Photo from Flickr

Every company screws up now and then. You do something with the best intentions, but it ends up a mess. Your customers are annoyed and disappointed.

It is easy to send out a generic apology. To say “sorry about the inconvenience”.

Don’t do that. Apologize like you would apologize to a friend. Say how bad you feel. Say what you will do to make sure it won’t happen again.

Make a real apology, and your customers will remain your friends.

A ball? Or a chair?

A few years ago Geraldine (my wife) convinced me to try an exercise ball instead of a traditional office chair.

A big bright blue ball, that took ages to inflate. I thought my back and/or stomach would be tired from not having the back support, but it turns out it’s the best office chair ever.

There are a bunch of benefits:

• You can bounce along to the music
• You move around on the ball while working
• You can stretch your back and sides by rolling over to one side
• You can jump up and down on the ball when frustrated
• They are only about €15 each (try to find a decent office chair for that amount)

Are you using a ball instead of a chair? Or thinking about it? Let me know in the comments below.

RescueTime is a little program that runs in the background and tracks what programs and web sites you use.

So, install RescueTime, leave it for a week, and see how much time you really spend on building your business. Compare that with how much time you spend on Facebook, or reading the news, or funny videos on YouTube, or emails, and all other not-so-productive-stuff.

Note to self: set a goal in RescueTime to spend more time writing on this blog.

1. Facebook has way more users than Twitter in Ireland.
2. People use Facebook to keep in touch with their friends.
3. People use Twitter to connect with networks and professional relationships.

And a simple three-step process to help pick what is right for you:

1. Ask your customers if they use Facebook or Twitter. Pick the one that is most popular.
2. Still not sure? Use Twitter if you want to do PR activities or keep in touch with a professional network.
3. If you are still not sure, use Facebook.

It is not pretty, and I feel really sorry for Geraldine, who spent a whole week’s holiday with me and the moustache.

Please support my growing efforts and the great charities that help more than 2,800 men who will be diagnosed with prostate cancer this year. You can give a donation through the Movember site.

Thank you!

Image by Sean MacEntee via Flickr

An amazing idea without actions is still just an idea. It does not solve any real-world problems, it does not bring customers, it does not generate income.

A half-decent idea with great execution can still be a very decent business. It solves problems, it has customers, it pays the bills.

Everyone can have great ideas. In fact, most people probably have one or more great ideas loitering around in their heads. But those ideas are only brain-fluff until they are executed, until action happens.

So, if you have a great idea, allocate a few hours every week to work with your idea. Take action and help the idea turn into reality.

Here are two different marketing approaches:

1. Spend buckets of money marketing your product via radio/tv/papers, and hope that the brand sticks in people’s’ heads until they actually need your product
2. Another approach is to get your product in front of customers at the very right moment, when they are ready to actually use your services

The second approach means you only spend money on people who are very likely to become customers that same day, at that very moment. It also means you don’t fork out lots of money before you know if customers are willing to pay for your product/service.

For a web site this normally means you show up in Google when people are searching for certain suitable keywords.

I have not come across any good terms for the second approach yet. How about “getting into the loop”. Have you got a better name for it? Please comment below.

When you start a company you are suddenly supposed to know everything about recruitment, accounting, cash-flow, marketing, tax, health & safety, and so on. Truth is, most of the time you just wing it.

Read his blog post here

Here are some words you want to avoid when assigning tasks at meetings: “Look at”, “Investigate”, and “Study”. Instead you want to give people tasks with words like “Solve”, “Fix”, and “Do”.

For example, compare these two projects:

1. Improve the speed of X 10%
2. Investigate how we can improve the speed of X

Which one would you rather work on? Number two feels a bit safer, but I guarantee that number one is way more fun.

There are two main goals with this approach:

1. Avoid wasting time on features that will change
2. Get real feedback from real customers as quickly as possible

You can do market research until the cows come home, but there is only one way to really test the market for your product. Get it into the hands of your customers and see how they react. And more importantly, see if they will actually pay for it.

Market research is useful, but it is never the real thing. There are things people say they won’t pay for and they will, and there are things they say they will pay for and they won’t.

So, get your big marker out, scratch out 80% of your new product’s planned feature set. Then go ahead and launch your next great Minimum Viable Product.