flamontagne
09-01-2009, 08:52 AM
Hello everyone,
My name is François Lamontagne and I am the co-founder of a web development company called Azanka, which exists since 1 year and a half. Our main objective with our company is to NOT do consulting work forever. We founded our company to work on our own products and give life to our own ideas... and we are doing consulting work at the same time to pay the bills.
The fact that we don't have any employee yet allow us to be less impatient about getting new contracts all the time. The project we are currently working on is called TimmyOnTime (a real-time project monitoring and time tracking application that works over instant-messaging). We started working on it even before creating our company.
Neither of us is really good at marketing... and I'd say without hesitation that it is probably our weakest spot. In the past, we tried to market our product the wrong way. We tried to generate a "buzz" in the hope to attract a lot of users in the smallest possible amount of time. We didn't really knew what we were doing but it seemed to be the most common way of doing things (at least in our domain of activity). Here is another big mistake we made : we almost completly halted the development because we thought it was 'OK for now'. Several users who were really excited about our product eventually left, probably when they realized that it was not living to its full potential. The next year, ToT was pratically a dead project.
We learned a lot from this experience. Instead of pulling the plug on our project, we decided to give it another go because we felt (and still feel) that it had too much potential to be abandonned like that.
So here we are. Our product is back to beta and we no longer try to "generate a buzz". Instead, we focus on the quality of our product and we try to give the best service possible to our current users. We are less impatient (and more mature I guess) because now we know that building a great product takes time.
So this was our little story. We are still looking for help in the marketing area. I'm sure that there are several things we could do to increase the visibility of TimmyOnTime... and this is basically the reason why I have registered to this forum, to learn from most experienced entrepreneurs. Any comment, feedback, idea, tip will be more than welcome!
Thank you for reading
My name is François Lamontagne and I am the co-founder of a web development company called Azanka, which exists since 1 year and a half. Our main objective with our company is to NOT do consulting work forever. We founded our company to work on our own products and give life to our own ideas... and we are doing consulting work at the same time to pay the bills.
The fact that we don't have any employee yet allow us to be less impatient about getting new contracts all the time. The project we are currently working on is called TimmyOnTime (a real-time project monitoring and time tracking application that works over instant-messaging). We started working on it even before creating our company.
Neither of us is really good at marketing... and I'd say without hesitation that it is probably our weakest spot. In the past, we tried to market our product the wrong way. We tried to generate a "buzz" in the hope to attract a lot of users in the smallest possible amount of time. We didn't really knew what we were doing but it seemed to be the most common way of doing things (at least in our domain of activity). Here is another big mistake we made : we almost completly halted the development because we thought it was 'OK for now'. Several users who were really excited about our product eventually left, probably when they realized that it was not living to its full potential. The next year, ToT was pratically a dead project.
We learned a lot from this experience. Instead of pulling the plug on our project, we decided to give it another go because we felt (and still feel) that it had too much potential to be abandonned like that.
So here we are. Our product is back to beta and we no longer try to "generate a buzz". Instead, we focus on the quality of our product and we try to give the best service possible to our current users. We are less impatient (and more mature I guess) because now we know that building a great product takes time.
So this was our little story. We are still looking for help in the marketing area. I'm sure that there are several things we could do to increase the visibility of TimmyOnTime... and this is basically the reason why I have registered to this forum, to learn from most experienced entrepreneurs. Any comment, feedback, idea, tip will be more than welcome!
Thank you for reading