After the rush and buzz of getting the product built, we finally got around to registering and forming the company.
omelett.es is it’s name and that is where we’re bloggging now. The new RSS feed is here, and we’ll update the Operation Canine feed to point to that too.
We finished the first version of Spend Meter and launched on schedule last Wednesday. I’ve been a bit busy on other things for the rest of the week so it’s taken a while to put together a few of the things we discovered whilst building it, and what we learned.
First up, the obvious - it is possible to build a fairly involved software application in a short period of time. However, there are some caveats - we used tools and technology that we are familiar with - as we chose Senokian to build it, their excellent Open Source framework used in EGS was the main building block, as was Asterisk for the telephony platform. Both these tools are Open Source so were able to be tweaked easily for the product. We also know that they are scalable and will be able to grow comfortably as the product does.
Secondly, we cheated - not really, we were sensible in what we wanted to achieve in the 3 days. Our aim was not to produce a fully polished management section for us to be able to manage the product - we have some manually setup to do when new clients sign up. Rather it was to build a fully functional, polished product customers can use to manage their advertising spend.
We’ve now got people using the product and will reinvest in the product as this number increases to put the management features we require.
We wanted to show people: do the important bits first, start bringing in cash and reinvest - don’t blow all your money first - as and when Spend Meter starts bringing in cash, we’ll automate the back-end. We feel we’ve achieved this with Spend Meter and time will tell how it proceeds - our main focus is now on sales and marketing of the product.
David wrote a great post about building Spend Meter.
First of all a massive thanks to David, Matt, Jim, Paul, Greg, Matthew and Dave for getting Spend Meter built in 3 days.
Also, WOW we did it! I always had faith in the team, but with a few minutes 1 minute to spare, the site was live and the demo for people to login!
The website is now live, you can check out the demo and sign up for the product too. Remember 50% of the first year profits will go to charity, we’ve already chosen 1 of the 12 and will announce that tomorrow.
A big thanks to everybody for all the twitter and link love. Please carry on so we can help out some worthwhile causes.
OK, so we’re just putting the finishing touches together for launch. Here is a sneak peak at the dashboard:
So today has been a busy day. I had a meeting this morning which ended up being 4 hours instead of 2 and I’m now in the office.
Greg is back today and has joined the team and we’re just finishing everything up. We’re good to go for today’s launch, so watch this space!
We’ve built Spend Meter to help people easily track calls and monitor advertising/market responses, but we need your help.
If you had one sentence to descibe what Spend Meter does, and what terms you would use to search for a similar piece of software on the web, what would it be?
Here are a few to start it off:
Thanks to the Operation Canine Team, we got loads done yesterday. Here’s what we achieved:
officedog hasn’t been a huge amount of help so far, but since he’s responsible for the project name we’ll let him off this time!
We’re well on target to get everything done, assuming things carry on as they have!
I had the pleasure of attending the Digital Pioneers reception last night, hosted by Tom Watson, at Admiralty House. It was part of the Digital Mission I attended to New York with Tactile CRM and I was asked to say a few words to the people attending. I took the opportunity to plug Spend Meter and mention it to the people and press representatives there. Admiralty House is very nice, here are a few pictures!
I also had a chance to chat with Ryan Carson from Carsonified - I’ve met a few times in the pass, but had a chance to have a proper chat with him and a few others that went for dinner afterwards. I got some great ideas and suggestions from him about Tactile CRM.
So, you know what Operation Canine is, what the Spend Meter logo looks like, and we’ve hinted at what Spend Meter is all about, but here is our first pass at writing the marketing/website copy for it, and a sneak peak at the website:
Spend Meter is a simple, yet powerful, system which allows you to measure and analyse your marketing/advertising spend.
Do you advertise in papers, magazines, online, or on the radio and ask customers to call you? Spend Meter will help you automatically log and analyse those calls to help you spend your marketing budget better.
With this information you can make advertising spending decisions based on the actual responses you receive. You’ll be able to see which campaigns generate the most calls, how long people are on the phone, what time of day you receive most calls, how much each call costs, and more.
With this information to hand you’ll be able to generate more calls and business, save money on advertising and build more business.
John Wannmaker, considered by many to be the farther of modern advertising, is recorded to have said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half” - with Spend Meter he would have known.