Testing, testing and more testing

Ahhhh, the joys of user testing!  On the one hand it's fantastic to be able to get hands-on with the website and see our idea brought to life.  However, the joy quickly turns to frustration when you find out how many little things are not done right and need re-doing.  A surprisingly large amount of things need attention which is worrying.  It's really testing my patience - ha ha - like what I did there?  Subtle as a brick through the front window and probably just about as funny.  Nevertheless, we are persevering with spending a few hours each night trying to find little things that aren't working properly so they can be sorted out before we go live.  Each day Base Creative gets sent a list of things that need their attention.  Things are slowly working their way out but we are running out of time for having a live website ready for use.  Unfortunately, the website is already late on a revised release date (because they missed the first one by 6 weeks) and so well overdue.  At the moment, we have a demo environment which we have been able to share with interested Universities and so I hope the glimpses we have offered via this will generate a positive response from them and they will make a decision in our favour to invite us along to their Freshers Week events.  Eyes open and fingers crossed!

Duty calls

"Order! Order!  I will have order in my blog!"  Today I received notice that I have to go on jury duty.  No worries, am happy to do my civic duty and help the community, however, the jury duty is scheduled for the middle of September and runs for a fortnight.  This is smack bang in the middle of our busiest period so presents a bit of a problem.  "Objection your honour!"  Not to worry though, I am able to write away and request for it to be postponed.  "Objection sustained"  Am not sure whether to be excited or worried about the prospect of having to decide someone's fate.  I hope I don't get some ridiculously long trial as every day I am away dispensing my own brand of justice, I am not going to be around to work on the business and it needs all the help it can get!  Maybe I could combine the two?!?  At the start of the trial I could get the defendant to do a video saying what they thought the outcome of the trial will be and then do a follow up video after the verdict is read out.  "Overruled! The Jury will stick to traditional Jury activities or will be held in contempt of court"  No, don't worry, that was just a joke and rest assured I will be taking my jury duty very seriously and hope it is a clear cut case so I can feel I've definitely made the right decision and not have any feelings of doubt.  Anyway, lots to do with the business and so need to crack on and not just sit around here telling the world what mail comes through door each day.  "Blog dismissed!"

Busy little bee

Busy but brilliant week this week with lots of work contacting Universities in the UK to see if any are interested.  The Student Unions we have been able to engage with have thought it is quite a novel idea and seem keen to take things further which is great news.  Am working on ways to support them with useful marketing collateral and perhaps some stuff to give away.  The only negatives so far has been facing up to the fact that our limited marketing budget is going to exclude us from taking stalls at some of the Freshers Week Fayres.  Not to worry though, am still confident that our work with the Universities we have got on board will be enough to get the ball rolling.  Once students start using the site and sharing it in their social media feeds, students at other Universities will also get involved.  Am happy that things are heading in the right direction and encouraged by the positive responses we are getting.

First office computer

New computer arriving today should help with the creation of marketing collateral and organising the company email a bit better. 

It's here: It's big! It's noisy! It has a giant 24" screen!  Exactly why did you buy this one dear?!?

Hi, my name is Grace and I'm a Microsoftholic

Surprised by how dependant I am on the MS Office suite of programmes to actually get anything done properly.  Tried to set-up the email using the default server but am struggling to do things like add a signature with a graphic to make it look nice.  Also not impressed to find that all the emails I send seem to end up in the recipients junk mail box.  Hmmm, that will make things a little harder.  Am definitely going to have to sort myself out a new computer and make a gold sacrifice to the software gods - Oh please look favourably on this small business, and smite me not with rubbish operating systems such as plagued my forefathers (Vista) but deliver me something usable lest my wrath of frustration be unleashed upon the new computer and husband.

The IT Crowd (of 1)

Webmail has been set-up.  You can contact me on grace.wooller@videostasis.com now!  Or at least you will be able to once I link up Outlook to the email server.  Quick call to the videostasis IT dept. to log a helpdesk request.  In my capacity as Chief Information Officer (yes, they warned me I would have to do everything myself), I have prioritised my helpdesk request to the top of the queue and will now attempt to try and sort out the email.

Oh crap, my version of office doesn’t come with Outlook.  Thanks retarded EU anti-competition regulation for making Microsoft break-up it’s office suite and sell it to me on a piecemeal basis thus increasing my costs. Grrrrr (angry because I’m spending money unnecessarily growl)

Marketing on a budget

Organised a meeting (cup of tea) with the Chief Marketing Officer (me) to discuss our marketing collateral needs.  Have to decide on what would make a good welcome/marketing pack for our contacts on campus to drive awareness.  Given our limited budget we are a bit restricted but think we can at least get some basics out there.  Definitely need some little A5 flyers to hand out and some A4/A5 posters to go up on noticeboards on the campuses.  All exciting stuff as the business becomes a little more tangible.  Am going to have to engage a design person to put together some basic marketing collateral content.  Hmmm, even for the basic things like just putting the logo and background blueprint onto something is going to cost a few hundred quid.  Am wondering whether I should hire a Brand Manager (me) and buy Photoshop and try and do it myself.  Given I am only after something reasonably simple, maybe it’s worth doing?  It’s a fine line between paying somebody who knows what they’re doing to get it done quickly and correctly to trying to save a few pennies here and there.  Mind you, given the administrative error at EuroMillions (they didn’t pick our numbers again!) I don’t have the deepest of pockets to fund the business from and so have to be mindful of how every penny is spent.

Summer intern project

Bit of grind work today for our summer intern (me) locating contact details for all the student union activities officers for each university.  Given our success with Keele University, I think this is the point of contact on campus most likely to be interested in the concept and also be able to offer the greatest support in spreading the word on campus (if we can’t make it in person).

Social media is go!

LinkedIn and Facebook accounts now up and running.  Looks like we finally have a social media presence.  Guess I need to start tweeting and posting.  Should be fun!

Social media is starting to come together

Lots of little activities to keep me busy: setting up social media accounts and starting to populate them with a bit of content.  Twitter and Google+ accounts now up and running.

First win!

The old saying "it's not what you know..." proved true today as a former colleague at the Pharmacy I used to work at (Bhavika Patel) was able to help bring in our first win!  Bhavika is working this year on the student union of Keele University and was able to share our idea with her team.  They seemed to like the idea and are keen to help out and so a massive thanks to our best friend Bhav for helping us getting the ball rolling.  I'm hoping this will be the first of many wins for us on the road ahead.

Better late than never

Update from Base Creative: Revised timeline for delivery sees us go live on the 13th of August!  A whole month’s delay!  Clearly, they haven’t even started the coding.  At least we have a firm date to work towards and weekly milestones to check in on.  Will be watching them like a hawk!

Ok, deep breath, here we go again – at least the website build has now commenced.

The waiting game

Update from Base Creative: the team will be reviewing the build and timing and be back to us tomorrow with a revised schedule. Am not a happy client and have let them know that.  We will be discussing a discount on the final invoice following delivery of the website.  Will wait and see what tomorrow brings.

The new career honeymoon is already over :-(

Very disappointed to find out at 17:00 on the Friday before the scheduled launch of the beta site on Monday that the design agency we are using to build the website have had a problem with resourcing to code the site and so the website will be delayed a further month!  Absolutely ridiculous that the project manager didn’t get in touch to warn us of the potential delays.  I guess the lesson learned for me is not to trust anyone you deal with in business to come through on their end of the bargain.  Very unexpected as they were absolutely brilliant in the design phase of the project and were one of the few firms who actually understood the underlying concept of the business when we were doing RFPs.  In retrospect I should have been asking for daily/weekly updates to ensure things were on track – that way I would have been aware of the problem early.  Oh well, I guess we have to learn these lessons at some point.

 

Unfortunately, it has impacted on our initial awareness campaign and so will have to cancel our initial marketing activities and refocus on the university/college campus drive at the start of September.  Grrrrr (that’s my angry growl)

 

It all starts somewhere...

Hello Blogosphere,

My name is Grace and I am in the process of making a career transition from Pharmacist to internet entrepreneur.  I have decided to chronicle my experience through this blog and hope you find the highs and lows that lie ahead both entertaining and insightful. 

I guess a bit of background is in order to start things off.  Having trained and worked as a pharmacist for the last decade, I decided that the pharmacy game is not for me.  There are a number of reasons but following years of putting effort into other peoples businesses, I decided that I would rather direct that energy into something I could build for myself. 

Closer to home, I am married with 2 small children and if I can survive them then starting my own business will be a piece of cake!  I also enjoy photography as a hobby and have thousands of photos of my kids which one day I will get around to editing and putting into an album.  I am lucky to have a very supportive husband who has encouraged and supported me in this career change.  He has a lot more commercial experience than myself and so will be invaluable in this new adventure.

So what's the plan?  I am launching a website called videostasis.com which provides users with the ability to create and share their thoughts about what the future holds through video time capsules.  It is a unique new twist on video sharing that is easy to use, easy to share with others and most importantly fun.

So here I am, the first step down a different career path.  I'm not sure how things will work out but whatever happens, I will learn plenty and the experience will at least be something different from working in someone else's pharmacy.  Wish me luck!