Warning: What you are about to be shown doesn't necessarily exist...

Went to a local Salesforce thing yesterday.  The promo for it was good.  We do Cloud stuff and there are some obvious match ups between what we do and Salesforce.

The information we were given looked excellent.

Things went down hill when we arrived and found half the deligates at the Tully's two levels down.  We took the hint and got our coffee there.  Upstairs there was an 'exhibition' which turned out to be consulting companies selling consulting to each other.

They went further downhill and off the fucking ski jump when the first thing their regional VP of sales showed us was a 'safe harbor' disclaimer stating that what they were about to show us, didn't necessarily exist.

Yes, they had created the tech equivalent of an infomercial with fake product animations.

We left early.

General Updates

Proposal Writing is hard: we're getting a steady diet of leads now which means we have to write proposals.  The problem with writing proposals to large companies for a service they didn't know they needed until we told them so, is what to include and how to phrase it and how to deal with the mismatch between the expectations and knowledge of the people you've met, versus their management.

This goes both ways - we've had the same problems internally with what should and shouldn't be in the proposals too.

Pricing is hard: pricing new services that quite literally didn't exist until we created them a few months ago is hard.  It's made harder because we really don't have a clue how to position them pricewise.  I'll get back to you on that later.

Starbucks hotdesks.  I'm between meetings.  Half the people in the Starbucks I'm drinking are here working.  Things really do change.  I keep wondering if we'll ever get an office?

Customers are a pain :) - had to talk down a justifiably annoyed customer today.  It's a tricky one.  They paid us upfront as a favour several months ago, which I was grateful for.  OTOH they've asked for so many changes that we've probably done 5 times as much work as they paid for.  While I don't begrudge them this, they really helped us out of a tight spot.  They also have to accept that when you give us a week's worth of changes to make, and we have paying customers, we have to prioritize the other paying customers.  I suspect this will cost me beer and pizza at a future date.

We have a huge amount of work to do before the end of the year and still the Requests for Proposal keep coming in.  Fingers crossed that this augers well for the New Year.  It would be nice to go to Vegas for the AT&T Dev Summit and CES with a wider customer base and cash in the bank.

Upcoming Travel... more for me than you :)

Bay Area - some time in November, not sure yet.  I'm also thinking about a Social Networking in TV event in LA.

December - DC, I'm speaking at a Medical Apps Conference on Social Media in Medicine

December - Bay Area - again, catching up with customers

January - AT&T Dev Summit and CES Las Vegas...  Yeah, Vegas Baby, vega... blegh.