Hello Anca,
Anca | Tech Liminal wrote:
Miles,
I've been involved in, or managed, projects with a variety of scopes
(software, comedy
shows, business projects, marketing, etc) for many many years. So,
conceptually, I fall
into the category of people who care.
Thank you very much for your comments! If I might ask, what else do you
read (lists, blogs, etc.) that might be relevant?
I like the idea of what you've proposed, but you made me work really
hard to get at what it is.
The thing that will make me click on your link needs to be much more
succinct, and either
talk about the pain I'm feeling or the benefits I'm going to get from
supporting your projects.
Take a look at how some of the leading project management tools
describe what they do,
such as Basecamp, Podio, Mavenlink, etc. Why is your tool more
compelling than theirs?
That's a great suggestion!
What I'm going for is simple + distributed + open.
The short form is that I've yet to see the combination of simple (e.g,
spreadsheets) and distributed (e.g., Git). These days, everybody seems
to be gravitating toward Google Spreadsheets as a way to share action
items; I'm shooting for something more like:
- linked spreadsheets where the links actually work across the net
- running in a browser, linked by open, asynchronous protocols (no
software to install, no vendor lock-in, updates flow when connected)
To an extent, my motivation comes from sending out action item lists in
an email, only to be inundated by a huge follow-up thread - questions
and answers, updates, comments, ..., each in its own message. I don't
like going to a central wiki or Google Doc - what I want is for replies
to the first email to be automagically applied - sort of like sending
out a wiki page by email, saving it on my desktop, and then anytime
anybody updates their local copy, every copy gets updated.
How does this work for you as a concept and message?
And thanks for the rest of this:
Just to be clear, the pain I'm feeling when dealing w/ project
management is that it's hard
to get to get people to use the project management tools that i've put
in place because they
cater too much to a technical audience (trac, git), or require too
much customization for
simple projects (Podio) or are too simplistic to let me do all PM
tasks in one place (Basecamp).
The technical problem of keeping tasks synched across the network is
among the least
of my worries, actually. My problem is finding a tool that's simple
enough yet complete
enough to work for a technical and non-technical audience.
Here are some suggestions for your pitch:
- identify a particular person that has a particular problem (e.g.
your customer demographic)
You might need to write a different invitation email based on
whether you're sending it
to theater producers or web designers
- put your link at the top of your pitch, not only at the bottom of
paragraphs of justification.
- find a Twitter-length description of your tool. Otherwise, you make
it too hard for people
to share it.
- Crete an executive summary (no more than one paragraph) that leaves
me wanting more
Kickstarter and Indiegogo are really great tools for honing your
marketing pitch, and they
provide some brutally honest feedback about its effectiveness. It
may take you a couple
of iterations to get to where you want to be with this project.
Good luck!
Anca.
On Aug 5, 2012, at 3:26 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
Hi Alex,
Alex Hillman wrote:
LightTable is:
A) an outlier. Building anything on observations of outliers is a
recipe for disaster
Well... funded projects in the $50,000+ range are outliers on
Kickstarter in general, but there are other software projects besides
light table that have succeeded in raising significant amounts. I
kind of like looking at outliers - you can learn a lot.
B) EXTREMELY niche. You're pitch is extremely broad. That's going to
impact your sales in general, and even moreso at this stage.
Coverage helps for sure, but I don't think you've actually picked an
audience to sell to. Do that, and you're entire formula changes.
Now that is certainly true. In one sense, "folks who manage
projects" is a niche, and more so when one focuses on "folks who
manage virtual projects with teams distributed across the net." In
another sense, this crosses lots of different niches - whether one
is doing software development, product development, running a
marketing campaign, organizing a flash performance, etc., the number
of folks who worry about project management are a small subset. A
common set of problems, but a dispersed audience.
Which brings me back to my questions of how to find and reach people
for whom what I'm doing will be helpful. I have a sense that a lot
of my audience can be found among the same folks who inhabit
co-working spaces, but I'm not sure - hence my inquiry to this list.
Thanks again,
Miles
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