This is my short story of how this came about. May there be interesting tidbits for others facing comparable problems.

It all started off with CabChap developing faster than anticipated. telfish being an B2B business, didn’t generate many leads, we were able to handle them with the standard Mac address book.
CabChap on the other hand, is pure B2C play. And as leads, partner requests, customers, bugs and that stuff started rolling in, I needed a more capable solution.

Everybody knows 37signals and salesforce, so these were the obvious places to start. I tried Highrise first, being an avid user of Ruby on Rails I deemed it fair for them to get the first shot. But I somehow didn’t get the hang of it, found it was lacking to much in terms of integration with my contact and mail database.

On to salesforce: Everybody knows them, seemed to me, it’s the gold standard of CRM on the web. Wrong! It feels reasonable fast, but it looks, feels and IS way over-engineered. It probably has all the (little) features I wanted but 1.) at a price in terms of money, and 2.) in terms of a steep learning curve.

Features I required:

• Integration with my contact database on MobileMe (or Google for that matter) – I am a heavy iPhone user
• iPhone app or at least iPhone-enabled access
• Integration with my mails (MobileMe or Google as well – I ended up switching contacts and mail to Google because they are interfaced the most to other solutions)
• Have the ability to put notes and tags to contacts easily
• Be affordable
• ‘Handle Projects’ is an optional plus that Solve360 delivers, it wasn’t on my list at first

After 37signals and salesforce I turned to small solutions for SMBs like BatchBook and TactileCRM. I like them way more, but they both felt clunky to use, like Web 1.0 – plenty of page reloads and SLOOOOW, at least from Europe. Maybe that is different from the US/CA. Actually I preferred BatchBook over TactileCRM, the latter producing a few significant display-problems in my beloved Safari browser.

On to a short stint with Gist. Gist.com is something like a external information aggregator for your address book, feeds, blogs and Gmail. It pulls together all this information and helps you stay informed about what is going on with you important accounts. It bills itself ’social CRM’ but its less CRM and more social. I am still playing with it, but more to find out if I may have other uses for it. Check it out, it’s worth a trial.

So, a few days and a few address book rebuilds later, I found a hint on the CRM solution Solve360 from Norada. At first its an awkward mixture of CRM and project management. But the UI looked so good and it felt like it was engineered with passion (something I am very susceptible to as an avid Apple user). So after a few hours of importing my stuff and reading through the CRM forums I almost felt relieve, this could be it – at least for me.

So next morning I took the plunge and started to migrate all my stuff to Solve. Then I couldn’t help it, I had to push my luck. I activated two very cool beta features that Solve is about to deliver: Google Contact Synchronization and Google Mail Integration. This sounds to good to be true, none out there, delivers a tight live integration of the most important poor-man’s tools. But as I said, I hit a few problems here. At first the sync wouldn’t work, this was resolved within hours by helpful Norada support staff.
But once the integration worked I got all my contacts (1000+) into Solve and this was not what I wanted. But again, very helpful staff sorted out (my) mess in a few hours and I am good to go again. What really shocked me was, how understanding and empathetic support was (thanks Mike!). Live email integration worked somehow nicely, but then again I have a complicated setup with different SMTP-servers for the different projects, and compared to the fantastic Gmail Client it has to lack big time. Remember, these both promising features are beta, so things will improve further and I will probably try them again one day.

So, my setup looks like this now: I keep my contacts in Mac and iPhone address book, my emails in Apple mail and Gmail and all neatly synced with Google Sync. This works like a charm, is fast as hell and push-y (and free, but thats not so important for me). I keep Solve separated, but mails for my projects are automatically forwarded to Solve via Gmail filters to my Solve360 dropbox. Sending mail is triggered via the Solve web app and then automatically sent to the dropbox as well (via bcc). Looks and works good so far.

If you have any questions or tips, don’t hesitate to leave me a note below.

Bonus tip: Back up your contacts in different formats (VCard and CSV preferred). You’ll need these files for import into your chosen system anyway – and I messed up my contacts db in the process a few times.

For now, it’s just the first beta, next steps include iPhone client and more data. Let me know what you think! Cheers.

It is a lot more than fancy graphics or the packaging of the product. It is everything from the relevant minimal feature set, to timing when to enter the market to colors, typography and logo.

Before I delve into the gory details, I will simply describe how I go on about it. By no means is this the relevant source for state-of-the-art branding/development but it is, by now, a honed process to get to reasonable results quite cheap and fast. And this is what matters in a cash-strapped start-up!

I consider this a side-project; at least in terms of continous attention. It is quite important, probably as important as product development (at least for B2C-products) – but branding is nothing that I am able to rush. If I am writing software for 16 hours a day instead of 8, I will get significantly further during that day. While thinking about a claim, naming or a smart graphical representation (aka logo) it is impossible for me to ‘push’ my thoughts. Depending on work-load, I set aside one or two days per week on average, which means maybe spending one full day on creating meaningful naming patterns for a product, but over the rest of the week, revisiting and reconsidering for a few minutes daily.

Right a the beginning of a project, while doing initial feasibility research and talking to all the stakeholders, my branding process begins. In an iterative process, I am considering what problem the product may solve exactly. Then, by thinking about related problems in my domain I reconsider if it makes sense to broaden or narrow down the scope of my research. It’s absolutely vital to repeatedly narrow and widen the scope until all related areas haven been well thought through. A wrong focus here is very expensive (at least in terms of ressources) later on.

After having the best scope nailed down, you are able to answer the most encompassing branding question: “What is the character, the basic feeling, the overarching solution my product stands for?”.
BMW identified “Freude am Fahren”/”The Ultimate Driving Machine” as their core value proposition. This doesn’t sound like much but from this condensed statement flows everything else -> a sportive color-palette, aggressive car styling, matching typography and such.

With CabChap things evolved like this:

1. Finding and refining the scope of the product (online market for on-demand transport). So it’s not just the demand-side of human transport or the offer-side, it’s not scheduled traffic like busses or trains. This will be refined along the way.
2. Deciding/making-up on a customer base. CabChap will most probably have 40+ year old, non technical cab drivers and on the other hand techno-freaks that wear a suite and are well versed with their iPhone/Blackberry.
3. What kind of characteristics are ideally suited for this product and these customers? I don’t know, but my guess is, that these two groups prefer most likely a friendly and competent site. So the feeling I would like to communicate is friendliness/chap”iness” and competence/cleanliness.
4. The results can be found in the name (CabChap); Cab, besides being an alliteration and easy to remember, communicates ideally the concept of on-demand traffic for everybody. So, by just hearing the name you may guess it has to do something with human transport. And this is already quite an achievement if you don’t plan to spend millions on building a brand like Coca-Cola or the like.
5. Secondly the logo carries cleanliness and – hopefully – competence. At first I opted for a serif-font to communicate british/old-style but figured later that this is no ideal fit. And, actually as an afterthought, I happend to stumble on the ‘ab’ part in ‘Cab’, which lends itself nicely to a graphical mark for icons, logos etc.
6. From there finding fitting colors (black, white, orange), derived from BlackCab, the orange Cab-Sign and matching styles in webdesign (simply, typo-based, little and concise content with lots of white-space) is just a small step.
7. If the end-result will fit together isn’t so clear yet, but with another iterative honing process I will get there eventually.

Now, I am tired. More thoughts on this later.

Marcus, a real London black-cab driver, taught me quite a bit about the trade during hikes in the mountains surrounding Freiburg. One of the themes that connects all my startups was obvious again: on-demand transport, namely cabs in London, lacks transparency. Another problem are brokers in the market that are overpaid and imho underdeliver. With this hypothesis I started surfing around and reading through all the relevant cab-sites. The next few days I talked a lot to cab drivers in Freiburg and drove around with them to get a first-hand feel for the trade, at least in Germany.

This helped a lot in 1. really verifying there is a pain point and 2. understanding the big picture of the synthesized solution. For statistics and an overview, I checked out the main organizations on the net and by calling a few relevant people.

In discussing the problem and the proposed solution with Mathias, my business partner, and with friends and family I basically honed the story and filled in holes in my reasoning. Don’t rely to much on positive feedback here, though: A lack of enthusiasm with your friends may simply arise from not being into startups like you are. Or, conversely, enthusiastic reactions won’t help you in the future if you don’t have a clear view of all the potential problems. Basically I am only looking for real, factual show stoppers here, nothing more, nothing less.

So, iteratively refining the problem and continually thinking about how to solve it will continue to be an important thread in the next months! This will not be done any time soon; maybe its just me, but I keep discovering new aspects of the problem and the solution the more I talk or really hands-on experience the problem. E.g. while exploring the possible solutions it became obvious that the market for on-demand transport is lacking a decent payment method. So it may be naturally to offer this adjacent solution together with the core product. But this is another discussion (See Episode 65 – Upselling :-) )

My third try, a lot more more if you count the unsuccessful ones. This time I will not deviate from best practices I learned by trial and error in the last startups I started. At least this is what I thought a few weeks ago, unofficially inaugurating CabChap.

I will note a few thoughts and best practices on internet start-ups, that I’ll execute in the coming months.

Flashback: First real startup: millimeta, an out-of-home media control company, dead by now, successful in its days. Number two: telfish, worlds most powerful mobile phone plan analysis engine, with customers like o2, Saturn, Spiegel, Media-Markt and the connect-Magazine – alive and kicking (www.telfish.com). Finally CabChap, the best place to buy and sell on-demand transport, currently in it’s infancy. We’ll see how this one will work out. ]]> http://www.tomschlenkhoff.com/2008/12/start-up-braindump-prologue/feed/ 0