Earlier today over on the Webstrong Blog I launched the first phase of TrackPath. A simple web app to help you track your quotes and proposals. Below is a copy of the post. You can find the original one here.

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Today we’re launching the first phase of a little app called TrackPath. Available at http://ontrackpath.com, this simple tool lets you track your quotes and proposals. It measures their success rate and provides meaningful statistics to help you make better decisions so you can write more effective proposals in the future.

We’re quietly excited about this project because it scratches an itch we had in our own business and also because we managed to launch it less than 10 days after the idea came to mind.

The Pain

During a recent seminar, I (momentarily!) lost concentration on what was being said and instead started to think about all the proposals I had out at the moment. I tried to recall which ones I needed to follow up on and which ones still needed to be sent. But, I couldn’t remember them all.

I then started to wonder about proposals that had gone out in the past. How many had I won? How many had I lost? If so, why did I lose them? Was I too expensive? Did I not follow up fast enough? Did I have the wrong approach? Was it a cold lead?

All these questions came flooding in and I realised I didn’t have any answers. Moreover I had no easy way to get the answers because I wasn’t tracking the success /failure rate of my proposals.

The 10 Day App

So, I quickly scribbled down a basic wireframe for a simple app that would let me track my proposals.

The next day I booted up Photoshop and started turning the raw sketches into proper designs. I built 5 screens in all and made a promise to myself that I wouldn’t add any new features to these designs until I had launched the app as was laid out here.

To put myself under some pressure I set a launch date for July 6th, just 9 days later, and I setup a Twitter account, registered a domain and launched a teaser site announcing the project and launch date.

I handed the designs over to Phil, who started slicing and dicing the screens into proper code.

Meanwhile I began configuring the application framework. Things like login, registration, authentication, password reminders, etc.

Once I was all done, Phil had the dashboard coded up in HTML and CSS and it was ready to be ‘turned on’ with data driven content.

I quickly built a couple of database tables (one for users and the other to store the proposals). And then started coding up the PHP and SQL statements to pull everything in.

Each time I finished a page, Phil would have another UI screen ready to go,. And it went on like this until we had all 5 screens built.

The Business Model

No project is worthwhile without a business model, and while I accept that this is a very simple app I do think it’ll be a valuable addition to any small business in the B2B space and I think it’d probably be reasonable enough to charge a small fee for the app at some point in the future.

But for now, it’s completely free until we gauge people’s interest and see what the response is like.

Moving Forward

TrackPath is a single user app. But it’s very likely that we’ll flesh this out in the future to include multi-user accounts so each rep can each access their own proposals, with a managerial account overseeing these proposals and tracking the performance of each sales rep. We’ve a hundred different ideas about where to take this new project but we’ll carefully consider each one before including it in TrackPath. Because at it’s core it’s a simple app, and that’s how we want it to stay.

Please check it out at http://ontrackpath.com, we’d love any feedback you might have.

It struck me recently that I’ve never really defined who my heroes are. Unsure if this is a good or a bad thing, I’ll have a crack at listing a few of them now.

But before I do, I just want to make a quick observation I have on the significance of a hero through the eyes of the beholder.

To put some perspective on this, I want to include a quote by Oscar Wilde of which I was recently reminded. He wrote that: “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation”.

The relevancy of this quote in relation to our heroes is pretty clear. If you define your hero, do you unwittingly replace your own hopes and dreams with those of your heroes?

It would seem so.

But that said, I have to say that I strongly disagree with this. Without getting too academic, I believe that admiration of success is a necessary ingredient in new success. In the same way that the evolution of language is based upon an existing set of definitions, personal success is based on an existing set of definitions as well. To put it one way, if we don’t know where we are in the world, how can we reach for the skies?

So, now that I’ve argued the relevancy of having heroes, I’ll have a go at listing mine in no particular order:

1. Ewan McGregor
2. Richard Branson
3. Barack Obama
4. David Heinemeier Hansson
5. Eric Cantona
6. Sean Kelly
7. Richard Feynman
8. Billy Connolly

These are my heroes today. Tomorrow could be different, but for the cynics and elitists in the audience, I make absolutely no apology for any glaring omissions or vulgar inclusions they might think I’ve made. We all look at the world in or own way, no matter where our influences come from.

This is me. Age 4, having a picnic in the Phoenix Park with my family.

It’s the perfect day. Life is simple, anything is possible and the world is my oyster.

At that moment, I have no responsibilities, no worries, no debt, no issues, no unpaid invoices, no deadlines and no baggage. All I have is hope, energy and a desire to enjoy every day of my life.

I have no inhibitions, confidence is sky high and I truly believe I can do anything.

Yes, I’m naive, but that’s empowering. I’m too young to let silly preconceptions about ‘how the world works’ get in the way of my hopes and dreams. My potential is truly infinite.

That was me aged 4. Now I’m 26 and asking myself do I still feel like that?

The truth is, that I don’t.

So what changed?

Fear of Failure. And the Growth of an Ego

How come I don’t feel like that now? What has changed in my life? The answer is of course that I grew an ego. I became aware of what people thought of me and feared rejection from every area of my life.

An ego is a truly terrible thing. It debilitates us from achieving our real goals. It puts up barriers to innovation and prevents us from standing out and being different. Someone without ego has the power to change the world. It’s a strange phenomenon really. The person most likely to make a change is the person least likely to desire fame. And inversely the person most likely to desire fame is least likely to change the world.

Maybe that’s why we see so many ‘fake celebrities’ these days, famous for nothing except being famous. What happened to the real heroes?

The desire for popularity is a very complex beast and your ego drives it. It’s like a thirst that can never be quenched, and once you start drinking it, it’s very hard to stop.

Learning to Change

So, what can we do to reverse this? Should we ignore what others think and drive forward with our plans of success? Should we ignore the status quo and be the one to be different? Should we lose our fear of making a fool of ourselves?

Easier said than done.

But ironically, those that succeed in taking their ego out of the equation and losing their fear of failure are actually far more likely to be successful than those that don’t.

The trick is to try to make meaning, not wealth. I believe that wealth is a bi-product of doing something you love that others also want.

My mum always says: “do what you love and the money will come”. That’s one of my favourite pieces of advice. Another favourite is “stop trying to impress people and start being impressive”.

Now take those two key pieces of advice and I think you’ve got a recipe for success, and a road map to fulfilling the dreams you had when you were a kid. When nothing was impossible.

Be Inspired

The only thing left, is to be inspired. And you only have to look around you to get that. The web is teeming with people willing to take a chance, leave their egos behind and attempting to change the world in their own way.

This is what matters to me now.

Here’s a great video made by GrassHopper on what it means to change the world. [thanks Fin].

The Tuesday Push is a bi-weekly cooperative effort by bloggers to help get the word out about the chosen web service in a co-ordinated way. This week it’s RevaHealth in the hot seat.

RevaHealth is a portal website for people who want to ‘find and compare health and cosmetic clinics anywhere’.

First Impressions

RevaHealth is a portal site, but it has a razor sharp focus on healthcare. and in particularly dental and cosmetic clinics. This is a good thing. Like I’ve said before, having a niche a focusing on it is crucially important on the web.

Overall the site has a deliberate purpose, helping you to find the right clinic. The homepage has a clear call to action and prompts users to search for the type of clinic they’re looking for in a specific geographical area.

The results are clear, informative and provide user contributed ratings on most of them.

The Test Run

I wanted to see how useful RevaHealth would be in helping me pick a suitable dentist in my area, so I took it for a test run. To start, I didn’t go to RevaHealth, I went to Google, and typed ‘Dublin Dentist‘ into the search box.

Hey presto! RevaHealth came up on the number one spot for those keywords and deep linked to their internal search results page for ‘Dublin Dentist’. - Someone’s been working hard on their SEO!

Once I arrived at the RevaHealth search results I picked the clinic with the best star rating (Smiles Dental Spa). From there I could see a lot more detailed information about the clinic. Things like:

• a Google Map showing their location;
• a detailed review of the clinic;
• a gallery of photographs of the clinic;
• a full price list of the services offered;
• and their opening hours.

I wanted to compare this against the information on the Smiles Dental Spa website and amazingly they gave almost none of the same information over there. Not even their opening hours.

Summary

I think the guys behind RevaHealth are onto a good thing here. They’re providing easily accessible information, that’s community driven, in a niche area, that’s difficult to find anywhere else.

They’ve got a clear business model and are already earning revenues from advertising and corporate accounts.

Well done to Caelen and his team. I wish you guys the very best of luck with the business.

Almost everyone who succeeds, fails the first time. In fact they usually fail many times before they get it right. Failure, it seems, is a key ingredient in the success of any business, project or person.

What can we learn from this? Well, if anything it’s that failure is just a stepping stone to success. And there are few better examples of this than Abraham Lincoln. The man failed at almost every point in his life, right up until he became the U.S. President, and the most powerful man in the world at that time. See for yourself.

One of my heroes, Guy Kawasaki summed it up nicely when he said “if you succeeded at everything you did, what would you have learned along the way”?

This truth became clear to me when I tried to build my first pc. I naively went out and bought a processor and a motherboard, stupidly thinking they would just ‘work’ together. Of course they didn’t. I then bought a system fan and a few other bits and pieces like memory and a graphics card. There was problems with all of those too. But despite the challenges, I over came them and I learned a ton about computer hardware in doing so. And to be honest, I’m not so sure I would have learned as much if everything had worked together first time. The end result was a killer system that I knew inside out.

The bottom line is, don’t worry about failing, just make sure that when it happens you get up and try again. You’ll eventually get it. Remember, you’re always stronger and wiser the second time around.

Even Michael Jordan knows that failure is just a part of success: [Thanks Dave].

I was going through some old folders on my laptop this week, tidying things up and I found some old scans that I’d done of my school journal covers. 

Channelled Expression

The journal cover was one of the few ways I could express my individuality in school. So, I made the most of it, and it’s amazing how creative you can be on such a small canvas when you’re restricted by so many [school] rules.

I think most teenagers have a natural urge to express their individuality and I was no different. It’s a pity blogging wasn’t around back then because I can only imagine the type of controversial, angst ridden rants that I would have put down. Especially after a tough day or a row with my parents. It would have been really cool to be able to look back on them now.

But, it wasn’t, so all I have are these scrap book collections stuck onto the covers of my old school journals. 

These young bloggers don’t know how good they have it.

Forgotten Interests

Seeing these old covers also reminds me how much passion and I had for my hobbies at the time. Mostly mountain biking, dirt jumping, rock music and dry comedy. It makes me want to bring back some of those interests and use them as fuel for my life at the moment. Whether it be for fun, for work, or just plain living.

These quirky interests are what makes us different from everyone else. They make us us, and gives us our individuality. The Internet is a massive place and a world where everyone tries to create more noise, bigger hype and generate more interest then those around them (they might not admit to it, but they are) and it’s your individuality and quirkiness that will help you get noticed.

So if you’ve got some old school journal covers, works of art as a kid, silly old recordings, or funny moments caught on camera why not take them out and dust them off, because it’s those kinds of things that make you unique.

First off, just in case there’s any misunderstanding. This IS an April Fools’ post. But unlike the others I’ve read today this NOT a joke, it’s a rant.

The April Fools’ tradition is a complete. Waste. Of. Time (say it slowly). It’s a waste of time for the people playing the jokes and it’s an even bigger waste of time for those who fall for them.

It’s not even midday yet and already I’ve been bombarded with wind-ups on the radio, in the press, and online. These fictitious stories have wasted my time, annoyed me, and confused me. Some of them are very believable, at least a the start of the article. They usually get more ridiculous as you read down through them, testing the audience on what they can get away with.

Take Advantage

My message to everyone reading this is to take advantage of all this goofing off and to use it to make grounds on everyone around you taking part in this farce. I might come off here sounding like the guy that ruined the party, but come on people! We’re in a recession and the last thing we can afford to do is spend a whole day of the year playing jokes on each other.

They say that when there’s fire in the streets, buy property. Well when there’s people goofing off all around you it’s time take advantage and gain some ground on your competitors.

Ignoring Today’s Press

I get distracted with my RSS feed at the best of times, but to read the drivel that’s been coming through on blogs and news sources that I admire and respect is just too much. So, I’ll be ignoring all media sources for the rest of the day. In the mean time I’ll be busy developing my business, doing deals, and earning money.

Enjoy the rest of April Fool’s people. And like they say in Dragon’s Den: I’m out.

With good design, the user instinctively knows what to do next. Everything from a web app to a door handle. Pretty much everything we use. For example, when you see a tap you already know how to turn it on. All it needs is a twist.

If we use the conventions that have gone before, people will know what to do. It’s simple right?

Well, not quite.

For instance, what about innovation? Where does that fit in? How can we move forward if we rely on the rules that already exist? It’s a really difficult question but one way to answer it is to show you what not to do. Sometimes, in an attempt to break convention, to create something new, the designer gets it wrong. So wrong in fact that an action that used to be simple actually becomes more confusing then before. Regression in it’s truest sense.

Unwanted Innovation

Recently I was in a hotel bathroom and noticed this message above the sink.

If a tap needs instructions so people know how to use it, then that’s a FAIL in my book. The tap problem was solved way back in the late 19th century. The original tap design works. People know how to use it. They don’t need instructions to figure it out.

Designing a tap that looks like a miniature hair dryer just confuses people.

Lets not over engineer things to the point of confusion. If the problem is solved, leave it alone. There are plenty of other problems out there just begging for our attention.

It’s exactly one year to the day that I launched this blog. So I though I’d do a quick review of why I started it, what I’ve learned in the process and where I plan on going to next.

I Started Because…

I started blogging for a few different reasons. One was because I felt there was a web community in Ireland that was quickly gaining a voice and I wanted to be part of it. Another was that up until last year I was still working from home and I felt a little isolated in my daily routine. I needed a way to meet other designers and developers. A virtual water cooler. Another was that I believed I had value to add from my experiences so far and that a blog would be a perfect platform to voice these opinions.

But what finally got me out the traps was a very quick chat I had with Niall Larkin in the Digital Depot. He probably doesn’t even remember it, but it resonated with me enormously. The web is about connections, and it’s about having an online brand and an online reputation. Writing a blog is by far the best way to make all of that happen. So I got busy designing a custom theme and launched a week or so afterwards.

The Benefits

The benefits of starting the blog were immediately apparent. I met some old friends that I didn’t know were in the web space, and I made some new ones that I admired and respected. I started to feel immediately connected with what was going on in the web community both in Ireland, and the World. But launching the blog was just half the trick. It’s just as important (if not more important) to read and comment on other blogs written by people in your niche. This is where the real value comes in, the community engagement. It’s not an essay, it’s a conversation.

Twitter Power

Using Twitter has increased the sense of community online by ten fold. It’s really only just starting to take off, but the web community have been using it for years. And although I felt I was a little late to the party (when I joined last year), the Irish web folk on Twitter have been incredibly friendly and supportive. I can’t recommend Twitter highly enough as a means to engage with other people in your industry, your niche or your interests. There’s a community there for everyone.

I liked Twitter so much that I started playing with the Twitter API. At first I added an aggregation script to the short.ie homepage, a project I started last year. Then later on I launched Twitter Perch, a tool for following people who talk about things that interest you. And then just earlier today I launched Twission, a Twitter Search extension that adds tag information on the degrees of separation between you and the tweets in the search results. There’s a more comprehensive post about Twission over on the Webstrong Blog.

Meeting in the Flesh

Having met everyone online, I was looking at ways to meet my new contacts in the real world. Thankfully there’s an abundance of events in Ireland where you can meet the people in the web community. There’s everything from Firefox Parties, to Connector Events, to Bizcamp, Bizspark, the Irish Web and Blog Awards, Twestival, and of course the recent FOWA conference.

Meeting these guys in the flesh really brought home the sense that there’s something powerful happening in the web community in Ireland at the moment. We’re getting together, we’re gaining a voice and we’re doing some really interesting things on the web.

The Year Ahead

The last year in the blogosphere has been truly ground breaking for me. It’s changed how I work, it’s changed what I know, it’s forced me out of my comfort zone. I’ve made new friends, had great work opportunities, and it’s given me a voice that I didn’t have before. But it isn’t going to stop here. The year ahead is going to be even more exciting. I’ve just launched the Webstrong Blog and have great plans for the business. I plan on making even more connections, releasing more apps, going to more events, and having a whole lot of fun in the process.

Here’s to another year of Code agus Craic.

I’ve been planning the launch of the Webstrong Blog for a while now, and I’m delighted to say that I’ve finally kicked it off. The new blog will focus solely on developments within the web community and news relating to the company. It’ll be a platform for honest, transparent and inspiring stories on business in Ireland, building web apps, and running a software company.

I think the new blog comes at a good time because I’m at another stage of major change in the business. For one, my time in the Hothouse is coming to an end and I’m looking at expanding my team again. Plus I have a great new office lined up too, which I’ll announce as soon as I’ve signed the deal.

Keeping Up Two Blogs

A concern I had when deciding to launch the Webstrong Blog was that this blog, my personal blog, would suffer as a result. But the reality is that Webstrong is a lot more then just me now, and together with my team we’ll be writing posts from all angles and opinions. So it won’t be just me posting on it, which should make things a little more interesting.

The Big Brand Decision

One big decision that most bloggers must have to make is whether to brand their blog as a personal one or as a business. I reckon it depends which one has the bigger voice, is most important to you, most appealing to your audience and most marketable overall. For me, that used to be an easy decision, but I think it’s time now to give the company an identity all of its own.

I’ll be posting in both places now. So go check out http://webstrong.ie/blog for more information.