Crap I wish I had more time - I haven't been involved here in a fewyears - since Google bailed on us - and I am...

Crap I wish I had more time - I haven't been involved here in a few years - since Google bailed on us - and I am frantically trying to get as many people as I can into my CRM - but it is hopeless. During its time, there was an explosion of creativity here - a wild west where people said what they wanted and did what they wanted, and were far more authentic than on any other social network I have ever seen. At times this was a high brow intellectual coffee hours, at other times it was a mosh pit - where you came out battered and bruised but learned in the process.

There was some crap here - of that there is no doubt - but during its time, this was a place of growth and I met amazing people from all over the world - and will miss many of you dearly. I am still working and playing in San Diego, California. Still getting involved in crazy ventures and projects - most of which fail but occassionally I come up with something mildly interesting. Should you ever find yourself here, look me up - there is beer in the fridge. I love you all.

Phone: 858-848-5001
Email: rob@action.associates
Twitter: @robgordon001
Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/caltrade/

Small Business Friendly Pricing

This is one of those things I have been intending to write about for years, but the post I have had in mind was going to be awesome and definitive, so naturally I never wrote it.   I am going to crank out a crappy post instead, just to do it, and type out a few thoughts - in this case about CRM app pricing - maybe I will come back here and update.

First, the no-brainer - let us start for free, and not with a "trial version" - trial versions suck, and two week trial versions are ridiculous.  Many pps these days often have a great deal of complexity and steep learning curves- that is expensive to us.  We need to be able to quickly get into the app, decide if it is for us and not lose a single minute of work we have put into it it.

A company that gets it wrong in this respect is Salesforce - they start at $50 a month for a limited version and only a two week time period.   No effing way Saleforce - i don't want to have to pay you $50 a month for my own data for the rest of my life- not even though you seemed to offer me some special deal    They are really leaving the lionshare of the small business community - independent small business market to others with this dumb pricing scheme.

A company, in the exact same CRM industry that gets it right is Insightly - 2,500 contacts - definitely enough to have value, social media integration and top notch technical support for free, and thereafter just $9 a month per user.  That's good, but not perfect - there is a "barrier to entry" for team formation there.  A team of three could form, and then when they hit their forth member everyone has to pay - so now it goes to $36 a month - a big jump and not insignificant to many solopreneurs, who may want to be on many teams.  I think there is a way for the CRM service providers to do better than that - encourage team formation in a way that will actually increase their paying user base.   For example a single payment that would allow you to be in as many groups as you want.   I have to assume they have already thought of that so perhaps I will ask them.

I saw another one - Free CRM I think, that was free for 12 users so that seems to be how companies in this industry are pricing - primarily by ?users" rather than by number of records of some other measure.

Lot's of implications to this, but I need to think on it a bit

The Biggest Problem with trying to use Google+ for Small Business

The brutal and dishonest troll attack I had a few days ago on Google+ made me think about writing that blog post "10 Reasons Your Small Business should NEVER use Google+".   I have talked about this before - at least to myself - through my RSS feeds, I read an endless number of blog posts with titles like "10 Reasons Your Small Business MUST be on Google+ TODAY".  

Almost all of these are absolute nonsense - self serving articles written by "social media consultants" that are "factually challenged" to say the least, and sometimes give outright false information, and the never, ever talk about the "downsides" of Google+ for business - which are many and serious.

I have some street cred on this - 65,000 followers and a business community with almost that many, and the simple fact is that Google+ is a horrible platform for small business - in almost every way.  I have a feeling this blog will become a journal of my attempt to salvage my investment in Google+   - but here is one of the biggest problems; when you follow someone on Google+ - you don't get their email address, even if they follow you back.   People often never even see private posts you make to them in Google+ - and TONS of people have dropped out - so if you made a great contact a few months about, it may be all but worthless now.

Two things drove this point home - one was the need to contact one of my moderators on the Entrepreneur's community there to send her a file.  That thing where you are supposed to be able to send someone an email on Google+ even if your don't know their email doesn't work for her, and shy hasn't answered two different posts requesting it - she probably just never saw it.   What a pain in the ass!   Am I supposed to go through this for all 65,000 people who follow me/ - or even just the 4,000 or so I follow?  - it simply is't possible.

The second thing that made me think about this was when I downloaded my Linkedin contacts - I got a nice list complete with all email addresses.  When I do the same with Google Takeout for Google+ I get a bunch of garbage - that essentially forces me to go back to Google+ to try to get the information, making it all but useless.   The reason for this likely is that Google+ was designed to defend against spam, but they really threw the baby out with the bathwater - your "followers" on Google+ have essentially zero meaning - increasingly even in Google+ itself.

Why am I beginning to think more and more I have been playing a suckers game?