Compared with other companies, what is your current positioning?
I'm cheaper, friendlier, can give more personalized service than larger shops. Compared to overseas and "enterprise" shops, I use the business value of software as the metric of success and focus of work as opposed to features or lines of code. I'm in NYC and will come to you but experienced with working remotely, and with existing teams.
What is your business? What is your purpose?
To build high quality software that provides business value. I believe this can be achieved through teaching business owners and developers the agile methodologies.
Beyond the economics, why do you do what you do? What is your mission?
To teach people how to build and discover what software they really need to improve their business and quality of life.
What is the most distinctive thing you do or provide to support your and mission?
Providing an environment where everyone can teach (each other and clients) and has agency to do what they think is best. While having the firm available to help correct mistakes and improve upon our products and processes.
What is your current internal structure?
Me. I'm the product manager, account manager, and developer.
What is your chosen style and manner?
I only accept water during business hours. I get very interested in how other business work, in how they're improving on what they have. I like the philosophy behind why we work and what we make. I like seeing others succeed.
What are five key goals over the next one/five years?
60 hour of billable time a week and one or two employees in the next year 5-10 employees each billing 30 hours a week with 10 hours of internal time
Learn and adapt from clients needs to refine my products (project management, developer team education, "rockstar type" consulting.)
Helping at least one startup from inception to success. (helping 5 in 5 years?)
Getting popular in a small business niche. (Doctors, lawyers, other professions)
Doing good work for the open source communities (paid or not)
What are the greatest opportunities for the growth of your business and image?
I'm currently going to meetups, talking with small businesses, and tapping my network.
What promises do you make to your clients?
Transparency. I want them to be able to know what's going on if they chose to, so they feel comfortable trusting me with their time and money.
Who is your current audience? Who, when, where, why?
My "hacker" activities with nodebots, hackathons, meetups etc. Mostly startup or junior techies. Some established people. Roborooter.com (or rbrtr.com) is old but stagnent. Twitter acquaintances in the ruby and js communities. People seem to recognize my avatar and handle.
Do you want another type of audience? Who would it be?
Small businesses (10-20 people) don't know who I am. I don't know how to find them besides word of mouth.
How does your audience currently view your brand?
They view it as me. I'm this smart guy they know.
How you you want your audience to view your brand?
The smart people I've collected. The experience and expertise to build good products and teach about software development.
How are you different from your competition?
From the positioning question. "I'm cheaper, friendlier, can give more personalized service than larger shops." I'm also inexperienced, new, small. Without a website. Experience with large scale operations. Versatile. Without a portfolio. Smart.
What response/feeling do you want your target audience to take away with them?
That I can help them achieve their business dreams. That I can improve how they work beyond what they currently understand. That they can trust me.
What is the market objective?
Enough work to employ 5-10 people and take time to travel.
Tell us what your brand is about in one sentence.
We are about building quality software to make an impact on how you do business.
Try to put them in order of importance, too.
- Trust
- Quality
- Education
- Transparency
- Value
Tell us what passion drives your organization’s culture.
That there's always more to learn. About making software, about doing business, about people. The more we learn the more we can improve.
Tell us about your organization’s history, major accomplishments or failures and key defining events.
From 2004-2009 I ran Wizard Computing as an IT consulting firm. We fixed your email. I also saw how seemingly small changes to a business could have a large impact in their productivity. Tasks I felt a computer should do could be automated freeing employees from the mundane and allowing them to challenge themselves and grow the business.
2009-2012 I ran software development groups. Growing a group of people (including myself) to figure out how to solve the unique problems our businesses faced. Whether it was a hedge fund that had built a hard shell of legacy software and policies that made any change or improvement a monumental task, or a new startup that needed to figure out how to measure our success and learn the best way to work together, my teams were able to excel and grow to meet the challenge.
2012-Future! I want to take what I've learned with my previous teams about building software and bring it to the businesses I used to serve. Working on the larger more impactful projects that were previously beyond my ability.
Think big. reality is no obstacle. You can have it all. Make us believe.
I want 5-10 employees teaching each other how to make software, make it better, make it faster. I want us to learn how to have the largest impact on our clients. I want us to teach our communities, through open source and education. I want a happy place, where we're all welcome and like bringing our friends and family by. I want an office in the city (but coffee shops until we're rich) and I want us all to feel we have earned the good life we all have.
I'd love to make some software products that run themselves (apps of some sort) I think what we learn along the way will lead to this.
Tell us how extensive they have been, what has worked and what hasn’t.
I talk to people all the time, they wish me well but don't understand what I want to do or how I can help them.
Think character traits, age, personality, taste, politics, that kind of thing.
A 25 year old, who knows what they're doing, enjoys helping others. Knows when they're right but knows how to teach what they know. They love pizza, but japanese food is also delicious. They enjoy a good drink, and a good song. They believe in personal freedoms and the right to privacy. Helping others around them is important to them. A rising tide raises all ships. They think equality will be had through education.
Everyone, we know, but tell us specifically about the people your brand speaks to.
People who have worked hard to start their business. People who would like to do more but need a guiding hand or a temporary leader.
Tell us about other brands in your space, their similarities and differences.
Pivotal Labs is the heavyweight. There are lots of rails consulting firms.
While I'm small there are firms like http://www.freshthrills.com/ who do the same thing but clients may not understand.
Name three brands, in any sector, that you love and tell us why you love them. No Apple, no Nike, no google. Dig a little deeper.
Pivotal LabsThey are really good at what they do, they charge a lot of money and provide a lot of value. No nonsense, no fuss.- http://ycombinator.com/ They are a VC who trains people to program (through hackerschool) and trains people to run businesses. I like to think I could train clients to get the most value out of my service and in turn get better results than they would otherwise.
- http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ Patrick McKenzie built this site over a few years, he constantly AB tested it to make it better, improving his value props, his layout, his buttons, his order flow, etc. While improving his product only to the point where it made people happy enough people would refer him. It's a testament to taking something for non techies and getting it out in front of people's eyes and iterating until it's successful. It's worth reading about if you don't know it.
Tell us how you plan to measure whether this effort was worthwhile.
When I have a website that I can point someone at and they say "ahh, I get that, I get what you do and I get that it can help me" Then I'll be happy.
Tell us who will be involved in the decision making process on your end, who will be our point of contact and who has final approval. The closer we are to the decision-makers, the smoother this will go for us both. Let’s make sure they know what we're up to so there are no surprises.
Me on everything.
This is your wildcard. Use it wisely. Tell us about any internal politics, font fetishes or color allergies we should know about.
I like big impactful fonts used sparsely. I like red. (While the execution is sloppy the red dragon of my former client EIS is appealing to me. http://www.eisincorp.com/ http://www.eisincorp.com/EISlogo.jpg)
What do you have? Tell us about the assets you currently have, even if they will be redesigned. Logo, color palette, brand fonts, brand guide, icon systems, key messaging, stationery, signage, apparel, etc.
I'm a blank slate. WizardComputing.com shows everything I had. My old business cards are no longer appropriate as they show cd roms etc.
Tell us the deliverables you think you need in the perfect world.
I need a website, a name, a brand, business cards, a pitch, and some love.