Nicollet.Net

If you’ve ever been a teacher, you know what a model pupil looks like. Most of the time, you have the bad pupils—maybe they can’t get it, or maybe they don’t want to get it, so they just annoy the hell out of you. Then, from time to time, you get that really brilliant child who understands everything you say. And points out your mistakes. Sale gosse. And then, there’s the model pupil: he’s smart enough to get along, but not too smart, and he’s polite and always willing trying to please you without getting in the way, and always does everything that’s expected of him just right.

Being a model pupil is at the same time a very obvious characteristic and a very subtle one, because it does not involve doing many things right as much as doing few things wrong. It may take a while to notice the lack of annoyance, the absence of sloppy solutions put together hastily, the missing thousand paper cuts you get when dealing with the non-model version of your pupil. But when you finally notice, you treasure it and admire it.

One such model pupil is Less Annoying Software. It’s an online tool for keeping track of your customers, potential customers, and any interaction you have with them when selling or supporting your product.

I swear, there must be some kind of secret checklist about how to get your online business just damn right that I never heard about. And these guys must have found it and followed it without skipping a single item (including the dreaded «gargle rusty nails» and «seek the holy grail twice» parts). The end result is a customer experience that’s smoother than the smoothest thing you can think of because it’s late and I’m out of clever analogies.

Send out a Clear Message

• Pick one and own it [says Jason Cohen]. Less Annoying Software picked «Don’t be so annoying» and wrapped the entire company around that message. It’s pretty good news, since they’re going up against SalesForce, and not being annoying is a statement that’s more easily identified with than «Salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud-computing company»
• Have a good name with an available domain name. Their name is basically a restatement of their core values. You can hear the name and understand that it’s software that’s less annoying, which is quite surprising given that the usual attributes of software are «runs on a computer», «is made by people» and «is annoying». Surprising enough to have me check their web site to determine what kind of software it is. And their domain name is available (admittedly, they didn’t manage to get this right – they should protect their name better).

Establish Online Presence

• Have a blog. They do. Here. And it’s quite alive too : recently, there have been new posts almost every single day. Nothing like your average corporate blog that gets ten updates and then goes into several years of just existing.
• Have a blog about something else than yourself. The point being that no one cares about Less Annoying Software enough to subscribe to their blog, or recommend their blog to their friends, or link to their blog from their own blog (I know, I’m special). Tyler King (one of the two founders) writes the blog, and dabbles in things that are relevant to the daily activities of his potential customers—small business owners overwhelmed by the complexity of doing business in the Web 2.0 era.
• Have a blog with the latest in community-enabling features. You want people to participate. This part would take an entire article to explain correctly, but in short, you need comments (with several ways of logging in : OpenID, Facebook, Twitter and WordPress are great), trackbacks, the Facebook “Like” button, a “Retweet” button (as well as the various “Share” buttons for your typical bookmark sharing sites), an RSS Feed, a Twitter account and an e-mail subscription (I might get around to setting that one up too. One day.)
• Sign up on blog directories. I found them through Technorati. Sure, signing up there only gets you a small trickle of visitors. But these visitors must be bloggers or near-bloggers, if they’re browsing the low-authority blogs on Technorati in search of a gem—people you want to attract.

Design your Landing Page appropriately

• Tell people what you are right away. This way, they won’t go away. The Easy Online Customer Management line is a great start. Start organizing your business caught my eye too. It took me a short while to notice the grey text right above the video, though.
• Provide a quick overview. For the passive viewers, a video does fine because it does not involve the same effort as reading text and doing the 1000-words-to-one-picture conversion in your head. The only issue with the video is that it sounds like a child’s voice, which is not reassuring (a false alarm : you can stalk Tyler King on LinkedIn to find out his actual age, if you want ). Oh, and maybe a few screenshots or a quick scene of entering a contact would have been good too.
• Provide a hands-on demo. This is great for the active viewers who want to try things out themselves. The Less Annoying Software registration is almost instantaneous – only four moderately invasive fields to fill. And you can even take the guided tour (an in-browser tutorial) without registering. Never ask people to provide you with a credit card when they’re trying your software out—most will recognize it for the filthy scheme that involves waiting for me to forget that you can charge my card, although I don’t use your software. Less Annoying Software clearly state No credit card required and I believe it’s a great move.
• Customer references are always great. If you have many customers, or several high-profile customers, quote them (using their brand logo if possible). Since Less Annoying Software is pretty young, they don’t have that many customers yet, so a few quotes will do fine. Which reminds me that I should add a quotable sentence in here. So here it comes.

If you were planning on having lunch today, don’t. Spend those $10 on Less Annoying Software instead—the simplest and most elegant piece of customer management software that ever crossed paths with a business owner.

• Detailed information should be readily available. If people want to dig deeper, don’t get in their way. People care about feature lists (check), pricing (check), who is behind this (check, but close), and contact information (check). In fact, the contact information on Less Annoying Software includes an e-mail, a phone number and a contact form, just like I love them. Glee!

So, is it worth it?

It does, if you’re the right person. I’ll just quote their web site on this:

So if you’re a small business owner, a freelancer, a consultant, or a member of any other small business, Less Annoying Software is for you. We know that you don’t have an I.T. department, so we handle all the setup and hosting for you. We know you’ve got better things to do than worry about your software, so we make things as easy as possible to let you focus on your core business.

I love the software. I won’t use it because I’m an I.T. department all by myself (and a quite efficient one—I always pick up the phone when I call myself), and because I’m very fluent with vTiger, an open source CRM package (for reasons that will become obvious later this year, so stay tuned). But I can recognize its benefits—it covers almost all my typical CRM needs, except maybe for setting reminders at specific times of the day (I can use Google Calendar for that, though).

The software itself was obviously written by someone familiar with modern development techniques. They used FamFamFam icons (a sure sign of someone who has been around on the web development scene), jQuery and jQuery UI, and the server runs PHP. The JavaScript code is pretty clean (although it denotes a lack of knowledge about closures). I’d say the application was written by a competent software developer (I’d estimate it to about three months of work for the application itself).

The web application itself gets an YSlow grade of D, and I have loading times of nearly 3 seconds on most pages, but all of this would be solved by simply 1° adding ETags to the icons and 2° grouping and gzipping together the JavaScript. On the other hand, I’m in France, so your local performance might be higher.

Final words: use it.

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