Month: Sep 2018

Communicate like a Pro

~ Peter T'Sas ~ Leave a comment

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HowAbout has both a consumer and a professional version. Both communicate with each other but from a completely different perspective. Plenty of advantages of the consumer version have already been highlighted in previous articles. Now it is time to give you a heads up on the professional version.

First of all you don’t need the average consumer to be using HowAbout to make good use of the app. It is a great tool to use intra-company since it will reduce your IT staff and release pressure on your mail server. That means HowAbout is going to save you money. There is no argument against that. So without taking use of any of the marketing potential that HowAbout offers, companies already reduce their costs for IT and communication. Not a bad start.

The most powerful element in HowAbout is how we use groups. Groups are an active tool. You drag them around, create new ones almost every day and delete the ones you no longer need. They are a dynamic ingredient in HowAbout. People who work in your company can be listed in groups according to their functions, the projects they are working on or any other way you like. People can be in several groups at the time so you can also group them in function of a certain type of messages. People at other locations can also be in any group as well as people on mobile. There are no restrictions and you can even work with several company setups at the time using the group-in-group function. Just don’t make it too complicated so you don’t lose the overview. 

But it is the UI that makes it so easy to handle all these groups and communication between everybody. Very simple and user-friendly without ever losing your overview of your communications. Smart details make group communication seamless avoiding public beside the point comments from co-readers. 

All messages to a person are saved in a block which means you will have a communication block per person. Easy to look up any previous messages. All intra-company communication happens in a private circle. Only the central operator can add external HowAbout accounts to the circle. That means your communications are quite safe. That doesn’t mean you can not use howAbout to communicate with the rest of the world. You just can not mix your professional messaging with private. HowAbout also has chat and you can send files or photo’s of course.

HowAbout also offers event based messaging and photo-sharing. When you set up an event for a group of people you will be able to send messages to the group with one click. Invitees answer directly to you only. If replies are worth sharing the organiser can share it with the group. This to avoid other invitees from being bothered by often irrelevant remarks from other participants in an event.

“This feature can be life-saving and time saving”

Once an event is set up participants can activate event-based photo-sharing. Photo’s taken in this mode are shared immediately with all participants. This feature can be life-saving and time saving. And fun as well of course. Events are found in event-history which is linked to your Howabout calendar.

Talking about calendars, HowAbout also has a feature for meeting set-up. You virtually compare calendars with multiple people and pick out the moment best suitable for all to have a meeting. After all selections are in, the organiser picks and confirms the best option upon which all participants get the final invitation. After confirming the event is created in their calendars. 

Filters can be created to make it easy for you to go through your calendar. They are really easy to create or switch on or off. The calendar warns when you try to plan an event where something else was planned already.

So far very briefly the communication part of HowAbout. It’s marketing functions are a subject for a later article.

Do you know your product?

~ Peter T'Sas ~ Leave a comment

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When you design your product you have a vision on what it is and how you will get it on the market. As development proceeds you need to make minor changes or sometimes bigger corrections but your vision generally stays the same. 

However when you meet with investors you often have to review your vision. Your approach may have too little perspectives on monetisation or you are not really solving a problem. Either way it calls for redesigning the concept and the vision or simply discarding it. But if you are lucky it is just your pitch that is simply not giving a clear enough picture. Then you seemingly have nothing that would convince an investor to risk his money on but maybe you are just not making a clear picture.

Because of this it is crucial to get feedback from professionals before you throw yourself to the lions. You may think you understand your product better than anyone else, but as the creator you may no longer grasp the simple approach of the listener. When I presented my last version of my pitch to an investor a few weeks back he listened carefully for more than two hours. It was a friendly and patient man with a lot of venture capital experience as it turned out. But his background was simple engineering as he called it. 

“Vision is not about how you launch your product. It is about how the market is going to prove you right.”

After going through the whole process he gave me a few lines of advise. Advise that I read before on websites and heard in speeches but I guess I was stuck in my own point of view and never understood what it really meant. The bottom line was “make it simple to understand”, no matter how complex your product is. And finally realising that lead me to a new pitch where the path for launching my product became abundantly clear. No it is not the path i had planned but more important it leaves the door open for the user to prove the point that I have been trying to make in each of my previous pitches but which I didn’t need to make. Vision is not about how you launch your product. It is about how the market is going to prove you right.

But before we get to that hurdle there is still user testing which will surely teach us a lot. Being able to face criticism in the first place…

Note : The investor I talked to did like the product. Upon request I wrote him a much better pitch which he currently uses to introduce my product to other potential investors in his country.