An easy idea that a friend of mine shared with me to alleviate procrastinating:

Once a week our manager turns on some adrenaline pumping music and everyone spends the next 20 minutes ‘Doing - not procrastinating.’

Answering emails, organizing workstations, cleaning out the inbox or the desktop. 20 minutes. Once a week. How much more productive would we be if we were diligent enough to have this sort of self-inflicted preventative maintenance?

Seth Godin has posted some interesting remarks comparing Viral Marketing and Word of Mouth.

Viral marketing [does not equal] word of mouth. Here’s why:

Word of mouth is a decaying function. A marketer does something and a consumer tells five or ten friends. And that’s it.

Viral marketing is a compounding function. A marketer does something and then a consumer tells five or ten people. Then then they tell five or ten people. And it repeats. And grows and grows. Like a virus spreading through a population.

Read Seth’s Blog: Is viral marketing the same as word of mouth?

The power of the Internet makes viral marketing easier than ever. Have you ever seen the Evolution of Dance video? Were you randomly googling a ‘man dancing’ or did someone send you a link or tell you to check it out? The video has been viewed roughly 100,000,000 times and has become a social pop-culture phenomenon.

Wouldn’t it be nice if growing your business was this easy?

We stumbled across a free alternative to GoToMeeting or Webex called Yugma. True to Web 2.0 form they offer a free ‘limited’ account and then charge for advanced features.

Yugma is compatible with Windows, OS X, and Linux. It only took a few seconds to set up an account and I successfully had my mom on the other end of a web demo in less than 5 minutes (which speaks to the simple nature of the software). If you have any intent to demo a software product or need an online collaboration tool that allows you to remotely control a desktop you should try Yugma.

Free Account: Signup Here

Okay…we’ve got this great software product that builders are going to love…all we have to do is get it out to them.

So how do we do this?

The obvious idea was to pick up the phone and start making calls. Phone calls are cheap. With the VoIP connection at the office we can call anywhere in the US or Canada for free.

But who do we call?

That’s easy. Decision makers. I want to speak with someone that will tell me yes (and send me a check). So we compiled a list of builders in the Louisville market (based on proximity to Indy) and started making phone calls.

Marketing Lesson: Cold-calling builders in the Midwest about a revolutionary and yet ‘unproven’ Internet product is not as easy as advertised.

The builders that would actually take our calls (very few) had a difficult time understanding what we were trying to sell. Our marketing message was cluttered and we had yet to perfect our elevator pitch. We hadn’t given thought to their perception of our product. We understood it, so why shouldn’t they?

Throw in the fact that our culture has conditioned people to say no. And don’t forget about how slow the building industry is to adopt new technology.

We quickly realized the uphill climb we faced and decided that we needed to reconsider our approach. We have since developed a multi-prong marketing strategy that will be outlined in future posts.

As our focus has shifted from product development to market penetration we have also shifted our frame of reference and constantly put ourselves in our customers shoes.

URBaCS was featured in the October/November issue of TecHomeBuilder Magazine.

I have subscribed to TecHomeBuilder for a few years now and I genuinely enjoy the content. The magazine focuses on technology in the new home market. I knew that this would be a great launching pad to get URBaCS off the ground…but I didn’t know where to start.

So I did what any shameless entrepreneur would do…I called and asked for help. I left a message for the editor of the magazine, Jason Knott, and within 24 hours he had returned my call and suggested that I send in a write-up for our software. Jason guided me through the process and was a tremendous help. He asked for a breakdown of URBaCS then compiled the write-up himself. And I’m very excited with the finished product.

You’ll find the write-up and a screenshot of urbacs.com on page 33 of the magazine. If you don’t read the magazine I suggest you start. You can get a free subscription (for industry professionals) by filling out this form. You can also visit TecHomeBuilder.com.

After countless hours of debate we have decided to take this blog to a new level and in a different direction. We will no longer post horror stories about the ‘doomed’ housing market. Instead we want to talk about starting and growing a software company. But more specifically a software company for the new home industry.

We will post insights into the decisions that we make and why. We plan to use this space to make our company nearly transparent to the outside world. You won’t find financial statements or legal documents here. We will however post pricing models, sales decisions and growth objectives. We hope to become a tool for students and entrepreneurs.