1DayLater - The Blog

Music and Motivation - manager

This one’s specifically for any managers out there, while my brother will be blogging the same topic soon for the coders amongst you!

1) The everyday grind

If you freelance or run a small business you will be faced with common tasks which need to be tended to a regular basis! It could be doing your bookkeeping, writing a proposal, or replying to a customers email query. Having some music to listen to can make all the difference to your mood and productivity while taking these things on.

It’s important not to listen to any old thing mind. Priority no. 1 should be finding something that’s not distracting. Songs with too many lyrics for example are no good, as they take your focus alway from what you’re doing too often. You need to be able to just float along with the music, serene and calm.

Which is why, when deep inside the underbelly of the business beast, I like to listen to some modern mellow trance, post-rock or some very downbeat drum n bass. Keep it at a volume which isn’t too high so your attention doesn’t shift from your work, but high enough to be able to bop along to happily.

Albums of choice: Tiesto - In search of Sunrise (1-7), Above and Beyond - anything, Commix - Fabriclive 44

2) Writing Tenders

When competing for a large software contract the usual thing is to go through a tendering process. 1DayLater have just been through this with local Quango (Quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization) Codeworks who need a timesheet solution and a way of tracking their ERDF funding requirements from local funding body OneNorthEast.

Writing a tender is pretty similar to writing a business plan. In both cases you disect an activity to its individual components, which helps identify potential problems, skill gaps and ultimately its feasability. When there’s a deadline looming it can also be fairly stressful, which is why some chilled music is best!

Album of choice - Bonobo - Days to Come

3) Missing your weekend

A start-up company like ours needs to be prepared to put in a lot of hours. Work-life balance can become a distant memory if not careful. I like this article in the Texas start-up blog which illustrates the amount of time entrepreneurs need to be prepared to give up.

Ultimately missing a weekend to plough on with work can be tough, but when you love your work like I do, it’s not so bad. I’m fairly sure my brother shares a similar outlook!

Getting some bouncy happy music on the go at weekends is therefore a must. If you’re going to spend the weekend caning work, some uplifting music and an open window will at least provide a happy illusion. I like to use weekends writing our blog, and working on activities which fit our long term vision and goals for 1DayLater

Albums of choice: Billy Talent - Billy Talent 2, Zebrahead - MFZB

 In part 2 (coming soon) - music and motivation for coders

The WonDayLater Golden Ticket

A common problem faced by many software companies using a freemium pricing approach is:

“How do I show the value of our premium features without simply giving them away”

The answer for most (and the majority of our competitors) is to simply use a good old 30-day trial. Great, easy, badabing, badabong - yes?

Well although this might be straightforward, we realised that the 30 day trial method actually presents the customers (and therefore the company) with a second problem:

(customer)

• Signs up to service

• forgets about it for 30 days or more (or is too busy to take a proper look) - easy to do

• returns - to find out their trial has now expired

• loses interest / becomes annoyed

• goes elsewhere

For a customer-orientated service based company like ours this really is no good. We want to impress our users from the outset, not alienate them!

So we sat down and put our heads together for an epic brotherly brainstorm. Some cups of tea and wonderfully obtuse ideas later, we finally hit upon a nice elegant solution…the 1DayLater ‘test-drive’ pass!

A photo of what the free pass might look in the real world, if it were conceiled in a chocolate bar.

Now each of our customers will get 3 passes as soon as they sign up with us. They can be activated when one of the premium features is clicked (currently invoicing, export and mileage claims)

The passes themselves last 30 minutes (just long enough to have a good play around with the premium features we think). However they can be used at any time - whether a user has just signed up or has been signed up for 6 months. Returning customer problem solved!

— Next week should mark the start of our paid-for subscription services. Once this is underway we hope to get some feedback as to how the free-pass system is working out.

And if anyone has any feedback now - please get in touch:

feedback@1daylater.com

Paul

oh. ps. phone and desktop app development are going very well - more info to come soon!

The Cost of 1DayLater

1DayLater currently stores over 22,000 entries tracking 26,000 hours, 72,000 business miles and over £3,000,000 of receipts and expenses. The cost? A £20,000 bank loan, 1,700 dedicated man hours creating 30 iterations of 100-200 files resulting in around 5,000,000,000 database queries, 2,000 users and hit spikes of around 5,000. But lets not forget the 85(+1) blog posts, 2,000 Tweets, 120 hours of networking, £600 in bus fares, £250 of metro tickets, 450 business cards, a 50 page business plan (constantly revised), 500 working documents, 3,000 emails, countless publications, 40 support tickets, £3,000 of legal documents, £12,000 of 3rd party development, 600 long days, and approximately 1 TRILLION CUPS OF TEA.

The result? A server that constantly says “usage = 0.01%”, a business network we’d happily call friends, a product that gets better every week and a wonderful outlook for the future.

Did I mention, we’ve just rolled out a new version? Do you like the tweaked design? How about the mobile site? You know everything is faster too? And that there’s more output options? That the search is more powerful? And the apps are on the way? Go figure.

Bonding with Bond Solutions

I have 8 ambitions for this year. 4 are related to 1DayLater, 2 lifestyle, and 2 personal/professional development. I pin the list to the wall behind my desk helping me instill each point into my day-to-day efforts as I repeatedly mull them over.

Here’s a little peek at the first 4:

1. Get world wide recognition for 1DayLater
2. Become market leader for activity tracking software.
3. Integrate 1DayLater with Sage
4. Host a charity based event
5. ……..

Being featured in Lifehacker last week let me cross off no.1 and now I can happily say that 3 is officially underway too. The brains of 1DayLater met this week with the brains of local Sage reseller - Bond Solutions to work out how to best integrate with, and compliment their popular Sage offerings.

As far as business alliances go we really couldn’t have asked for better. The 8-year-old company is headed up by Derek Curtis, one of the most likeable guys you’re likely to meet. And as the biggest Sage reseller in the North-East and North-West of England they really know their onions.

My bro David King (1DayLater), Derek Curtis (Bond Solutions) and me

It looks likely that we should be able to integrate 1DayLater with the popular Sage CRM system - Sales Logix and Sage Accounts as a useful add-on, which will then be available throughout the Sage reseller network. If all goes to plan it should make entering data into these complex systems easier while out ‘on the go’, greatly saving admin time later. More on that to come soon.

Lastly big congrats to Derek and his new family unit, as he’s just taken on some foster kids. Great stuff

Take it easy

Paul