Hi there! Hope you are doing great, and that there’s some helpful startup tips in this week’s post:

Mind Your Messaging

Kinda along the lines of what I mentioned in last week’s post about ‘Always be demoing’, don’t snub the trusty ‘ol trade show, either. Last week we did our first exhibiting event at Market NY Expo at the sprawling Jacob Javits Center in NYC. And y’now what? It was awesome! We met great people, networked, got some biz dev stuff in the hopper (reseller program, anyone?) and some awesome feedback. For instance, our booth graphics said “All Your Apps…On One Dashboard. Free!” Several folks thought we were in the apps business, as in creating mobile apps. Good take away.

I was also reminded that people who visit your booth at a trade show almost never read your copy. They could stand there for minutes, scanning all your material and still ask “So what do you do?”

Free Should Mean Free

Another one? People have some serious concern about what ‘free’, as in business freemium, means. Many thought it must mean we are going to make money from selling ads within the app. No way! Once we told them certain folks would eventually pay us for more Insights or advanced features, they were satisfied. So we need to make that crystal clear in our communications.

Cohorts Are Important!

Get yer cohorts over heh! Hey these reports should drive your business, and we’ve discussed the value of cohort analysis in previous posts. We are setting up ours now, including the time between when someone initially signs up for Dasheroo to when they connect their first insight, and most importantly (especially when we launch our billing solution!), Initial Signup to a Paid Account. If you aren’t instrumenting your biz on cohorts you are leaving money on the table!

Automation is Necessary

I learned a great lesson! With the rapidly growing number of new users we are getting (thanks!), I cannot any longer manually review and enter into our CRM solution Salesforce, each person. I really really enjoyed doing that, as it gave me so much insight into the profile of our users - the type of business, where they are located around the world and so on. I personally researched and entered our first 2,500 users. But now, it’s an automated script right from our database into SFDC.

So the lessons are: 1) get your user data under control or die. Like I said, we’re now pumping in all our signups into Salesforce. But that’s only the first step. I’m looking at InsideView as a solution to appending all the vital information like company name, company size, & geo. 2) Although this will automate what I used to do manually, I will always do some random, manual spot checks to make sure I never lose sight of the type of users we are attracting.

Have an awesome week and keep on Dasherooing.