Archive for the “Things that suck” Category

The phone rang at 5:55 this morning.  It was my friend Joe.  Sent the call to voicemail then checked to see if it was something urgent.  

Joe wanted to make sure that I caught the latest news out of Redmond.  Apparently the good folks at Microsoft came to the same conclusion that I did.  Bing is a great product name.  Unfortuantely, I don’t have $100 million for an campaign to establish my brand.  So now Bing will be competing with Microsoft’s new search engine for the Bing moniker.

Ouch.

So the plan is to continue R&D working on tweaking the prototype and reopen the naming folder.  My first inclination is to change names.  A significant piece to the business plan is establishing a brand.  That becomes harder to do when there is an active campaign that may cause confusion.  I’m a bit upset about this, but will try to assess the situation dispassionately.  

More on the development of the Bing Personal Alert… or whatever it will be called… as it happens…

Thank you to all the folks who have asked about Bing and the product development.  Things are going slower than I would like, but still making progress.  I have received updates that indicate the prototype will be completed soon.  

It is both expected and frustrating to hit delays like this.  For those of you who stumble upon this blog while considering a project of your own, know that things will take longer than you think.  Did you just add time to your expected completion?  Now that you expect it, it will take longer than that.  

I will share a new plan once I have the fully functional unit in hand.  Until then, the timeline keeps moving.

Once I have the device, we will immediately begin user testing!  Exciting times ahead!

I’ve heard it.  I believed it.  I thought I had learned it.  I obviously had not.

Unless you have been living in a cave somewhere, you know “off shoring” is a hot topic for businesses looking to reduce costs.  For the entrepreneur, the opportunity to reduce costs during the business launch is extremely appealing.  I thought the same way.  Based on my experience getting Bing launched I would offer a few words of caution.

Two major lessons for fellow entrepreneurs:

1. Manage timelines and expectations very carefully.  Despite my efforts to keep the project on time, deliverables would lag by weeks at a time.  The next time I find myself in this situation I will put incentives and penalties in the contract that will help manage the timelines.  Keep in mind that the US view of timeliness may not be shared with your overseas partner.
2. Off-shore to low cost vendors only things where you can check the work.  Hiring someone to do repetitive work that you can do but want to optimize your time is fine.  Sending a critical project that you cannot verify is not.  Once we hired a local engineer to examine the product we found out that although the device nominally performed what we needed, it was not the right solution.  Without that expert insight we would have not caught the problems until a lot more money was wasted.

Don’t give up on the idea, but be careful!