I am back to business and it feels good 
At PocketSmith, we are now shifting our focus on Sales, Marketing and PR. Finally something closer to my expertise! Because we don’t have a huge Marketing budget (in fact we don’t have a marketing budget , we do need to be clever and find alternative (and cheap) solutions to get PocketSmith known by the right people. So how are we going to tackle this issue?
- First of all, the three of us are coming back to the basics of business: selling. I just finished setting up a simple CRM (thanks Google doc to keep track of people to contact as well as actions to be taken in the future. At this stage, it is all about “planting seeds” and taking care of our leads.
- Then, Jas, James and I can leverage our networks to reach people in the right circles. We have spent some time meeting people, participating in business events and raising our profile. It is hard to measure the real impact of this time spent but we are confident these actions will pay in the long run.
- Moreover, we continue to release private invitations to the people who signed up at www.pocketsmith.com. Even if most of these people are still friends and relatives, we have been delighted to get applications from people all around the world. Thanks Google analytics for helping me understand how these people got to know us!
- Something we have learnt from our experiences is that the best way to sell an application is actually to show it to the people. Part of our sales strategy is then focused on getting opportunities to demonstrate the product as we are confident it is simple and attractive enough to raise interest immediately
- Finally, in order to get more of these opportunities, we are exploring different ways to get press coverage in New Zealand.
We have still a long way to go but the first feedback from early demonstrations of the product have been very positive and this encourages us to keep pushing forward. After the New Zealand market, we are going to seek commerical opportunities in South-East Asia as well as in France. It is good to be international
