Keep your team on the same page broadcasting your dashboards
I started setting up dashboard screens at Google and kept doing it at every company I worked for. It was always clunky and harder than it should be. I decided to make it easier and more secure.
I made some technical errors, but above all, I just couldn't sell enough of this. I still meet people that tell me it's what they want(ed), but it's not even paying for its own servers, so, sadly, I need to close it down. Will this idea ever come back?
Alex Papadimoulis, Daniel Magliola and Sarah Law now form the board of advisors for Dashman. I think I'm covering all my basis with people that know me very well, people that are technologically savvy and people that have a lot of business acumen. This is very exciting.
This one is nothing but bug fixes. One potential customers says: "This is awesome Pablo! I'm going to be back to testing this starting next week! This is an awesome tool!".
This version got the best reviews ever in terms of performance and stability. We managed to make one sale with it so far.
This is the first one to be public. I don't seek out to have one on one meetings anymore. Instead I try to get as many people as possible to download it and try. Pretty much everybody runs into bugs that prevent them to use the product so I decide to work on nothing but quality.
I release the second beta and it's still private. This time, it feels like I'm in the middle of the desert. I don't manage to get any meetings. A few of my potential customers that were very supportive and excited about the product never responded to my emails or Skype messages. I'm still scratching my head about this one, I blame having used memes.
This is a private beta. I only give access to people that are willing to spend an hour on Skype talking about their needs and helping them set up the product on their own computer. I do about 20 of these and they are overwhelmingly positive. --------
I see the amount of potential leads growing at a rate of 5 a week without me doing anything. I decide to try this a second time.
I got tired with people emailing me asking what happened to Screensaver Ninja, so, I set up a landing page explaining what happened and offering people an opportunity to enter their email address to get further news. I was expecting that was my last interaction with this product.
The first time I tried to execute this vision was quite different and it was called Screensaver Ninja. The release was a failure, the name was wrong, the marketing was wrong and the focus of the product was wrong.
I started setting up dashboard screens at Google and kept doing it at every company I worked for. It was always clunky and harder than it should be. I decided to make it easier and more secure.