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Monthly Archives: August 2009

Casuals and usuals – Treat them differently

August 31 2009 - Design, Startups - Write Comment

Managing any kind of business is not so different from running a restaurant.

Restaurants have two groups of customers, and the way the marketing is done configures pretty much the share of each kind you’ll have and how will your place be for them.

  • The casuals. These are the guys that are walking down the street one day and they find your restaurant. Attracted by the prices, looks or offerings, they’ll come
  • The usuals. People who already know your place and they come often for more. Returning customers.

Casual-customer driven bars are about ads, and finding the right placement. Being in the quartier-latin will get you loads of customers every day, without any big effort. But it’s rare to find a returning customer.

Returning-customer driven places are about loyalty and slowly building a remarkable experience. They are about keeping old customers and trying to bring them back as often as they can. It’s about getting your passionate clients to recommend your restaurant to their friends.

If you want to get the best of both worlds..

It is your job to keep new people coming in.
It is your job to turn casuals into usuals.
It is your job to make the first-time experience different from a heavy user experience.

It is your job to offer something new each time to frequent customers.
It is your job to turn happy usuals into referrals.

In a restaurant, this means having attractive offers for new comers. A cheap basic menu, perhaps. It means serving people in an efficient way, and caring about them. It means having a special menu only on Thursdays so people who come every weekend find a good reason to visit you twice a week. It means offering discounts and making it easy to refer people with gift cards.

In a web applications, these would mean segmenting. Caring about SEO and blogging to attract new people. Landing pages to give each one what they’re looking for. Adding primers for first-time users. Giving tips to experienced users so they can out-learn the others. Affiliate programs. Listening to users.

How could you apply these lessons to your business? Leave a comment!

Pablo Villalba

Teambox founder

@micho

Teambox 2.0 preview

August 26 2009 - Teambox - 7 Comments

Teambox has been running for over a year now, and the time has come to make a great announcement.

A major redesign is in the works. Lots of old code is going away. All the user interface will be replaced by a new one. New talents are joining the team. And soon we’ll be able to say,

Teambox meets twitter!

Thanks to all your feedback, we have been able to fix issues and plan features that you will use every day.

Teambox overview screen is turning into a Twitter-like feed of activity and updates. You will be able to post updates on a project from the web or from a desktop notifier. We want you to be in touch with your team all the time, across all your projects, easily.

In our strive to make a clean an simple product, quick messages and chat are being removed. The activity feed will be more organized and better for instant updates on projects! Activity updates will allow file attachments, too.

Teambox 2.0 is a work in progress, I’m posting some mockups below while we’re working on the code and design. The full roadmap can be found here, and some ideas for next releases include Time tracking. Invoices. Customization. CRM. Stay tuned!

You can follow our progress with development on Lighthouse, or checkout the open-source version from Github. If you have ideas, feel free to suggest or contribute!

Pablo Villalba

Teambox founder

@micho

Stuff that makes you rock

August 11 2009 - Design - Write Comment

I’ve followed Kathy Sierra for some time, and I really miss her blog, creating passionate users.

In her presentation How to grow and nurture your community, she talks about an interesting concept: Products that stick are products about you, not about how cool they are or about how well they solve a problem.

Some people will buy your products because they’re good, cool or useful. But every single day I notice that stickiness comes from products about you, about you getting things done, about you uʍop ǝpısdn buıʇıɹʍ, about you learning or becoming better in some skill.

Remember when instant messaging came, and people would start conversations with you just to try all those stupid smileys? It was annoying, but it sticked. Users would feel they could do something they couldn’t before, and that helped creating a passionate community for fancy instant messaging above plain text chats.

Think about it as your product’s charisma: Everybody likes a person who drives conversations about you. You can never have enough of those. Can your product reflect your users in that way?

Those are the kind of sites or products people will go back to every day, thirsty for more.

Pablo Villalba

Teambox founder

@micho