Posted by Rene Jansen
Wed, 03 Aug 2005 12:36:00 GMT
Over the last few weeks I realised myself again, that big institutions like banks are really not able to deal with customers. An example. I tried to get in touch with
ING Bank, one of the major banks in the Netherlands. I was triggered by their nice radio commercials, that many of their major customers started off with a small question for a second opinion. I thought, well, as a high tech startup, let's have a chat with these guys.
So, I turned to their web site. An obvious link "starters click here and we will call you for an appointment" was available. Well done guys! So I filled out my information, clicked submit and bam, yes, a confirmation email that they will call me back within 3 business days (what, THREE business days?! Talking about the on demand economy...). Anyway, two weeks later, I still hadn't heard anything, so I visited their site again to try to find a phone number. Only three clicks deep into the site I found a dull downloadable PDF document with phone numbers. Awful! Anyway, let's call the representative in my region. Ring... Ring.... Ring..... Phone not answered. Mmm, let's try tomorrow. Next day, same Ring... Ring... Ring... Mmm, let's try the overall number. "Hello ING Bank, how can I help you?" I explained about the unanswered contact request via the site, that I couldn't contact my regional office by phone, and if she could help me. No sorry, I can only give you the number from the regional representative, sorry..."
Mmm, since I couldn't reach them by phone, I thought: let's again fill out that web form, perhaps it was just bad luck the first time (too bad I had to fill out all my information again...). Same prompt automatic email response, same radio silence for another three weeks now.
You understand, I give up. No new customer for ING Bank. They simply don't deserve new customers. I really don't understand how companies like these can be so arrogant though dumb, to simply ignore a prospect who is really trying over and over again to get in touch and become a customer...
If they need advice on how to improve their customer experience, they can
call me. I always come back to phone calls or emails. Specially if ING-bank calls me, since they really really really need advice...
(or they can check out that nice service offering to improve customer experience from my friends at
Innberg)
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Posted by Rene Jansen
Thu, 21 Jul 2005 12:34:00 GMT
I live very near the Dutch beach. Right from my window I can see the beautiful dunes. A stiff walk through the dunes brings me to the sea (Since it is a stiff walk I often prefer my car, yep, I am a bit like: doctor said I needed more fresh air, so I bought a Convertible...).
Anyway, on this beautiful beach I had a nice chat with Robert. Robert is one of those highly appreciated - difficult to get access to - expensive - though charming "Database Administrators", you know, the ones that can make or break the performance of any major database system. Robert recently started his own company as well,
Continux IT Solutions. His vision:
Continuity of business = Security * Availability * Integrity
I told him about bPerform, and he offered some sparring regarding our data model. We had a chat regarding topic maps, RDF, and how well these semantic networks fit into the tabular data model from MySQL or Oracle. A very valuable contact, again...
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Posted by Rene Jansen
Wed, 20 Jul 2005 12:33:00 GMT
Today I read an interesting quote regarding People Management. Carin Wormsbecher, director of the publisher "Wedding" (For the English speaking readers of this blog: nothing to do with marriage...) in the Netherlands won a
price for her HRM policy. Carin's advice for good people management, and how to motivate your people:
- Listen to them
- Give them the ability to grow
- Give them tasks that are opportunities for them
- Give them responsibility
Wow, sounds easy right :-) Let's wait and see if it works for the future of bPerform. At least, it matches my opinion of good people management...
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Posted by Rene Jansen
Fri, 15 Jul 2005 12:30:00 GMT
Our ambition is to keep bPerform a lean and mean organisation, that focuses on concepts, marketing and sales. The development of our software will be done via partners, possibly situated in other countries like Romania, Serbia or Yugoslavia. An interesting starting source (in Dutch) for a first orientation on offshoring can be found on
Zibb.nl. I specially liked the site about offshoring in
Hungary.
Outsourcing the development doesn't mean we don't need any local technical expertise. Although I can do quite some stuff myself, as a matter of fact I still do have my masters in computer science ;-) I had an interesting chat with a possible CTO today. He asked me a lot of questions about our go-to-market strategy and how we think we are going to make money. The story must have been convincing, since we decided to make a follow up appointment...
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Posted by Rene Jansen
Tue, 12 Jul 2005 12:28:00 GMT
This time we spoke with Caroline, a senior communication specialist working for the Dutch government. In their impressive building in The Hague, where we could see the beautifull summer gardens of the
Peace Palace, we presented our thoughts and plans. Well, it might become a little bit boring (and I promise myself (and you) that I will not post all these presentations anymore) but Caroline loved our ideas as well.
However, Caroline pointed us to an important issue we heard before, and that we still have to solve. She stated "Well, to say we are having a problem is not really true. However, it is for sure that things could be improved". So from a sales perspective, we have to convince our potential customers that things will improve, even if they are not really aware of having problems. And she continued: "You have another communication challenge. Since bPerform offers such a broad range of functionalities, ranging from communication, via projectmanagement to knowledge management, you will find quite a diversity in your potential user groups. Project managers will be triggered by marketing communication about the project management parts, but a general manager might be more interested in knowledge management. How are you going to solve that in your marketing communication?"
Mmm, good point, thanks Caroline, need to think about that...
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Posted by Rene Jansen
Tue, 12 Jul 2005 12:26:00 GMT
There has really been no boring day at all since we started bPerform. The positive results from the last few weeks, like positive feedback in the user reviews, interest from investors and nice publicity in the
Computable last week (Thanks to Rene Rippen who wrote a nice article about us) gave me a lot of energy. However, something very sad happened as well. Over the last few months it turned out that my old friend David, who joined bPerform from the start, was less and less on the same page as Mark and myself regarding focus, priorities and approach for bPerform. I tried several times to get ourselves on the same track again, but unfortunality we had to decide that cooperation with the three of us was no longer an option. I feel especially sad since David is an old friend, and it is disappointing to realise we can drink beer together, play pool or darts together, but can't work together. I have always said "I never wanna be in business with friends". For once I didn't stick to one of my basic rules and see what happens... I've really tried to make this work but have to conclude it simply doesn't work.
Of course Mark and I are continuing with double energy. We are already discussing several options to fill the gap. Most likely, we will change our business model based on this new reality. I'm considering to make the bPerform organisation a "lean and mean" concept-marketing and sales organisation, and do all the further development off shore. This would lower our operating cost, offer higher flexibility and we can survive with a lower cash flow. Our first thoughts are that this approach is an even better plan than our original busines plan. Coming week I've to present our new business plan, so a few more days (and nights!) to discuss with potential partners and make plans for this new direction...
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Posted by Rene Jansen
Tue, 12 Jul 2005 12:25:00 GMT
We have a launching customer!
Last week I had another reality check with a potential user. We spoke with the controler of an insurance company in the Netherlands. They are currently merging two companies and really recognised the communication and knowledge management issues we want to solve. He told us: "Since the culture of the two companies differs, we will need to spend a lot of time on communication and sharing experiences, to build "one company" out of them. It sounds like bPerform can really help us here". When I am writing this quote I realise myself this might sound like a cheap commercial, but I am really enthousiastic about this, since it means we have a first customer who is willing to try our product, even before it is on the market! That's good news in these hard days... Hard days? Well... read the next post...
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Posted by Rene Jansen
Wed, 06 Jul 2005 12:23:00 GMT
Yesterday evening I had a nice wining-and-dining with Martijn Hoogeveen, CEO of
TakeitNow, a successful e-commerce initiative in the Netherlands. Martijn used to be one of the professors in my
PhD Defense committee, and it is always inspiring to talk with him.
Since we hadn't spoken about bPerform yet, he asked that question that always comes back when you are starting your business: "So, what is the essential problem of users that you are solving with bPerform?" I started to take off with my basic answer to this question "we help users save time with basic tasks, so they can focus on what really matters to them, and we help organisations to better make use of the available (often hidden) knowledge in their organisation..." Martijn responded "Good consultancy talk, but... you didn't explain to me the real underlying concept"
An interesting conversation followed. I told Martijn that Mark and I are firm believers that each successful innovation need to improve the
freedom of people, and often has a
social component (interesting reading on this topic is from
Rheingold). I quoted the example of the
Apple iPod: according to this theory the iPod is a success because it offers ultimate freedom in listening to
your music. That's the difference with an old fashioned walkman or a simple 256Mb player: you have all your music available, everywhere...
So, what does bPerform has to do with freedom and sociality? I realise my self we offer four types of freedom, and they all have a social component (pff, sigh of relieve... ;)
- Freedom of commitments
We don't offer a simple "task manager", no, we offer you a tool to manage your commitments. Commitments with your manager, your team buddies or with yourself. We enable to ask for commitments (could you please...) and we enable the acceptance (or decline) from commitments (sorry, cannot...). So, we give more freedom to managers (less hassle, less phone calls to verify commitments and progress), and freedom to decide how you want to spend your time. Very important for our target group: professionals and knowledge workers, who are really looking for freedom in managing their own work "I wanna do it my way, scheduled when I wanna do it and at the location where I wanna do it, my commitment is only that I will do it - in time...".
- Freedom of sharing
It's a sharing economy. "knowledge is power" doesn't stand anymore. If you share knowledge, you still have it, someone else has it, and together we are stronger. bPerform enables sharing of information. Sharing of your publications, your thoughts, your reports has never been easier. But you are still in control: You decide if you want to share, and with whom you want to share.
- Freedom of listening
In this information and communication society you are spammed and overwhelmed with awful amounts of requests of attention. bPerform will help you to decide yourself: to whom do I wanna listen, and when. That sounds like... Freedom again :)
- Freedom of speech
One of the main aspects in the Dutch constitution (and others of course). Perhaps this is the same as Freedom of sharing. It offers you a platform to make yourself being heard. No matter if that's done via blogs, mails, sms, chat...
Well, seems like this might be an interesting topic to write a white paper about...
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Posted by Rene Jansen
Sun, 26 Jun 2005 12:22:00 GMT
As a reality check, we had our first "potential user review" last Thursday. We spoke with
Hans de Graaff (you might know him from his excellent
index on human computer interaction and his work for
SIGCHI).
Hans and I go back quite some time, since we initiated MMUIS about 10 years ago. MMUIS used to be a group of PhD students, having bi-monthly meetings on topics like Multimedia, User interfaces and information retrieval. Since we are all graduated these days, MMUIS still exists as a group of friends :-)
However, when Hans learned about bPerform, he sent me an email saying he had some thoughts on next generation e-mail and time management himself. He embraced a time management approach called "getting things done" from
David Allen some time ago, and he is very enthusiastic about following a good time management philosophy: "it gives you a much more relaxed feeling".
So, we found ourselves last Thursday, drinking a lot because of the heat wave (very rare in the Netherlands), discussing our sketches for bPerform. Hans was pretty enthusiastic about our approach, making statements like "this is LinkedIn as it was meant to be" (
LinkedIn is a pretty popular social software solution for business environments, pretty much equal to
OpenBC) and "good to see there are people working on the MS Outlook of tomorrow".
Although we planned to talk for an hour, we got so enthusiastic that we spend over two hours in our office discussing the pro's and con's of our approach. Then we decided to continu our discussions in the pleasant city center of Delft, in the sun, having beer and some food. His comments were very valuable, and we will take his comments seriously to further improve our design.
His final conclusion was that he would definitely consider to use bPerform as soon as it is available. This first reality check with an "outsider" gave us confidence for the following sessions with potential users, planned for the next two weeks.
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Posted by Rene Jansen
Tue, 21 Jun 2005 12:16:00 GMT
This Thursday David and I went to
Innobizz, an interesting event where (starting) highly innovating entrepreneurs can meet each other and potential informal investors.
Was a very interesting day. We got in touch with people from
NEBIB, an organisation that matches informal investors and business angels with entrepreneurs. Interesting organisation, if you are in need of informal capital in the Netherlands, check them out!
We were able to present our bPerform ideas in front of a big community of fellow entrepreneurs and investors. Result: several opportunities to discuss in more detail our business plan and ideas the coming weeks. We were even interviewed by the
Computable, a well known Dutch magazines on ICT. Might be published in a few weeks.
We got as well in touch with several organisations that offer support in acquiring money and subsidy from the Dutch state and from the EU (like
Cordis and
Senter Novem). You might consider to check out
www.subsidieraad.nl,
www.pwl.nl or
www.vectrix.nl if you want support. I found out that these companies often offer a no cure no pay option, where you pay between 10% and 15% of the total amount, only if they succeed. Another good source for information on subsidy is from
Elsevier.
If you would like to double the money that investors invest in your startup, you might point them to
www.technopartner.nl. This organization is funded by the dutch ministry of economic affairs, and doubles the investment budget of an investor (only for high tech investments that is).
Another useful initiative is LiveWire. This initiative, operated by
Syntens and sponsored by Shell, Radio 538 and BDO accountants, offers free coaching services to start ups. They even have an award program where you can win money and free commercial time on radio 538.
Last but not least we met the people from
NextStage. They organise networking events for innovative entrepreneurs. Nice guys.
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