Nicollet.Net

There was a 900-hour countdown on this blog. The hardcore fans who stalk me on LinkedIn already knew. For the rest of you, here it is:

As of today, I leave the warm safety of being a full-time, well-paid employee and take my first steps down the road of Bootstrapped Start-Up adventures. And I’m giddy like an Evil Overlord who just had his new Death Ray delivered by UPS. I guess I could technically call myself a CEO, but there’s only three of us so far, so the delusional titles will have to wait.

The Project – RunOrg

We’re building an online tool that helps associations, unions, organizations and communities manage their members, contacts, activities, events, knowledge and online presence.

• Members : the people who matter. Know who they are and what they want. Let them join for free or for a fee. Send them emails or let the automatic notification system do its job. And let them communicate online.
• Contacts : everyone you talk to — players from other sports teams, spectators who enjoy your acts, city officials… Remember who they are and how to contact them. Let them sign up for a newsletter and comment on your latest events.
• Activities : anything your group does on a frequent and regular basis — weekly dance lessons, daily meetings, Saturday night poetry sessions… Keep your members informed, know who participates, send reminders and collect feedback.
• Events : anything exceptional — a Grand Gala, yearly elections, matches against other teams, even the birthday party of a respected member… Manage participants and spectators. Keep track of who buys the food and who books the hotel and who purchased the train tickets.
• Knowledge : never lose important information when a member leaves. All relevant information can be posted online in a wiki-like format and easily searched through later on. A simple and effective privacy system keeps critical information safe.
• Online presence : set up a web site, write a multiple-author blog (and turn interesting wiki pages into blog posts), publish a member directory, let new members join online and keep the public informed of your upcoming events.

Obviously, we won’t be the first tool in this category, and we’ll be going against free competitors. Why would RunOrg be different?

Bad answer #1 : if he wasn’t afraid of people, the hacker inside me would answer that we intend to write godlike code and bring together a baroque triumph of technical prowess. I remain deeply convinced that our users don’t care about code quality as long as the interface is usable, the data is secure and the features are delivered on time.

Bad answer #2 : every member of the RunOrg team holds or recently held a position of responsibility in an association or community, and frequently interacts with other people in such positions in other associations. This is where I would insert the standard blathering about how we intimately know the needs of our customers, how we eat our own dog food to make sure it tastes good, and that’s why our product will rock your socks off like no member management tool ever did (I swear there’s a sock rocker feature in the design blueprints). That’s not the case for all of our competitors, but several of them are as familiar with the issues as we are.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for my daily prayer to Seth Godin and Kathy Sierra. I’ll be right back.

The Revolution

Good answer : the challenge of building a tool for associations, unions, organizations and communities is neither software engineering nor interface design. Software engineering is for computers, interface design is for users, and RunOrg is for groups. What we need to be doing is social engineering : making sure that in addition to being friendly to the computer and useful to the user, the tool encourages behavior that helps the group thrive and discourages behavior that has a negative impact on the group.

Make sure you pre-order our $299 RunOrg™ neural implants, which send stimuli directly into the pleasure centers in the brains of your members to keep them acting in the best interest of the group. Surgery not included.

Just kidding. Or am I?

Failing to see the needs of associations and groups as deeply rooted in social behavior leads to mistakes being repeated over and over again, both by service providers and by group leaders. The high turnover rate in these groups imposes some hard requirements on any long-term software strategy. Members spend most of their time not participating in the community, so involving them enough to keep the community alive is a real challenge. There’s a fine line to be walked between spamming members to death and boring members to death, and it’s easy to create tools that turn that line into a line of negative width.

We’re in the business of helping communities thrive. We do it by writing software that recognizes that communities are more than lists of members, activities and events. For every feature, we ask ourselves how it can help members get involved in their community, both online and offline.

What’s Next?

The RunOrg project will begin its Beta phase at the end of November 2010. It will be held in French, although an English version is possible if there is overwhelming demand for it. You can pre-register (or simply keep in touch) by sending me an email (victor@nicollet.net) or from the project home page.

The first commercial version will be done by the end of January 2011, and beta participants will get nifty bonuses to thank them for their time.

The current project site is hosted on a small laptop in a small room at home, so it might break down unexpectedly (we’ll move to professional hosting next week).

Until then, you can read the RunOrg/blog (in French) to learn more about our project. You could also follow us on Twitter (@RunOrg) or join our Facebook Page.