This Business and Moment...

It's not just thinking about yourself though is it? It's your career which is ultimately about your family as well, so it's not just about what YOU want, it's you for them. And she's being incredibly selfish if she wants you to be unhappy for 25minutes. Find a way of making it work, do some of the things you can't at the time once you're in. Talk about what exactly is the issue and see if you can come to a common understanding.
 
We have too much work for the resource we have at emotuit. I need someone who is good at front end dev, such as js, css, etc, as well as knows their way around ruby and picks up things quickly!
We have no money, so it'd be part time for equity until we could afford you.

We're awesome with awesome tech...

/wishful thinking
 
While the US guys have been off, it's meant we can't troubleshoot an issue we're having on their staging environment with our plugin. It's weird as we don't see it on our systems... always a joy!
Since we had a few days until we get an account sorted from them, I've pushed another small feature through. Hopefully tomorrow we'll have fully added the new tutorial feature, that takes you through all the functionality on the dashboard. Trying to iron out any issues people have understanding anything, and making it easy as possible to provide feedback to us basically.


Basically just intro.js and implemented a zendesk widget for support requests too. I like seeing tickets get completed. If only they were as quick as I wanted, too!

STILL haven't heard back about this job I applied and apparently was shortlisted for... guy said he's catching up with them on Weds. Seems a bit odd it's so long since it's a contract position!
 
Great news that he's upped his game tosh!

And congrats on the baby skaif! The hard work starts here dude :) keep pushing!

My boss on my contract has always been quite untrustworthy, he's based in the states and plays the company game to get where he wants and doesn't particularly like me. Yet recently he's been very nice and I don't trust that. He's currently taking on the job at the level above his, which is the reason why he's trying to keep everyone sweet as possible.
He's just said to me tonight that he's sorry we haven't wrapped up my contract for next year yet, he doesn't know what's going to happen, but he's really pushing for me.
Pretty much his words, word for word. I think he just likes to stress me out, I wasn't even concerned but now I can't help having a niggle annoyance there. Officially I have 2 weeks notice I think it is, but on every occasion so far, people have had 3 months just to be nice. If he gives me less, I'll be just seriously annoyed. Leaves it with very little time to line up another over Christmas, which is crap.

/rant
 
Man this couple of weeks.. ugh. Busy.

Contract work is busy... I've been assigned to deliver training on 4 different applications, which is fine but it's getting it all ready and working out what I'm set to deliver. I'm also managing two sets of migrations from one platform to another set to kick off 15th, finishing the 23rd. Which is funny as ****, since they haven't even told me whether I have a contract here in January, which is leaving me a ton of notice...
Hopefully I'll have something, as otherwise I'll be selling pulled pork road side. Which doesn't actually sound like such a bad thing really :p timing would be annoying mind.

emotuit is keeping me busy too; we've pushed out a fix for ASU and signed contracts (woo!), even though I wasn't happy with some of the wording on it about the data, it was going back and forth so much with the attorney it cost me a fortune. I now have to supply an insurance certificate for the company that meets all their MASSIVE list of requirements, so trying to get that sorted now too. But it's progress...
They're now testing the app in their staging environment, so again, progress.

We also pushed out the Zendesk widget to the dashboard, too, so people could send us support requests directly from it. Trying to simplify the whole support model process as we get more customers.
With that we pushed out the above video I shared, the intro.js tutorial feature this week too, so that's now in Prod.

Invoiced that client in South Africa too and he's all sorted and paid up. Not a lot, but that's something from him.

Pushing on with our next release, which will contain active tab functionality; understanding when a student has switched tabs and not on the learning management system anymore.
Then on to our internal dashboard, which I think will come at the beginning of Jan now anyway, but we're moving again.

We've been evaluating Dbs to use as well and narrowed it down to Cassandra or Couchbase with a Spark cluster and blob storage. Means we can store all the readings in the big HDFS dbs and then do predictive analytics with spark and reference baselines from user profiles which we can store in the blob storage. Means our algorithms should evolve for each user as data grows, which is our aim. Spun up a couchbase instance and have tickets for cassandra and spark to be done before next week too and we can come to a decision.

On top of all of this it's getting ready for Christmas and trying to apply for as many contracts as I can. Which is always a giggle.

*breathe*
 
Ugh sorry I missed that Phate, he sounds like a complete and utter idiot.

I'm back at work and currently working from home due to the tail end of a bug. I mean I could go in, but you know, it's cold out... haha I'll go back into the office tomorrow. Slow start back and I'm fine with that. I'm just trying to catch up on all things emotuit too and that needs such a 2017 kick!

Happy new year, let's get some things done this year!!
 
Need to put together an investor report today for last quarter of the year. I don't know how many times I can write **** lol

Planning out the year here too and what I should be attending and what sales and marketing strategies are. Had the Mrs say to me yesterday "you haven't sorted out when you're away yet, what are you going to this year?" I was like, it helps to have some damn money too! I'm just going through the conference schedule at the moment, seeing what the audience will be like and what would make sense to attend. I'd love to sponsor again, but I need about 12k to cover the cost of the 2 big ones. Not pocket money.

Ugh. Hard start to the year with empty pockets. Going to have to all out push this quarter with big sales and marketing drive and pushing lots of content. That's my strategy. See if I can get picked up by any other the big education publications.

Push on.
 
We sell to universities/ colleges/ schools. Buyers different from CIO, Head of Online Learning, head of educational technology, or even in some case learning designers (depends on size of org).. anyone who deals with the management or delivery of online learning material / courses for that organization.

Happy to chat though!

@Phate, Web Summit is meh for us, but thanks! We did their US version, which was ****, but it was in Vegas so I enjoyed everything else :p It's just a bit too generic tech for us now, the conferences I need to be at are the pure education ones, where the attendees are all basically our potential customers (all unis and colleges).
We sponsored BbWorld and InstructureCon last year, both big and both cost me a ton. It was great for marketing and getting our name out, just needed to capitalise on the exposure more!

Spend some time on your model, it'll clear your head and help keep you focussed on the future. Chin up and keep pushing.
 
I suppose as a smaller company you expect to be doing a bit of everything. It does seem very varied in the role specification though. If you hate where you are and this gives you more money/ experience etc. why not.

@Phate, how's your canvas coming?

I had a meeting with a VC last night. They're really nice, like to lead rounds and more "partner" with companies, which is nice. I need more revenue though, which is what I know. It's my major to do...

Paid someone on Fiverr to do an editable responsive email template for me, matching our branding. I was looking at doing it myself, but the time spent could be used to, you know, sell something. Or try to.

Have to have a problem solving meeting with Arizona State Uni beginning of next week, see if they are still having some integration issues. Then getting to demo to a number of faculty about roll outs. See how it goes...

I've got a contact in Singapore (which is a market I'm eager to get in to as well - they love new tech), I just dropped him a "Happy New Year" reminder about contacts I asked for in Singapore to try and sell to. He's asked if I can be in Kuala Lumpur in April as his new role is to bring new Tech in to Malaysia. See where that goes... I said if that time there is packed with selling the **** out of our stuff, I'm in.

Also trying to find out who will be at SXSWEdu this year, potential customer wise and see if I can wangle any discount. It's Austin Texas beginning of March and I'd like to get there, but NEED to arrange meetings prior to that to make it worth the cash.

It's been a busy week.
 
Probably why they brought you in in the first place. I have been lumped with a project that no one wants when joining somewhere. It's great, clearly think they can lumber the new guy with the dead duck. Just try and get your head down on it and salvage what you can.
 
Think I'm in the doghouse. I was working until 2:30am last night/ this morning and the wife was fine with that, I got a ton done but there is always so much to do. SO she said she didn't mind if I cracked on tonight as well.
So, I'm still going now and she's gone off to bed with a tight lipped smile saying good night. I feel I'll get the brunt of that at some point...

I just have a **** ton of data to get through for an email campaign I want to launch on Monday, but I need to make sure it's all ready. I get she wants to see and spend time with me though. Bah. I have wine so I'll power on... just wanted to vent.
 
It's a thoroughly good/ worthwhile process to go through as even if you think you have everything sorted and you're 100% right on everything, it makes you go and test that and really have it all solid.

Wife is fine actually, she just wanted some chilled sofa time with me but she's been really good.
I have nailed things this weekend and tried to keep that momentum this morning but started badly as I was on a demo call for emotuit at 10am with a company in Japan interested in a partnership and had double booked myself here at my contract to meet our new group boss, which I ended up turning up late to. Whoops. I've spent the rest of today being a corporate suck up and shaking hands and back slapping with high ups in order to play the game and make myself as visible as possible. I suppose you have to play the game...

Annoyingly I am trying to play catch up now on emotuit stuff I set out for today. Got to get an investor slide deck updated and out to GSV labs, which is a great accelerator in LA. I have a relationship with them from about 18 months ago but we had no product then, and they really focus on companies with product and some sales and really growing that through partnerships with unis and colleges and schools. This is what I want; to get as much of us out there as quickly as possible to hit this 10k MRR (monthly returning rev) as this is the sweet spot for the investment we need (looking for about $1m) to grow dev team, sales, finance (I ******* hate that ****) and move over to the US.

Scored a meeting with the chief analytics guy at the Texas Uni System (they have a statewide system that controls from above what groups of unis do, it's more cost affective etc.) which covers over 14 Unis. I am made up with this one as we spoke last year but couldn't ever meet. Now I am heading to SXSWedu in March based in Austin where they are, so I'm aiming to have a sweet demo, and then massage a deal come march... it's the aim anyway! Would make the trip worthwhile!
 
Linkedin Advertising is a complete waste of money. Complete. Utter worthlessness. I once left a campaign running by accident and it cost me $1500. Oops. What did I get from that? Nothing. Not a thing.
I do a fair amount of articles, or try to, as I am trying to be better at putting content on the company site in general, and then cross posting to things like medium, linkedin, and then linking back to our site. Also, my tactic is "the more you look like you're an expert in your field, the more people listen" so I connect with as many people in my industry as I can. Yes, I have a few people say "Have we met?", to which I respond, we haven't but I was hoping we could in the future, or that I am very much an open networker and was hoping to expand my network and hoped that they didn't mind my reaching out.

With Linkedin the more connections you have the more you can see. Simple. So it makes sense to have a large network. I have... 4980 connections (that damn last 20 I'm going to get!) and I'll use it as a database to look people up, find them, try and add them and either message from there, or send them an email. Email is prefered as I can track this more.

I've tested; facebook, twitter and linkedin for marketing and advertising. Same campaigns etc. and facebook gets easily the most "responses" as in likes, or clicks through to site, but the audience is broad and we're niche, so useless for real targeting.
I found the best way to reach my audience is direct email.

My go to tools are: Streak for Gmail (pipeline management), Mixmax for Gmail (used for mail merges, campaign sending and email tracking), and clearbit/ zapier to join them.

I add a contact I've found on Linkedin in a Uni I wish to approach, create a "Box" in streak for that uni that filters all emails from that domain to that box to track it. Zapier then knows I've added a contact to a box and takes that email, looks it up on clearbit (finds all info about a person it can online) and creates a contact in my Google Contacts, in a certain contact group, which is then used to email campaigns from Mixmax.

I can then see how many people opened it, who opened it the most etc. Which, in this case was our latest news. So not expecting a reply, but the ones who have opened it most (one has 4 times) I'm like ah, I'll drop her an email or phone her to follow up...

Screen%20Shot%202017-01-17%20at%2010.34.42_zps3ppay7ur.png


Sorry, long post there... :o

Not saying I'm right, depends on your audience and what you want to get out of it. Just try some things and monitor the efficacy.

Pancake.
 
I use a paid version of mixmax but it's not a lot and I use a custom html template for my emails, but you can use all sorts and include attachments.

For finding emails, the clearbit app for gmail is great for finding people, or if I know the domain, I can 99% of the time find their email online if clearbit can't find it. Something like "firstname lastname site:www.domain.com" or build on that.
 
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