Technology - the "never have only one of anything" principle

So I wanted to take a look at our website before I went off to bed last night and discovered that the PeerFX website was down.

Weird, I thought. The contract guaranteed 99.9999% of the time the site would be up (this is a reminder for all of us to look DEEP into the fine print, I'm sure somewhere in there is a provision that says they will base this on a "best efforts" scenario). So I thought, oh well, it must be that there's this short lapse in our server hosting; woke up this morning and went online to check again 6:45am. Still not up.

I'm definitely concerned now - since our business comes in usually during the morning hours. My biz dev guy should be even more concerned because he's on the hook for a sales quota and burning up his entire day with a down website.

I send a couple emails and call the owner, letting them know that this is essentially a whole business day gone down the drain for us. Of course I get the usual apology and the "whole team is on it" explanation but it's been another 2 hours now and still nothing. Well, I guess not nothing, since we know that the interruption is caused by hardware breakdown. BAD. Just form a customer perspective, a hardware breakdown seems really bad because it takes much more time to move our stuff in the box over to another one and get the system back up again. Nothing really has been done to reassure me of an actual progress timeline as to when the site will be up again, besides the guarantee that it will be back up as soon as humanly possible.

Hopefully that's in the next couple minutes.

This is a point in time where I wish I had a backup server ready to go for the front-end site at a snap of my fingers. Another lesson learned on the "never have only one of anything" principle.

Interesting Use of Cell Phones in Developing Nations

Came across an interesting article in Google Reader stating that food coupons are now given out via SMS to 1000 Iraqi refugee families.

I think this is a very good use of existing technology; and the additional fact that African farmers can now use their cell phones to find out where they could sell their crops is another useful application.

One point that struck me in the article was this:

As Foreign Policy remarks, "We've reached a very strange point in human history when it is assumed that people who don't have access to food will have working cell phones."

I wonder if we can classify this as great "market proliferation"? With the want of having a cell phone now becoming a need of having one?

You can read the rest of the article here.

Profits Made by Social Networking Companies

I would agree with their headline of: "At Least One Company is Making Money off of Social Networking".

I've seen the ads for this company's games on facebook too and it seems like they do put quite a bit into advertising. A lot of my friends are playing the game and it's showing up on my news feed all the time.

An old friend of mine is also part of a company that produces similar games and is enjoying quite a bit of success as well - being venture-funded and expanding into different geographic regions.

Very cool. Read the rest of the article here on Zynga.

Building a Product so that all Parties Benefit

Saw two similar complaints pop up on my iGoogle feed and makes you think about product design.

When you come up with a business model, you are trying to solve a need; if it's just "really cool" but doesn't solve a need for customers, then you might as well forget it. This product that's being talked about and labeled as "dumb smart meters" by Fast Company are the smart meters that have been installed in millions of homes by PG&E amongst other companies that sell similar products.

What the product has done though, is raise hell for customers that are claiming their fees have gone WAY up for no obvious reason (now we should note that these customers also neglected to realize that there were rate hikes in 2008 and March of 2009). The other twist is that the meter company did screw up and ended up having to pay back $240 million in fees.

Long story short, smart meters didn't achieve the anticipated objective of reducing energy consumption, instead its accuracy increased customer fees, generated a ton of complaints and caused a headache for the party that originally wanted to install it.

In this case the product obviously pissed off its end-customers, but keep in mind that there are other parties that you should aim to please (or at least don't piss them off). Think of your business partners (don't screw up your system integration), think of your internal staff (pissing off your operations or customer service people cannot do any good for your sales figures) and even your competitors (heard of something called retaliation or predatory pricing?)

So in a sense all of these parties matter because they are involved in the success of your business; make sure you keep all of these relationships healthy, and you are always trying to design your product so that there is buy-in at all levels - here's what I mean...build it so that:

1. Customers will PAY for it
2. Business partners will endorse it and promote it
3. Operations won't have a headache trying to manage the day-to-day workflow (does your product make it easy for your ops people to make it work?)
4. Customer service is actually providing customer service and dealing with hate mail from customers (if you can't make your customers love your product off the bat, at least don't make them hate it - like in the case of these smart meters)

Now to think about my own product strategy so it meets all the above criterion. Easy to say, hard to do! Good luck!

The Customer Sales Process

Right now customers come to our website and book transactions. We process it and within a couple days they see the converted funds in their bank accounts.

Emails are triggered and sent out during the transaction process at the following points:
1) When you book the transaction you receive an email stating that your booking was successful;
2) When we receive the funds for your transaction we tell you that we've received it via email;
3) When we send out the converted funds to your bank account we let you know that it's on its way.

There's a missing piece here that we should have put in - an after sales component.

Why aren't we sending our customers an email say a week or two weeks after their transaction to encourage them to book additional transactions? We have seen customers who have exchanged with us once and left their accounts sitting there for months at a time before they do another transaction. Given that our customers are NOT speculators I wonder if our after sales tactics to drive more volume would even work - BUT, as a customer myself of other online services, I like to see that once in a while those services send me a value-add email.

With all these online services right now - an email with a catchy subject line would be a good reminder to the customer that your company is still up and running.