Carsonified

Apologies for the lack of posts recently. To be frank, I lost the desire to write for the last couple weeks.

I had a good chat with Gill (my lovely wife and co-founder) on the way to the airport today and she had a great idea: give people a behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like to run Carson Systems.

So I’ve decided to start posting things that give you a look at the kind of daily things I deal with as a CEO of a small and growing company. Whenever I wish I knew something about a businessman/woman that I respect, I’ll try to post the same thing about my life. I’m hoping it’ll be interesting for everybody, while also giving me valuable feedback from all of you guys.

I’m about to hop on a plane (going home to see the fam in US of A!) so I don’t have much time now.

Watch this space!

I had an amazing conversation with Ryan Allis, the 22 year old CEO of Intellicontact. I am so impressed with how he has taken his company from a small shop to a multi-million dollar company with 50+ employees, in about three to four years.

What really struck me though, was how he knew his numbers inside and out. He is absolutely hard-core about measuring everything. It was like a slap in the face - as CEO of Carson Systems, I just don’t know enough about what’s going on.

I guess what I’m learning is that I need to transition out of the day-to-day management of our projects, and move into a role where I’m evaluating and acting on important measurements. For every business, the measurements are different. However, it takes a good sit-down to brainstorm what’s important and what’s not. Once I know what’s actually working for us, I can guide our team to do more of it.

In order to help me do this, I’m putting together a monster Excel sheet that’s going to have everything I need to know. Then I’m going to ask our team to fill in the numbers from their projects on a weekly basis. This way I can react quicker to both opportunities and problems.

How do you guys measure what’s going on in your companies? Please share!

Mike just posted my article Web Apps 101: Your Three Point Success Plan.

Feel free to have a read and comment. There’s some big lovers and haters in the comments - it’s all pretty crazy :)

There was some really interesting comments on How much cash should you have in the bank?. Thanks everyone!

A lot of the comments said that a better measure would’ve been how many months of expenses were in the bank. I agree, but this was still really interesting to me. The actual cash in the bank has a much more nitty-gritty realness to it :)
View the full results of the survey here. I’ve also included a screen grab below. It’s interesting to me that the majority of the survey participants are from small businesses (1-10 people) and have less than $10K in the bank.

We’re at O’Hare in Chicago, waiting for our connecting flight back to London, and I’ve been thinking a lot about why I enjoyed SXSW so much this year.
I just hit me: I had time think about new ideas.

I made a conscious decision to not carry my laptop around with me. I bought a big yellow legal pad of paper and wrote down tons of ideas. It was so freeing to ignore email, IM and my monster to-do list.

As a result, we’ve decided to make some big changes at Carson Systems, and I’m SO excited (more on that later). Hooray for down time!

P.S. I’m really enjoying Dick Costolo’s new blog (founder of FeedBurner). If you’re interested in entrepreneurship, it’s a must-read.

I got a pretty good beating on the blogosphere :) for my post about handling abusive customers. It was well deserved and I’ve learned my lesson.

Another important lesson

In addition to remembering that the customer is always right, the most important thing I’ve learned through doing all the support for DropSend and Amigo is this:

Make it easy to help your customers.

Sounds obvious right? Well, believe it or not, it’s the small details that happen during the build of the app, that will determine how easy it’ll be to help your customers.

Here are some things you should build into your app’s back end in order to make customer service easier:

Simple search for users accounts

You will get tons of emails from customers saying things like “Please cancel my account” or “What plan am I using?” or “Can you re-send me my last two invoices?”, etc.

It’s insane, but I actually have to page through thousands of accounts in DropSend, in order to find someone’s account so I can answer those questions. I can’t do a simple search based on their first/last name or email address.

Building a simple user account search (name or email address) will allow you to quickly help your customers. If it’s quicker for you, you’re more likely to be helpful to your customer because it takes one minute, instead of ten!

Allow token gestures of kindness

There will be plenty of times when a user encounters a bug and they’ll be pissed off.

You can apologize and promise you’ll fix the bug ASAP, but that won’t really make your customer feel any better. If you can easily do one of the following, it’s likely they’ll forget about their frustrations and they’ll keep using their account:

1. Give them one free month of service
2. Refund their last invoice
3. Give them some extra free usage (ie in DropSend, we can give them an extra 15 files sends for that month)

If you can’t easily do these things in your app’s backend, you’ll find yourself dragging your heels when it comes to helping your customers.

For example, if you have to contact your book keeper to refund invoices, instead of simply clicking a button in the app’s backend, you won’t do it as often as you should.

Reduce that friction

Making it easier for you to help customers will dramatically improve the quality of your customer service.

Make sure to spend the extra time on the app’s backend and you’ll see a huge payoff in happy customers!

If you find yourself typing the same thing over and over again when answering emails, I’ve got a real time-saving tip for you.

I’ve found an amazing tool called Text Expander and it absolutely rocks. Watch the video below to see how it can save you time on when answering emails.

This is especially great for those of you who do tech support for your web app and get asked the same fricken questions again and again.

RSS readers, view the video here.