we’ll be sharing more official results once we’re further along. Thanks a ton to everyone for your feedback and support.

     

    Today we peeked from stealth

    After a long stretch of personal radio silence, I’m proud to share a little bit about Crushpath and open our private beta registration. Since we’re still in stealth, we won’t go into our solution, explain exactly what Crushpath does or share all the internal happening at the company. I can share that we were co-founded by our CTO, Matt Wilkinson, ex-VP of Product Development at Socialcast (recently acquired by VMware) and our Executive Chairman, Dave Hersh (ex CEO of Jive Software). I look forward to going into full detail with the rest of our team later this  year.

    Beta registration open

    If you’re interested in being a part of our private beta program just sign up on the bottom of the teaser site. We are prioritizing beta access to the excited elite who help us get the most folks to sign up, so the best way to get a spot is to spread the word.

    It’s time to change B2B Sales for good

    Sales software has made selling harder. Don’t believe me? Follow a B2B Sales Rep, Entrepreneur, Biz Dev person…anyone working their tail off to get deals done…and see how neglected and under-serviced they really are, at least from a “help me do my job better” product perspective.

    Or don’t follow them– that’s what all the systems do. They track their every move, force tons of data entry, and have them backtrack to report what’s happened in the past.  It’s a micro-managed reality that sucks the life out of the people who fight to keep us all fed. Solutions are made for revenue trackers, not revenue generators. And what about folks who handle deals but aren’t Sales people? CRMs aren’t made for them.

    Revenue Generators have been using systems that have been around 15 years or longer–that’s when eBay got started and Prince Charles and Princess Diana got divorced (no connection).

    Buying has changed. Selling has changed. Now is the time to change Sales for good.

    Soon Enterprise Software gets personal…

    Goodbye Blackbox.

    Exactly as has been reported, I’ve left Blackbox Republic as of February this year. It was a fantastic, bumpy ride and my first time building a company from absolute zero. Ultimately, I discovered I had conflicting ideas and expectations from those of our Angel investors’. Because of this, I self-elected to step down and hand the company over to different management so they could deliver something aligned more closely with what the investor’s want. So, the company continues, just without my involvement.

    Hello World.

    As it goes, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what I want to do next. I’ve decided to stay independent.

    At some point in your life you learn what you’re good at and what you’re not. After having worked in software, hardware and media startups-to-F500 companies with Marketing, Ops, Biz Dev, Sales and CEO gigs, I’ve got both the muscle and scar tissue to know exactly how to generate value. How to intelligently breakthrough. How to manufacture growth.

    So, I’ve opened a work/live space in San Francisco and will spend my time between there and Portland. I’ve begun talking to several interesting companies about advising in a variety of capacities. I’ve had coffee at Blue Bottle and hit a few places for girlie drinks. Enough said.

    Who I’ll work with.

    • Executive teams with the balls to separate from the herd.
    • Companies looking to create short and longer-term breakthrough results.
    • Teams who need to execute their unfair advantages.

    I’m leaving Jive. I love Jive.

    I’ve never had the experience of walking into a company and being inspired, then leaving a company four years later and being just as inspired, if not more. But Jive has been that for me. I’ve never learned as much as I have in my years there. Or worked with amazing people like Dave Hersh (you can read his post about my departure here), Matt Tucker, Bill Lynch and the rest of the team.

    Jive has been that magical connection between a market opportunity, a company and a team of amazing individuals. I loved to work with them every day. It’s a team that wakes up and goes to sleep fighting to win. A team that shares a single vision and DNA. A team of people who has what it takes to go big. And that’s exactly what they’re doing.

    Going big.

    I don’t know how many of you have been lucky enough to have an experience like that in your careers. If not, I hope you do. Everything I’ve ever said about the company, I believe. And I’ve never been more proud of the people there and the mission they are on. I believe in them.

    Every parent’s dream for their child is that they succeed beyond their wildest dreams. And every company needs different things at different parts of their growth. These are natural events, the coming and going of people in a company to help them achieve what’s needed. Jive has grown a ton. They have been proclaimed the leaders. They have defined a completely new category. And this, is an organic parting of ways for us. It’s the way companies are supposed to grow.

    Chapter Big

    It’s time for me to make more big things happen. To work on new things. To change the rules and create breakthroughs. I’ll be sharing more soon. But for now, just know that I’m leaving Jive at the end of the month. And join me in wishing them lots of luck.

    I know I do.