TACIT AGREEMENT ON OUR ‘A’ ROUND OF INVESTMENT.
Straight purchase of commons shares. 🙂
This takes us through most of the year.
Now Max, Iain and I are prepping a pitch deck for the B round.
I want to double our headcount and burn.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-30 03:44:00 UTC
OVERSING ROCKS.
We make Jira look like a cobol green screen application.
Ok. So, not that bad. But close. 🙂
There is absolutely nothing like Oversing on the market.
Do you know why these companies don’t show you their apps on their web sites?
– Microsoft Dynamics
– Changepoint.
– SAP
– Tenrox
Because they look like your father’s Chrysler from the 1980s.
Oversing is complex. It’s deep. We’ll make it even deeper and richer.
And in five years, if you’re in the service business, then you’ll either be using it, or something like it if we fail.
But it’s going to change the category.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-29 13:29:00 UTC
UPDATE : Oversing Update : How Much Do You Want To Really Know About Your Business?
(curious) (software)
You know, we pretty much, all of us, have internalized that we have an amazing product on our hands. Sure it’s early. And it’s not like we don’t have a lot of work left to do. But it’s the kind of thing that once you use it a bit, you think that it’s SO amazing you end up asking “Why didn’t anyone do this before?”
The flip side is different though. And it’s just beginning to dawn on me. And it’s that, are there indeed things that you do not want to know?
For example, I designed a piece of software a very long time ago, and it was, somewhat like Oversing, so insightful into the business, that it was disturbing. For example, we could measure how much less productive smokers were. (Or rather, the data was odd and we discovered it was that smokers were running out of energy earlier in the day.)
Now, any experienced manager knows the reality that most people cannot really do more than four to six hours of work in a day. And that the most productive people are those that simply can work longer and more consistently. Repetitious work is quite different. But only some of us can really problem solve (concentrate) for eight, ten or even fourteen hours.
So, if Oversing provides you with so much information about your business, and so much ability to control that business, then, how do I prevent that information from being misinterpreted and misused?
I mean Oversing is like E.S.P. for project managers. and project managers tend to be pretty good managers if they’re successful; since Project Management of time and budget and people is a pretty unforgiving specialty with pretty empirical measures. I’m more concerned about the average idiot C-level (financial types) who haven’t managed people in a creative capacity trumpeting their positivist ignorance from on high – completely unaware that what is wrong is their illusion of man, not how the employees are working.
But, I suspect that Oversing’s various weights and measures and social scoring tell us the hidden value people provide, and that it takes time to collect all that data. So maybe we can use that.
I guess the compensation for employees is that in exchange for making politics in the organization almost irrelevant – actually powerless, and rendering the middle management political nonsense out of existence – that the transparency to do that comes at the cost of transparency into your work too. It’s hard to argue with the truth. It’s hard to argue with transparency. But to some degree, we don’t like people to know the truth about us.
One thing the internet has taught us though, is that while we were concerned about privacy, the fact is, that the loss of some of our privacy due to social media, educated us: we are all full of foibles and failings and once aware of that, they become meaningless both as questions of guilt for us and matters of judgement for others.
We are all human. And transparency reminds us of that.
Source date (UTC): 2014-01-09 18:18:00 UTC
We moved entirely to Oversing today, and we’re using our own product entirely. (Its fun really).
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-26 08:11:00 UTC
Gave a demo of Oversing to a knowledgeable insider tonight.
Got the appropriate reaction: “wow… everybody is going to want this.”
Exactly.
We solved the problem. 🙂 he he he he….
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-24 16:03:00 UTC
MASHUP
(joy)(bubbling over)
Oversing = Facebook + LinkedIn + Email + Microsoft CRM + Jira + Greenhopper + Microsoft Project + Halogen Recruiting Software + Scrivener + Confluence + Microsoft Dynamics PSA. Plus plenty of things none of those products do.
And in one very clean interface.
All we need are spreadsheets. But that’s off in the future.
Like anything else, it’ll take three versions. But I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be the standard app for managing white collar work, even if I designed it for Advertising, Marketing, Internet and Technology firms.
I know how to fix ‘the spreadsheet problem’ that plagues the world. And so maybe that’s the last killer feature to add…
Getting ahead of myself. But we did it. We created a killer app. 🙂
Gotta hire one of the best UI artists in the East to tune it up a bit. But it’s just what we wanted, and just what the market needs.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-23 06:04:00 UTC
SHARING THE JOY – PROGRESS REPORT
Oversing works.
We are starting to use it to manage our business. Using Oversing to build Oversing so to speak.
Now, there is still a lot of work to be done.
Imagine: Enterprise project accounting with powerful workflow manager, your favorite CRM, every project management tool you can find, and Facebook put in a cauldron and stewed together. It’s not a trivial application. But it’s creative. And with our sort of ‘workspace’ we can build all sorts of user interfaces for all sorts of management needs.
It’s so much better than I had envisioned.
VIEWS: FROM ACTIVITY TO PLAN
1) Your Activity Stream (like FB news stream for your business – and in project work this really does matter)
2) Your Alerts (messages from the workflow engine that let you know you have something to approve or other, and messages from other users – and like fB you reply or collaborate in context of a profile.)
3) A List (table) of your tasks so that you can sort them.
4) A Tree view (Ribbons, or narrow index cards?) so that you can organize your work and your projects.
5) An Agile Board view of your work or project.
6) A Gantt Chart of your project (if you need such a thing – some of us do).
You can manage one project at a time or a hundred. No difference.
Each view can also be filtered by the sequence
1) Idea – Things you haven’t committed to. But want to remember.
2) Backlog – Things that you commit to but will work on in priority order.
3) Board – things you are currently working on, and trying to finish.
4) Archive – things that you’ve finished.
The workflow engine can be customized for whatever is on the Board. So the moment you start work on something, your can create your own ‘Agile Board’ or Kanban Board, and work an issue at a time.
We started with these Categories of projects:
1) Sales and CRM (Goals, Leads, and Opportunities)
2) Recruiting (goals, openings and candidates)
3) Revenue Forecasting (Time Periods and Revenue Commits)
4) Delivery of Project Work including
…..i) WBS Projects (Phases and time)
…..ii) Agile and Kanban Projects (iterations and queues)
…..iii) Jobs and Work Orders (Production work)
…..iv) Tickets and Queues (support requests)
5) Management Initiatives and Career Development
6) Accounting Periods. (Yes we manage accounting periods like projects – cause they are. )
So you either load a template for a project for any given business problem, or you sort of compose a project with the different ‘panels’ you need, and save that workspace.
Oversing sort of LOOKS like all these different applications that are slightly similar, but underneath the hood it’s all tasks, relations, and a project journal and ledger, and a workspace for composing the kind of UI needed to solve each business problem.
Now, our killer feature is really resource allocation, and forward management of your business. But that doesn’t mean the rest of the app isn’t just crazy fun to work with. 🙂
Cheers.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-20 15:15:00 UTC
THE FIRST KILLER APP FOR THE ENTERPRISE OF THE 21ST CENTURY
I think we did it. I didn’t really realize it until the past week. But I think we did it. Don’t want to get ahead of myself. But…. I think. I think we might have done it.
Why can’t, say Google+, compete with FB – really? Because FB collected so many users that the network effect wasn’t possible to break. Why hasn’t something like FB or Gmail really penetrated the enterprise? Why are Outlook and exchange still so popular despite being two generations behind?
Didn’t get the value prop right. No reason to change.
Now there is.
Might be crazy but I don’t think so. Might blow it. Easy to blow it. But honestly, I think I’ve got it. Need to spend more on it. Different launch now. Different pitch. Broader value prop.
Sure, all those people who work in services businesses will want to use it just like we’d planned.
On the other hand – just about every company would be better off with Oversing than whatever email or collaboration system they’re using today.
We have started collecting beta sites. Got a few now. I don’t want to get too many. Just a handful.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-19 19:10:00 UTC
BRAND POSITIONING
I’ve settled on the brand positioning for Oversing. And I’m excited about it.
Now, as some of you know, I wanted Oversing to serve the Enterprise market. We designed it for the large international business with multiple offices, and time zones, and management models. That means, multi-location, multi-language, multi-currency, with organizational structures, ACL security, and complex workflow.
As we built our previous 100M tech and internet agency, we acquired smaller firms.
If your product starts out in the market able to satisfy the needs of the enterprise, you can, remove or turn off features and satisfy the medium business market, and of course the small business market.
But the reality is, we built Oversing for the Enterprise. And so we’re going to address the enterprise market. We will configure a smaller version that does not allow multiple currencies, or multiple locations, and this product will serve the SMB and individual market.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-13 04:44:00 UTC
OVERSING UPDATE : AMAZING PROGRESS
You know, there hasn’t been a significant innovation in the means of using technology to operate a business in almost twenty years.
And, I’m not claiming to have invented the shoemaker’s elves or anything. And it’s the combination of small advancements together that makes the difference.
And it took a year to get the UI right. And it’s right. It just FEELS right.
Yes, oversing is complicated. It’s an ERP scale piece of software. Yes, you can use it for a small company, and yes, even as an individual it will help you significantly run queues of work, jobs and work orders, Agile and Kanban projects, WBS projects and our ‘mixed model’ of agile and WBS. Yes, you can do all those things. And you can even mix them together.
Yes, resourcing uses our funnel-model, so you can schedule out in the future and refine as you move closer to delivery.
yes, you aren’t treated as a dollar per hour piece of meat by oversing either. We track six or seven basic measures, including likability.
Those are all positives.
But you can also run your accounting periods, payroll periods, sales process, recruiting, career development, strategic initiatives. You can MANAGE your business with full transparency.
And it’s not this trivial little list-making nonsense you get from products like salesforce. And unlike Microsoft Dynamics, it completely hides the accounting functions. Unlike Jira/Greenhopper, underneath, first and foremost, it’s a financial package that lets you see your financial performance into the future.
THERE IS NOTHING ON THE MARKET LIKE THIS PRODUCT.
OVERSING IS A CATEGORY KILLER.
Source date (UTC): 2013-12-12 14:58:00 UTC