I don't see myself as an expert developer but I have written enough software over the last 10 years both for my own projects and those of others to understand that simplicity is the best approach to software design. Every problem in computer science can be solved by adding another layer of indirection. This is a rule that has been well understood in our modern age of computing. The software that we build today are based on many layers of indirection from device to OS to languages to API to frameworks to products. Needless to say, many products today are also build on top of other products.

But it is in my opinion that these layering of indirection is starting to produce cracks in our morden software architecture especially in the hands of inexperienced developers. We have taken for granted that because we don't see these layers, we have assumed that they are not there. So as a natural result, we keep building more and more layers of indirection one on top of the other. The more layers we build the more computing power we need. The more layers we build, the more complex our software becomes. Our pains and woes as developers are usually directly proportionally to the layers of indirection we stack up on our products over time. It is not my intention to suggest that we should do away with all the layers but rather to control the amount of layers we put into our software.

Here is a list of 4 rules that I stick to when designing and architecturing software:

1. Do the speed test.
2. Do the drawing test.
3. Do the overkill test.
4. Communication

Do the speed test

The fastest way is usually the least layered way. Simplicity often manifest itself through speed. The fastest way is not always the best solution but it will always be a good measure that we can use to guide our development. If we know that this task can be done in 5 seconds using the fastest approach, then developing a solution that is scalable and does not deviate too far from those timings will help us do the right thing.

Do the drawing test

Visualize and drawout on a piece of standard size paper all the key components of your design and their relationship, can they all fit into the paper? Even if they can fit into the paper, can they be simply understood. If you end up with a mess of relationship connections and it is hard to tell if the drawing was done by you or your 3 year old, then you need to rethink your design. It is true that complexity is unavoidable, however, our aim is not to avoid it but to properly manage it. Do remember that when you are doing this, you should not be over simplifying your black boxes. The more detailed your drawing, the better it will reflect the complexity of your design.

Do the overkill test

Always ask yourself this question, "Am I building a tank to kill an ant?". Don't build features that you don't need. Don't design your software to handle everything possible, this is when you over build. Software will evolve as the needs change. The designs you build in today may not be what is required in the future. Solve the current problems elegantly and let your design evolve with the needs as they come. This will keep your code small, layers thin and provides you will all the advantages of simplicity. One of the tell tale signs of over build are code features that are in the coming release but will never be in use. Another common sign are the cascading of 3 or more method or function calls just to do a simple task. If they exists, you should reconsider your design.

 Communication

If you work in a team, communication is key to good and simple software. The evil of poor software are often the results of teams that don't communicate. They work in silos only to appear during integration. Remember that your code may be designed to be limited to 3 layers deep but when  you start calling other methods that belong to other team members, that layering may become twice as deep. Knowing the overall architecture and design of your team member's software is important because it helps to eliminate unnecessary layering.

These concepts can be adjusted to different levels of design from code within a product to frameworks that you use to product to product layering or dependencies. The more layers you have, the greater chance of producing poor software. There are probably many other guidelines that you use but these are the common ones that I reuse often.

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With the raise of China and India, Asian businesses are beginning to play a significant role in the world enconomy. However, very little SaaS web applications provide support for them in terms of languages. We have yet to translate YourAM to support all the main Asian languages but this move is a small step forward towards creating a truly universal appointment manager.

We are confident that more Asian businesses will start adopting YourAM and benefit from the advantages it offers. So what are you waiting for, try it today!

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I'm sure most entrepreneurs have encountered some of them before...

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This is how Wikipedia puts it:

"A placebo is a sham or simulated medical intervention that can produce a (perceived or actual) improvement, called a placebo effect."

Take this phenomenon and compare it to the strategy of many of the fastest growing social start-ups today but instead of using medical intervention, replace it with social buzz. Some calls it viral marketing or word of mouth or whatever, you get the point. The main idea is to have as many people talking about a product as possible in the shortest time possible. Then periodically repeat this treatment over and over again for the longest time possible.

After a period of time, net citizens will start believing that this product is really something and start trying and using it. The reality may be that the product in itself might not be of any real use or give any real benefits. But the placebo effect kicks in and all of a sudden it becomes the best thing that ever happened to us. Only when the numbers start pouring in does the potential of the product become something of real value. When this happens, the value then is no longer in the product itself but the people and data that it has accumulated.

I have seen this happening many times. I am very impressed with how some start-ups have executed this strategy effectively. But not everyone that tries to employ this strategy will work out as expected. This is the same with the placebo effect when applied to medicine. Notably, the ones that succeed are usually those that have managed to successfully convinced or employ influential people to hop on board their ship.

So maybe it is more important today to play mind games in order to succeed than to actually produce a useful product. Don't get me wrong, either way, there are tons of winners from every camp but these placebo start-ups seem to be the trend the last couple of years. What do you think? Are you a placebo start-up too?

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Based on a true story at a conference...

Always ensure that you are not the only one.

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It can be the smartest thing you ever did for your customer...

It can be the smartest thing you ever did for yourself...

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Have you ever thought what would happen if Facebook became your word of mouth for your services? Well, that is what we had in mind when we recently rolled out this new feature in YourAM. Imagine for a while that one of your new customers was so impressed with your services, he/she started telling his/her circle of friends online about it and it catches fire spreading from one person to another on Facebook. Get ready because we want to show you how you can do this on Facebook via YourAM. It might just be what you need to propel your business forward!

If you have not already signed up an account with YourAM, you need to do that right now. Go to our website and click on "Sign Up". If you are facing any problems with signing up, you might want to read our dummy guide first and follow the steps listed there.

Next, you need to update your Facebook email in your account profile under the "Account" tab in "My Profile". This Facebook email is the email that you used to sign up for Facebook or the current email you have selected as your primary contact. Remember to save your changes. The appointment booking tab on Facebook will only be successfully added if the email in your Facebook account matches a registered email on YourAM.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Next go to: http://apps.facebook.com/getyouram

Follow the simple two step instruction there to add our appointment booking tab to your Facebook account.

Step 1

The first step will require you to verify your Facebook account with your registered account on YourAM. If you are unable to verify your Facebook account with YourAM, it is because the email registered on Facebook cannot be found on YourAM.

Step 2

The second step is to add our booking tab to your Facebook profile. Make sure that you allow our application to have access to your Facebook information. Don't worry, we do not store any information about you or your contacts from Facebook. So there is no need to worry about privacy issues from us.

Once you have that done, a new tab named "Booking" will appear on your Facebook profile. You might also want to ensure that you set the permission for this booking tab to be available for everyone or just your friends via your Facebook application settings.

See the full gallery on Posterous

That is it. You are now ready to start accepting appointments with your Facebook contacts and allow others to spread the word for you! You can control your booking details from YourAM and it will be enforced on your Facebook booking tab just like YourAM booking page.

Now here comes the interesting part. How does the word of mouth happen? Well, a customer comes along and decides to book an appointment for one of your services. They fill in the simple form, selects the service, date and time. Clicks Book. Upon successfully booking an appointment, they will be asked if they want to post their booking details on their Facebook wall. If they agree, your company description along with the service they have booked will appear as a post on their wall telling all their Facebook contacts about your company and service.

See the full gallery on Posterous

If you think this is a great feature and knows of someone who may need it, please don't hesitate to recommend YourAM to them!

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In the beginning...

It is all about the mating rights.

Just be careful to brag about the right things!

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Since we launched YourAM, I had always wanted to write an article about the technology that was put into our product. Perhaps now is the right time to do it. Most people that use personal calendars do not understand the complexity of automating appointment bookings. To them it is a simple matter of seeing and blocking out available time on a dummy calendar interface. There are many solutions out there that already does this DIY scheduling. However, YourAM doesn't just do that because it is not merely a personal DIY productivity tool. We actually build YourAM to completely replace DIY scheduling systems and we think that we are close to achieving it. Here are some of the differences about YourAM and a dummy personal productivity tool like say Google calendar.

• It manages the appointment of not just one person but a group of people.
• The appointment booking process is completely automated via our algorithms.
• It is not a dummy calendar but a smart constraint resolution engine that accounts for many factors that affect real world appointments.
• It doesn't just manage appointments but also helps you analyze them.

For an overview of what I am talking about, take a look at the diagram below.

The complexity of the algorithms that is used to do the analysis involved in resolving a successful appointment that can be properly booked is nontrivial. Taking into account that performance is important for a system like this, a typical resolution time should be in the milliseconds range. The longer it takes to produce a bookable appointment means that you need more expensive hardware and deployment platform to achieved a reasonable server load.

Here is one example of the sort of complex real world problem that YourAM is capable of solving.

A skin treatment center with 3 doctors and 10 consultants:

• Appointment bookings must be within working hours of both the organization and the individual. Working hours for the individual and organization can be different.
• Each appointment requires a doctor, a room, a laser equipment and two consultants. Each of the staff involved have on going appointments and events that needs to be considered. Each equipment and room can have available alternatives and double booking is not allowed.
• Each different type of treatment is a service. Each service have different time durations and the appointment booked must not over schedule the time needed. Multiple services are allowed in a single appointment booking.
• Appointments must be booked 24 hours in advance and no one should be able to book any appointments that is more than 2 weeks from today.
• Notifications, reminders and alerts for appointments must be automated and spamming of customer and staff are not allowed.
• Customers must be able to book appointments online by themselves at anytime if they want to without your supervision.

The above example showcase only one type of the kind of problem that YourAM has been designed to simplify. That is also why YourAM is more than just a dummy digital appointment book that you can easily find on your PC or mobile phone. It is also for this reason that YourAM is starting to become recognized as one of the best online appointment management solution for businesses.

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If you do not know what Google Adwords are, you must be one of those monks living in a cave high up on the Himalayas. Well, maybe it is time I bring you back to online advertising reality and share with you 10 stupid reasons why I still continue to use Google Adwords.

1) Because I want world peace!

Really, why donate money to another organization fighting for world peace and human rights when you can give money to a company whose sole aim is to "Do No Evil"! Any commercial entity that can achieve this is truly worth my money. But recently, I'm not sure anymore after hearing about their team of batmobile's running around collecting my private online data.

2) Because it works?

This is a controversial one. I heard rumors about tons of people becoming near bankrupts after using it. However, I'm sure it must be really effective. If not, why are people willing to bet all their money on it.

3) Because they dare to call me for an interview

I have a soft spot for people who are interested in me. If they are daring enough to call me all the way from the USA to give me a chance to join them, then giving some money back to them isn't so bad.

4) Because I'm not charged for impressions but clicks

Unlike some popular online advertising networks, Google Adwords don't charge me when my ads show up but only when people click on them. That is truly a comfort to know until I realize that my competitors are the ones clicking on my ads. Ouch!

5) Because Google Adwords automatically bids for me

Technically, I trust Google's engineers enough to have them develop algorithms to tell me how much I should be paying them. But sometimes I get cold chills down my spine when I see how fast my bank account is draining out. These engineers must be really smart to have produce such a cool algorithm

6) Because I get to target the people I want to advertise to

In the Google advertising system, only appropriate ads are displayed based on the searched and browsed content. This is great. If only my 9 year old nephew and his friends knew about it and stop trying to see who can find my new products via their browsers first.

7) Because high volume keywords are automatically suggested to me

I like the way Google does this one. They suggest to me all the keywords then disclaim everything about its usefulness. I totally get this one because everyone needs to cover their backside from being burned. It sure inspire confidence in me like never before.

8) Because I get to choose when to display my ads

I get to decide when I start my advertising campaigns and when to stop. That is provided my money doesn't run out first which is usually the case with all those awesome algorithms they put in to help me save money.

9) Because I get to choose where to display my ads

Targeting specific countries are especially effective when you know where your customers are coming from. The only problem is that I will need to learn Japanese when I use proxies from Japan to figure out those ads.

10) Because I'm too lazy to look for another alternative

Yeah, you are right. I deserve what I get because I asked for it..

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We are an underdog ourselves, so consider our discussion here as a live experiment in itself. We have naively chosen to enter into a market that is crowded with competition. What is worse, we have landed ourselves in an unsexy or niche market that has little venture money. In retrospect, none of these matters because the reality is that we are already in the battle fighting for our survival. If you have faith like us that your start-up has a fighting chance of winning then these are our suggestions on what you can do to turn the tides to your advantage.

My short couple of years in the army has taught me that if we are already in the shit and shit happens, its time to focus on fighting our way out. Stop all that self pity and grumbling about how we should have done things otherwise and start accessing the situation properly. The worst thing to do is to panic. Rather, the most important thing to do in such situation is to establish control over what is happening. Below are some of our recommendations that have worked well for us.

Calm the situation and restore their fighting spirit

If your start-up is in a panic situation, the first thing that you will hear all around you is negative voices. When people around you smells the fear and they are overwhelmed by it, you start hearing the "we are going to die!" speech. This is where leadership comes in, filter them out! Why? Because they will affect your start-up's morale tremendously. When morale hits rock bottom, your team will give up fighting and that will be the end of the game. Motivation is key here. Figure out how to raise the morale of your team by doing everything necessary to reduce the fears that they have. If their fear is that they will not get paid, then go out and beg family and friends for money or get a loan from the bank. The objective is to calm the situation and restore their fighting spirit.

Regroup

Sit down with your team and figure out your start-up's strengths and weaknesses. If your product is not gaining traction then figure out what is the strengths and weaknesses of your product. This is important because you need to know how to exploit these factors as you move forward. Sometimes your strengths alone is good enough to help you gather some momentum going. Remember, you don't need to have the world's best product before good things start happening. However, having an idea of what are the things that can produce motion will help you figure out where to push towards to reach some momentum. You will need feedback from all angles such as your team, your users and customers. Your users may not necessarily be your customers. Some people will use your product but they will never pay you for it. Analyze all these information to give you some clear direction on where to head towards. Try to do as little guessing as possible, the more hard data you have the more accurate you will be.

Focus on where the money is coming from

Your team will need to figure out who are your real customers. When we say real customers, we mean those who will pay you in order to use your product or those who you earn money from. If you do not yet have paying customers, that means that you have not yet found your product to market fit yet. You don't have to be too logical here, reach out to as many types of industries as you can or as you can think of and see which are the ones that respond to your product. Follow the smell of the money trail. If you can sell your product to one customer of a particular industry, chances are you can sell it to others of the same industry as well. Don't try to be too smart here because you should let your customers choose you and not the other way around. The reason that you have not found a product to market fit is because your brain is getting in the way and you have been targeting the wrong group of people previously.

Know your competitors well

The next move is to figure out what your competition is doing and where they are heading. Understanding how your competition is fighting the battle will give you some insights into how to out maneuver them. It will also often show you were the customer needs are without doing all the hard work yourself. That is also why many start-ups will sign up accounts with their competitors. It is not a real surprise because this kind of practices are common with web applications. In order to win the game, you got to know what your competitors are doing.

Change the way the game is played

But it will take more than knowing the competition to win. Knowing your competitors merely ensure that you are able to compete with them but it does not give you the winning advantage. Thinking out of the box is important here. If you are coming into the game where there are already many establish players, you need to change the way the game is played in order to win. There is a reason why tons of copy cat applications do not end up winning. If you play the game exactly like your competitors and they are 5 years ahead of you in customer development and features then your chances of winning against them are very low. You need to figure out how to exploit their weaknesses to gain the upper hand. One of the common weakness of established players is that they are very comfortable with what they already have and are unwilling to switch from the way they have been doing things in the last while.

Google and Yahoo is a very good example. Yahoo was initially winning the game because they focus on the direction that you can find anything you want with Yahoo. But Google changed the way the game is played by telling everyone that you can find everything faster and more accurate with Google. Their market and solution are basically the same, which is helping online people find things they want on the web. Yahoo was approximately 4 years ahead of Google in terms of customer development and features. But Goolge effectively changed the way the game is played by giving everyone a simple entry field with no clutter and faster, as well as, better search results while Yahoo continued with their information rich search portals. The effect of changing the way the game is played is clear, almost all search engines today follow the same concepts as Google.

Stay grounded and focus on how to reach your goals

What are the goals you want to achieve? What do you think you can do to get there? You don't really need to change the world in 3 months. This type of overnight success concept seems to be the new virus that is spreading around infecting many start-ups. Many VCs and popular technology blogs would want us to believe it. It is almost like brain washing. If you believe in this, you are heading towards disappointment because the odds are really against you. Stay grounded in reality! Build your start-up one step at a time with clear goals and detailed steps on how to achieve them. Don't waste your time talking about how you want to change the world when you have not even figured out how to stay alive in the next 3 months. Don't set goals that are so big that you cannot realistically achieve it in any given time. Set goals to solve your immediate problems and work out practical ways to fulfill them. When you have clear direction based on these goals then start working your butt off to get them done. As your start-up grow, your goals will naturally become broader because you will now have more resources such as money and manpower to achieve them. With this approach, changing the world is a natural progression of your growth and no magic is required in between.

None of the points above are of any order. You could be working on multiple points at any one time or just one. If you combine point 2 and point 4 of this article, you should be able to see clearly if you are contributing something significant or new. Even if you are not innovative, if you could figure out point 3 and point 5 as you press forward, you can still win the game as an underdog. The points listed here are not some academic theory about how you can succeed as an underdog but rather guidelines that we have figured out so far. We are trying to implement all these guidelines ourselves as we press on ahead and we hope that it will be useful to you as well.

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You may be laughing to yourself about the statement we have made. How stupid it is to change the world one customer at a time. How long does it take to change the world one customer at a time? Unfortunately, I don't know the answer to that question myself. But one thing I do know, it works!

We have been trying many different ways of reaching out to potential customers in the last few months and it is really hard work. After trying out and experimenting with different techniques, I'm still not sure how to grow and attract millions of customers in just one month. However, we have noticed that one particular technique is working out really well for us. I'm sure you have guessed it by now. It is simply meeting our customers and giving them a presentation about our product, YourAM. This way of reaching out have become the most effective way for us to change the way our customers view us and our product. By the way, we schedule all our appointments with them with YourAM so that they can have a first hand feel of how it is like to use YourAM. ;-)

Using popular social networks, web marketing, cold calling and sending emails are great ways to establish initial contact with your potential customers but nothing beats talking to them and sharing your passion for your product with them directly. When was the last time you scheduled an appointment with your potential customers? Did you know that customers are more likely to purchase your services when they have met you before. This method of reaching out will not be the most cost effective way but it might be the best method during the initial few months of your start-up launch. It has been for us.

One of the worse thing you can do as a start-up is to stay locked up in your office, coding 24 hours a day and ignoring everything else that is happening in your target market place. If you have lots of competition like us and is in an unsexy or niche market like ours, you might want to consider following our advice here. We started realizing how important it is to go out and talk to customers when we started getting feedback from people who were trying out our product, investors who we were talking to, as well as, family and friends. Everyone of them were giving us a different story of how they view us and our product. The good thing is that almost all of them were giving us good reviews. Each of them gave us feedback from their perspective but none of them were really our real customers that we were targeting.

There were many surprising feedback that we got from businesses that we are selling our solution to. We would not have been able to figure out some of the key directions on our start-up if we had not gone out to talk to them. We not only started realizing what were the specific hindrances, the mentality they had, what they really needed but also how we can really help them. This particular approach of reaching out did three things for us.

1) It showed us how we were truly making a difference.

Instead of making guesses, we could see how excited businesses were when we shared with them how our solution can help them. Hearing from your real customers that you have a good product is like pumping steroids into your start-up. It feels vastly different from receiving an email that says, "Hey your product is great!". It also helps us to narrow down on which type of businesses is our product really helping and which are the ones that we want to work towards in the future as our product matures.

2) It showed us how to innovate and improve.

You might think that you have the best product in the world until you meet up with the people who actually uses them. Not everyone will give good feedback because the needs are different for different businesses. Nothing is more sobering than hearing from your customers that your product lacks this and that. What differentiates you as a true entrepreneur is how you react to their negative feedback. You can either throw in the tower, crawl into your dog hole in self pity, blame them for being wrong or listen and innovate with their suggestions.

3) It keeps us grounded on reality.

On the virtual end of our business, the web. Our overall traffic has been steadily increasing by the day. More and more people have been signing up with us and our growth rate has not slowed at all but is growing in a consistent rate. Our servers are handling more and more real time appointments by the day. What does that actually mean? Nothing! What we want is more and more paying customers. Businesses who feel that our product is contributing enough to their business operation such that they actually pay us for using it. That is the reality at the end of the day. Every time we make an appointment with a new customer, it remind us that we need to go out and bring in the sales.

Our start-up journey has really been a roller coaster ride. Perhaps we are finally starting to see some hope because this has been our most successful product so far. Help us make a difference among small businesses by helping to recommend us to them, that is if you think we can really help them.

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There is this myth about being a start-up that most entrepreneurs have. I confess that I was one of them. We think that we are out to change the world and because we have a great idea, the world is going to rally around us and cheer us on. After two start-ups of my own, I am pretty sure that this is just a myth. I am talking about average folks like us who are attempting to make a difference and not about some special case.

If you are still as naive, I want to share with you some of the things that I encounter on a regular basis. Get ready because if you are going to attempt a start-up, you better be prepared for some of this type of crap treatment. I am no longer negative towards this type of treatment, instead I have come to accept the fact that very few people really understands us. Don't take this article too seriously because I rather it be funny than depressive. ;-)

Start-Up Bum meets Relative at Family Gatherings

Distant uncle sees start-up bum around the buffet table happily enjoying his food.

Uncle walks over and asks start-up bum loudly, "So you still doing that start-up thing?”

Start-up bum quickly tries to clear his mouth full of food to answer. Uncle takes the opportunity to start the ambush as start-up bum gets caught off guard.

Uncle starts firing to kill, "Still not achieving anything?”

"Don't waste money!” uncle snorts.

"Go find a proper job.” uncle declares to all around the room in victory.

Start-up bum sees everyone staring at him, waiting for an answer. Start-up bum wishes he had learned the macarena when he had the chance. It would have come in handy just right about now. Fortunately, start-up bum gives a big smile with food still stuck in his teeth to disgust everyone and avoid another disaster.

Start-Up Bum meets Investor at Investor's 5 Star Office.

Start-up bum walks in nervously to ask for money. Investor sees start-up bum and smells his fear. Investor stalks start-up bum and sizes him up for the kill.

Investor position himself for the attack, "You have nothing innovative.”

Start-up bum tries to justify his product, but investor interrupts.

"The problem you want to solve has already been resolved.” investor says cynically.

Start-up bum tries to explain.

Investor pounds on start-up bum and shouts, "Show me the money!”

Start-up bum walks out of the door as quickly as he can fearing for his life.

Start-Up Bum meets Customer at a Cafe.

Start-up bum explains to customer about solution. Customer agrees that solution can really help them. Start-up bum shows customer their paying plans.

Customer asks start-up bum, "Can your solution also make coffee for us?”

Start-up bum answers, "No, but we design it to...”

Customer interrupts start-up bum.

Customer asks start-up bum yet again, "Can your solution also wash the dishes for us?”

Start-up bum tries yet again to answer.

Customer stands up and concludes, "We are not a charity here.”

Customer walks out of cafe leaving start-up bum to pick up the bill.

I hope that these 3 examples will give you a good laugh and help prepare you for some of the things to expect as a start-up. The key idea to take away from this article is not about blaming others for not understanding you but to be able to figure out how to effectively communicate yourself to them. The more convincing you are, the more successful you will become.

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Alright, we are not another search engine like Google. However, we do think that we are more appropriate for businesses than Google calendar. Why? Well, most businesses consist of more than one person and Google calendar is designed for individuals. Before you start throwing stones at us, allow us to show you why we think this way. I know this post might end up bruising some egos but I hope to share with you some of the thinking that was put into YourAM. It is not about who is better but about what is more suited for what type of usage.

Most of your personal appointment calendars will look like this. Cool, I love the calendar interface too because it is clean and simple. But when it comes to businesses, things are different. Try multiplying the appointments by a factor of 3 to 5 for a very small scale business. Now, you get a different picture with the calendar interface. I like to call this calendar screen "Playing Tetris" with your appointments.

I was browsing the web and saw this screen shot of one of our competitors and it looked way more cluttered than the one shown above. That screen shot was not an example demo, it was one from their actual customer. Do you really prefer to go to work everyday staring at a cluttered Tetris screen? Don't get me wrong, I repeat, the calendaring interface is a great tool for personal appointment management but bad when it comes to businesses.

Now let’s take a look at YourAM. This is how YourAM looks like with 3 to 5 sales staff's appointments. Multiply that 10 times and it will still look exactly the same. You may be thinking, sure you are deceiving us with a carefully engineered screen shot. But I am not, view the calendar on a day view and then multiple the busy appointments of 3 to 5 staff by 5 times and the problem will again be clear. This is when we are only considering 3 to 5 staff. What if you have 10-15 busy staff? The real issue here is that the calendering interface does not scale well as your business grows. The faster you grow the more vexing the problem.

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The reason why YourAM looks the same even if the number of appointments exploded by a factor of 10 is because of the way it has been carefully designed and engineered. Our innovative real time interface is designed to scale as your business sky rockets. It reduces screen clutter and helps businesses to easily focus on the important appointment details. The scheduler is like an automated time stack. Each row in the scheduler represents an appointment. Appointments that are over are automatically pop off the visual scheduler stack. The scheduler appointment information is both dynamic and real time. You can easily view past appointments by toggling the scheduler. Appointments currently taking place are highlighted at the top of the scheduler. What is even better is that you can simply manage your appointments via SMS without even going online. YourAM is smart enough to figure out the notification and reminder details for you as you drink coffee at your favorite cafe.

YourAM does better than automating appointments for multiple people. It integrates Google calendar, as well, so that each of your staff can continue to enjoy their personal appointment calendar with YourAM. YourAM simply updates the appropriate staff's personal calendar while aggregating them for your later analysis via our detailed Analytics tool.

It is my believe that any start-up that wants to change the world in their domain of expertise must seek to challenge the current established players by thinking differently and introducing new innovation. We have placed our bar of innovation very high and we plan on delivering it as we continue to grow!

Is your favorite small business still using appointment books, phone calls and emails to manage their appointments? Do you have a relative or friend who is struggling to manage their growing service based business. Help us and help them by recommending YourAM to them.

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I am sure that if you are reading this post, you are a fellow start-up yourself. Welcome! I mainly write articles relating to YourAM but once in a while, I will write about issues that we face as a small start-up. I have a natural desire to connect with other start-ups. I'm not sure why, maybe because they understand what I am going through. Very few of us starts out with a bang and becomes big in six months, most of us struggle to survive for the first one to two years before we have any significant results.

If you are an Asian start-up doing web applications with no major financial backings, then your chances are even slimmer. I'm not going to go into a debate about this issue of why Asian start-ups get no love because I think it is a futile exercise. Instead, I want to share with you our experiences on how we can improve and hopefully you too will share with us yours. Let’s explore one of the first issues that we all face.

How to get some attention!

Before we even talk about marketing strategies and getting traffic, you need to take special care to make sure your site is ready to be seen. Why? Because people are attracted to beauty and hence, appearances are important in the web application domain. I am going to show you two examples but viewer discretion is advised.

If both of the above are websites, which one will you stay around longer to read about them? By comparing the two pictures you would have noticed some similarities and differences. Both pictures are the same but one is unnatural, the other is simply normal. Does your web application look normal or even better when compared with your competitors? An inexperience entrepreneur will focus on merely functionality but leave little or no development time for aesthetics. This is one of the first reasons why your web application even though good will get no love. If your team are all geeks, it is time to get a talented web designer on board! In my opinion, a first impression last and if they don’t even want to look at your site, your functionality no matter how good is useless because they will never stay long enough to sign up and try it.

Make sure that your web application looks like one of the established players in the market. I don't mean copy them, I mean at the least look like one of their kind. Innovate with your user interface but don't become a Frankenstein. A good design and a great user interface does not make you a winner, it merely makes you a possible competitor. The value that your application brings to your customers is what will ultimately differentiate your application from your competitors provided you can get them to try it first.

The next move that most start-ups will take is to try to get on Techcrunch or Mashable and etc. We did that too. They are the holy grail to start-up publicity but the chances of them featuring small start-ups like us are little to none. And even if they did, the traffic send by them would more likely crash our servers than help us get noticed. If you could get featured by them, by all means do it! We are not being a sour grape or anything like that. From our experience, we think that there might be other alternatives that are more effective for a small start-up to get noticed before they show up on Techcrunch or Mashable.

Sit down and think about your strategy and target market for a while. I am proposing that you don't start bringing in large amounts of your target users right away from day one. Although the temptation would be to do so as quickly as possible. The reason is that when your application is first released, you will have bugs that you have not sorted out. No matter how detailed you are or how careful you are, bugs exist! You do not really want ten thousand of your target users or Techcrunch readers posting bad comments about how things fail to work and etc on day one. I think a better approach would be to post your application on one of the relatively low traffic sites first to get in say fifty users. Then monitor your application closely and see what goes wrong both with the application and your users.

This is what we are currently trying out with YourAM and it is really working out very well for us. By analyzing our server logs, we are able to see how real users react to our application and the problems they face. Sometimes, it is not the bugs that prevent potential users from signing up but other surprising details. For example, some of our initial users feel so strongly about us requiring their mobile phone numbers in order to sign up an account that they email us to protest about it. We naturally listen to them, explain why we did it and removed the requirement.

Remember, if you plan for an explosive start but are not prepared to handle it, you are asking for trouble. Rather, taking small and iterative cycles to growing your user base and in getting noticed will allow your application to cope better with bugs and growth issues. By the time Techcrunch or Mashable feature your start-up, you would have at least iterated over multiple cycles and your application would have been more prepared to handle larger amounts of traffic. More importantly, you would also have accumulated some amount of good reviews that would become an important testimony in converting some of your users to paying customers! Poor reviews are good as well because they point out to you what are the things missing in your application. Don't be afraid to listen to negative feedback but use them to help you improve.

One of the good things about an iterative approach to getting noticed is that you get to analyze the traffic as well. Not everyone that comes to your site will end up as your customers. Hence, it is important that you learn to analyze who the people are signing up for your application, what industries they come from, how big they are and etc. If you get ten new sign ups a day and 80% of them comes from the health care industry, then those data are telling you something important. Maybe you should focus on them initially because they are the ones interested in your application.

On the flip side, guesses based on your own assumptions can be potentially disastrous. I'm sure your pride will shout out to you that you know better but we have learned that 50% of the time, we were wrong. Let the real users of your application show you via the live data. However, I do caution that you need enough real data to justify your decisions. If you only have 100 sign ups, making decisions based on them can be a bad idea. In this case you should go out and get more users before taking any action. The more data you have, the clearer the picture will be.

If you need some example sites that have been really helpful to our publicity, you can take a look at our buzz page, twitter page or facebook page and try contacting those sites for a review. They have really helped us along in our drive forward to getting noticed.

We have probably touched on only a very small fraction of this topic. It is not our intention to be the guru here. Instead we just want to share with you the things we did that have worked well for us. Chances are it might be different for you. Feel free to also share with us what you did to get your application noticed. If you have a good article, share it with us and we will post it here for other fellow start-ups to read.

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Most businesses who sign up YourAM do not really know that they have a personalized public booking page on YourAM. So we recently released a new documentation on why you should sign up for your business booking page.

We are not going to discuss about the benefits of your own booking page in this posting. Instead, we want to talk about some of the people that are already using it. I'm sure you might know of a lot more but I just want to list a small example of very different users who we never thought would be using YourAM. We have mainly targeted traditional service based businesses such as spa, clinics, salon businesses and etc. However, our current user base seems to be showing us that our target market might be way bigger than we initially thought.

Our servers are buzzing with appointments and we are excited every time we see businesses make their booking page available to the public. Here is a very small sample:

Pythagoras Strategies - These guys deals with political marketing and strategic consulting for candidates and issue based campaigns. Cool! I never thought that there are businesses providing such services. After all, I live in Singapore, where the same political party has been in power since its independence. Anyway, if there is one thing that people in politics know very well is meetings, and lots of them. If you ever need these types of services, make sure you check them out.

Swizzle - These guys are closer to what we do. Swizzle does web design and development. I guess when you develop software for people, the first thing to do is to actually go and meet them to find out about what they want to build. I know this very well because some of our own customers book appointments with us via YourAM too! When you send a follow up email to a customer query with your booking page URL, it makes a world of difference. Customers are more likely to purchase your services when they have met you before, trust me on this suggestion.

Young Thomsen is a blogger and works at a pet hospital. He provides a range of services that is of interest to him such as tutoring, blogging advice and etc. I am simply amazed at how proactive Thomsen is at selling himself and his services. Kudos to you Thomsen!

We have teachers/lecturers using YourAM to make appointments with their students. University research labs using YourAM to coordinate appointments with volunteers. We have computer service and repair companies using YourAM to make appointments with their customers. We are pretty surprised ourselves at how non-businesses and businesses alike are finding uses for YourAM in their own areas of need.

If you are also using YourAM publicly, feel free to share with us your URL in this article too!

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Back in my days in the army, I was a pretty good long distance runner. There were only a hand full of people in my infantry unit who could compete with me when the race distance hits over 10km. One of the few lessons I had learned from the experienced runners at my first half marathon (about 22km) had made such a big impact in me that I have learned to apply it to my start-up business as well.

I think that building a start-up is very much like running a marathon. While you are heading towards success there is nothing but pain and endurance. The only time you can feel special is when you are reaching the finish line. As you get nearer and nearer to the finish line the crowds get bigger and bigger. The cheers get more and more motivating and it is then that you can truly catch a glimpse of the purpose for volunteering in this grueling experience. It is not merely about the cheers but more so about being able to finish the race and conquering it for yourself. It is an awesome feeling when you step over the finish line and your body and mind tells you, "I did it!”

Here are some of the principles that I have learned from other runners that I think can be applied to your start-up business.

When starting out in the race, move and position yourself to the front

The reason you need to do this is so that you will not be caught in the middle of the pack. Remember, there are tons of people who are in the race right from the start together with you. Even if you are a superb runner, the crowds can block you and really slow you down for the first 10km. This can be a really bad thing if you are competing to win the race.

For a start-up business, I think it is the same. When you first launch your product, there are tons of others with similar or identical products and ideas. I am very sure that almost everything that you can think of has already been tried or is available out there one time or another. You have to get yourself out of the pack and position your start-up to the front. This will ensure that you get a good head start. To do that for a start-up is to create enough awareness for your product and differentiate yourself from the rest of your competitors. This is a lot harder to achieve than it sounds.

After you are at the front of the pack, run your own race

One of the biggest mistakes that a novice runner makes is to try to run at the pace of the other runners around him/her. Your own pride is at work here. You want to lead the pack, following behind others mean you are second best. This is a flawed mistake. When you fail to run at your own pace, you will blow out easily. Remind yourself that being the first throughout the race will not help you if you cannot finish it. Conserving your energy and finishing the race is more important than leading the pack.

Your product is out and your start-up has had a good start. People are now talking about your start-up and product. Conserve yourself and stay lean. Spend as little as you need to, work from your parent's basement if need be. Don't assume that you are going to get funded with millions of dollars. Work with what you have and plan ahead to see how long you will last and how much more you need to stay in the race. Don't spend money that you don't have unless it is going to move your start-up forward significantly in terms of sales and revenue. Manage your risk and keep reviewing and analyzing the factors that will help your start-up keep your morale high and motivated. Keeping your morale high and motivated is important to prevent your start-up from a premature death because the journey is going to be painful.

Know when to speed up, when to follow and when to lead

Observe the other runners around you. When you see them weakening, pressure them to keep up with your pace. Force them to blow out early while still reserving yourself for the remaining race. When you are weakening, follow behind others closely while keeping your pace. Let them break the wind resistance for you.

While your start-up is progressing ahead, know your close competitors. Know what they are good at and where their weaknesses are. Analyze your own strength and weaknesses and compare yourself with them. If you cannot beat them, force them to compete with you where they are weakest. Example, if they need to maintain a high pricing to cover their overheads, drop your prices. Cover the markets that they ignore or are unable to serve, in short, know what their customers want that they cannot or are unwilling to provide. If they are way better than your start-up, follow them closely, duplicate their strengths and avoid their mistakes. Learn from them and make your start-up as another viable alternative. If you are way ahead of them, then keep innovating to stay ahead.

When you are near the finish line, burst out and give it all you got

When the front pack is near the finish line, the cheers and crowds will give them the added boost of adrenaline. That is the time to go all out for it. No more waiting and conserving. It is either them or you, so make sure it is you!

Well, if your start-up has come this far, you would probably know better than me on how to out maneuver your competitors. At this stage, you should go on an all out effort to dominate the market. You would have enough resources and market share at this stage to compete with them. If not, you will be the one watching your market share lose to your competitors as they fight it out.

All the best to your start-up and we hope to be hearing from you on the news soon.

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At Quadedge we are constantly thinking out of the box with the help of our users to try and deliver better technology innovations. We talk to people and listen to their scheduling needs to figure out where that fits into YourAM. We think that the future to appointment scheduling is not some crazy social appointment application. Rather, we think that the next leap forward to appointment management is automated integration with various widely used appointment software tools. An example is a new feature that we recently released that allows our business users to sync with Google calendar. You may be thinking so what is so innovative about that because it seems like every appointment tool does it.

Think about this, yes, almost all appointment tools have import features to allow you to sync your existing appointment data into their application. But this type of approaches to technology is a very closed model approach. The fact is that many tools have their core benefit that is not available in other tools. With YourAM, we do the opposite. We provide the option for you to sync your appointment data out to other tools at real-time.

Why do we think that this is the future of appointment scheduling?

YourAM is good at figuring out the requirements such as when, what and who should be scheduled for an appointment but Google calendar doesn't do that yet. Google calendar is good at managing individual and personal calendars. So instead of building closed standalone technologies, we decided to integrate them transparently. Now with this new feature, your contacts can be scheduling appointments with you and/or your staff through your booking page in YourAM. At the same time your synced Google calendar will be properly updated at real-time. You can manage all your business appointment needs with YourAM while still allowing your staff to benefit from the features in Google calendar.

In this case, we have loosely coupled both technologies together enhancing the benefits of both software tools. The result is a big win for the end users. They now can enjoy both technologies without being forced to choose on one. YourAM has effectively gelled business appointment requirements and make it work seamlessly with personal calendars. We are excited about other possible integrations that we could tap on to network many other tools to make appointment scheduling a truly automated task.

One of our core product vision as explain in our previous article is to unify this fragmented appointment management market of technology silos. We are excited to finally be able to take steps towards fulfilling that vision.

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