Fight for your roads, keep riding
So I’ve been on a bit of a bike kick lately. The problem is, the websites supporting the community are pretty lame. Yes, I probably have high expectations, but if this movement of riding rather than driving is going to pick up, it needs content publishers that are using technology to its fullest potential.
Here are some cool sites I’ve found so far:
- Velog – a social cycling site (check out my velog widget!)
- MyBikeLane – be active, protect those bike lanes!
- Streets Blog – an active, content rich blog about city streets, and transportation
- TransAlt – great organization promoting cycling in nyc
- Times Up – a less “mainstream”, but equally motivated activist group promoting cycling in nyc
CRM: built for the boss
So I’ve blogged a bit about CRM systems, and there’s one underlying complaint that I have across all of these CRM system; they were not built with a salesperson in mind!
If your job is to meet new people, get connected, sell your product, 
figure out whos important in the industry, get on the ground and get new users/clients of your software, then a traditional CRM (see diagram) system is not for you.
Who is it for? Its for management. Enterprise CRM systems were built to sell, management has the money, so CRM systems are designed to sell to them. Management wants to kick back in the morning and pop a “dashboard” that tells them how everything is going at the company. Never mind what kind of data has to be entered in the background for these dashboards to work, or how useful the software is for the people who actually put in that data.
There you have it. CRMs where not designed to help you track your prospects, and it certainly wasn’t designed to help you quickly bring up useful information about your contacts while you’re rushing into the Bay Area for a quick round of interviews with investors up and down the peninsula. It’s not designed for real world use.
Charlie at This is going to be big, had a post called “If you don’t build it for geeks, don’t expect them to show up.” I completely agree. In particular his comments on Salesforce are spot on. Its clear that this wasn’t built for salesman, and its clear this wasn’t built for the geek/salesman that would want to hack your product into something useful. Thats why their Appexchange community is so un-imaginative, and unlike twitter (or other open platforms supported by a community of passionate users), no one is hacking together improvements on the fly so they can continue to use their products in new and creative ways.
My first serious experience with CRM systems was with SugarCRM. I was working for a startup with no budget, couldn’t afford Salesforce, so ended up really excited to find an Open Source project that was comparable. Over two years of use I came to realize that the “open source” designation for SugarCRM didn’t mean the same thing that it meant for projects like WordPress, Drupal, or even Firefox. The SugarCRM community (similar to the Salesforce community) wasn’t nearly as vibrant, the conversation throughout the community weren’t as passionate, and the amount of crazy hacked-up plugins being released was close to zero.
So, what can we do about it? Well, more and more people are being forced into Salesforce, and now Google is now involved. Maybe this will head in the right direction.
There are also more and more alternatives, including the one I’ve really be considering; Highrise from 37
Signals. In its short life Highrise seems to have done for me what these other CRMs couldn’t do in years. Not to mention theirs a pretty vibrant community associated with their products.
Though Highrise doesn’t have reports, pipelines, and dashboards, their approach is the right approach. From the bottom up, build a tool for the day to day users, and then work your way up to the reports. With happy user’s, you’ll get better day, thus better dashboard reports. It won’t take mandates from on high to force terrified workers to put every last detail into a clunky database.
Mint makes improvements, but slows down categorizing
Mint.com is tearing it up these days, and almost blew Wesabe completely out of the water if it hadn’t been for wesabe’s recent new features.
After a few minutes of using the UI I realized a core feature had changed for the worst, assigning categories to transactions.
Its used to have a popup that contained all the transactions, and you could quickly find the one that you wanted. Categorizing a long list of transactions was relatively simple and fast. Here’s that list:
The new version of this is a drop-down that you have to mouse-over to find the subcategories. Its a real pain, and put a serious dent in me keeping up with my tagging/categorizing. They do have an auto-complete, but its a hassle to tab over to that field, and you can’t just hit the “enter” button to save the tag and go back to your transaction list. Here’s what it looks like now:
The other issue with this is, that you can’t bulk edit the merchant and the category independantly. If you select 20 transactions, and want to make them all a certain category, it changes the Merchant name for all of these transactions to “Multiple Merchants”. I lost some data this way!
Oops, in the making of that screenshot I accidently clicked Save and lost two more Merchant names!
Anyway, Mint.com is still my favorite personal finance application, and I havn’t been searching for a replacement. These small quirks are a big enough pain to think about wesabe or buxfer again.
Profiling Angels: not an exact science
Over the past two years at Angelsoft I’ve seen a lot of confusion from entrepreneurs, service providers, and even VCs, about what or who an angel investor is. This confusion causes problems in the investment/fund raising process process because knowing your customer/audience is half the battle, so I wanted to take a second to help clear some things up and hopefully kick off a productive discussion!
My over simplified definition of an Angel:
“An individual investor investing their money in early stage companies”.
Its critical to understand that this definition is broad, and a lot of different types of people fall under the definition of “angel”!! They could be successful entrepreneurs looking to invest in the next generation of entrepreneurs or they could be successful executives looking to get their hands dirty with small startups and higher risk investments. They could just as well be family members that unintentionally become angels by providing seed money to son/daugther entrepreneur, or they could be self proclaimed lone wolf angels investing big on their own and actively seeking deal flow.
Recently I’ve found two great posts on the topic. Todd Vernon, CEO of Lijit, wrote a very well structured post with the goal of entrepreneur setting expectations. He says:
Many young startup entrepreneurs tend to look at Angel Investors as a group of people with more money than sense (which sometimes is true) but generally not. They give no thought to the motivations of their Angels, what their Angels should get from the relationship, or simply why the Angel should be interested in investing. Like anything, understanding your audience is half the battle.
He goes on to propose a series of different angel types including The Family Investor, The Relationship Investor, The Idea Investor, The Once removed investor, and the Arc Angel.
Roger Ehrenburg at Information Arbitrage focuses on the Arc Angel or Super Angel profile here. He goes so far as to say that he thinks this new breed of angel is better equipped to deal with seed stage deals than any VCs. There is definitely some cross over here with Roger’s definition of a Super Angel, and Todd’s Arc Angel. I’ll profile the type of person we call a “deal lead” in a future post.
Please contribute, and let me know how you think of angels, and what all the different profiles might be.
NYC Bike Month
One of the most exciting things about May is that its Bike Month!
Check out the insane amount of activities that have been planned.
Unfortunately I’ve been traveling like crazy, and I haven’t been able to make it to anything but the Kick Off event on the 24th of April. I’m gonna be traveling towards the end of the month, so someone please go check these out!
New wheeling transportation alternative
I’ve been trying to get more involved in transportation alternatives in NYC, so I became a member a few months ago. As a new member I have to wonder if this Magic Wheel falls under their jurisdiction?
The $350 price tag is definitely high, and puts it on part with a new bike, but its size makes it an interesting consideration for the city. Its a segway meets razor scooter meets unicycle.
I’ll stick to my bike for now!
What has the internet done for you lately?
Saw this video, well I didnt actually watch the video, but I liked the question and got inspired.
What has the internet done for you?
- caused my hands and back to hurt
- provided a job for me
- caused me to stay up late many a night
- caused me to spend too much time looking at my blackberry
- allowed me to track personal finance/expenses (mint vs. wesabe)
- spammed me
- baconed me
- finally gave me mildly ok places to download music (amazon mp3, emusic)
- youtube for watching music videos at parties
- notified me when good concerts where in town
- lazy shopping (amazon, fresh direct )
- allows me to pay bills without writing checks
Am I better off? What would I be doing without it? Probably something to ask yourself if you’re wondering where the value is in some of these web2.0 companies.
Great idea: CRM research bookmarklet
Some I’m throwing out some free ideas!
We have all these bookmarking tools, and we have all these clipping, notebooking, and research tools. But what are they all used for?
I tend to use them a lot for research on people/companies in my industry, and often times this would be really useful to have directly in my CRM system.
I’d like to see a bookmarklet that lets you clip content, and then associate it directly with a contact or company in your CRM. Store the notes/articles/clippings right with that particular entity, so that next time I look that person up I’ll know something about them, or have a conversation starter.
Great idea: bookmarlet for importing contact information
So I’ve raved about CRM systems and managing personal contact information, but now I have a solution, which I hope someone has already built.
Someone needs to build a bookmarklet that lets you highlight contact information, and then with the click of a button send it to the right contact management tool (outlook, highrise, salesforce, etc).
I hate copying and pasting over the address, then the phone number, then their name….. the whole time worrying about errors in my data input.
You could highlight text in an email signature in gmail, you could highlight text on people’s websites, and then the bookmarklet would recognize the address, phone number, email, fax, and put them in the right places for that particular contact manager.
Obviously we would love an automated version that just recognized signatures in your inbox (Mac mail may have something like this), but a rapid contact importing tool like this would be the first step.
About This Site
My name is Evan Bartlett, and I'm all about connecting people and finding better ways to do things. Every day life should be approached with the eye of an entreprenuer, so here's where I'll hash out my ideas on the intersection of sales, community, and product!
By day I'm working on a betaworks project called Allify, making tools for mobile app developers.
On the side I've just launched an iphone app called Matchbook with my buddy Jason. Its a new easy way to remember the restaurants, bars, and shops people recommend to you.
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