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View Full Version : François Lamontagne - Azanka - Canada (Quebec)



flamontagne
09-01-2009, 08:52 AM
Hello everyone,

My name is François Lamontagne and I am the co-founder of a web development company called Azanka, which exists since 1 year and a half. Our main objective with our company is to NOT do consulting work forever. We founded our company to work on our own products and give life to our own ideas... and we are doing consulting work at the same time to pay the bills.

The fact that we don't have any employee yet allow us to be less impatient about getting new contracts all the time. The project we are currently working on is called TimmyOnTime (a real-time project monitoring and time tracking application that works over instant-messaging). We started working on it even before creating our company.

Neither of us is really good at marketing... and I'd say without hesitation that it is probably our weakest spot. In the past, we tried to market our product the wrong way. We tried to generate a "buzz" in the hope to attract a lot of users in the smallest possible amount of time. We didn't really knew what we were doing but it seemed to be the most common way of doing things (at least in our domain of activity). Here is another big mistake we made : we almost completly halted the development because we thought it was 'OK for now'. Several users who were really excited about our product eventually left, probably when they realized that it was not living to its full potential. The next year, ToT was pratically a dead project.

We learned a lot from this experience. Instead of pulling the plug on our project, we decided to give it another go because we felt (and still feel) that it had too much potential to be abandonned like that.

So here we are. Our product is back to beta and we no longer try to "generate a buzz". Instead, we focus on the quality of our product and we try to give the best service possible to our current users. We are less impatient (and more mature I guess) because now we know that building a great product takes time.

So this was our little story. We are still looking for help in the marketing area. I'm sure that there are several things we could do to increase the visibility of TimmyOnTime... and this is basically the reason why I have registered to this forum, to learn from most experienced entrepreneurs. Any comment, feedback, idea, tip will be more than welcome!

Thank you for reading

vangogh
09-01-2009, 11:41 AM
Welcome to the forum François. Sounds like you have the right attitude. When I first started in business, marketing was my weak point too. I didn't really know the first thing I should be doing when it came to marketing my business and before too long that business failed.

Having understood why it failed I started again with a better sense of how to go about marketing myself and my business and I've been learning ever since.

Focusing on quality and service are good things. They aren't the only things though. There's nothing wrong with generating some buzz as well, though buzz without the quality isn't going to lead anywhere in the long run.

Glad to see you didn't give up and are at it again. A big part of success is hanging in there and continuing to try.

Thanks for joining the community.

cbscreative
09-01-2009, 12:00 PM
That's a great intro, and I agree that you have the right attitude to make it in business. We have several members here who know a lot about marketing (the forum has sections devoted to the subject) so you are in the right place to learn. Welcome aboard!

My own experience was not all that different either. One of the reasons I took on marketing was from a sign business that failed in the 90's. I had enough talent to shame many competitors (not the "old timers" who were really good, but the newcomers who entered the biz thanks to computers). There were instant sign shops with no design talent hiring minimum wage workers and putting out crap, but they were beating me out on marketing.

I figured if they could market garbage and do that well, I'd better learn marketing. You've made a good decision to sharpen your marketing skills because the lack thereof has led to the demise of many a good business. Enjoy being a part of our community. It's a great resource to ask questions, learn, and bounce ideas.

flamontagne
09-01-2009, 12:22 PM
Hello,

Thanks for your responses guys! I'm glad to have joined this forum, the community seems quite helpful here.

It's true that there is nothing wrong trying to generate a "buzz" around a product... but the problem I think is that we tried doing this at the expense of the evolution of our product... who was at the time only a "great idea / experiment" and not quite a truly useful product.

Again, thanks for your responses

KristineS
09-01-2009, 01:19 PM
Wow, sounds like you have a lot of experience to share, and that you are wise enough to learn from things that didn't work in the past. That is always a big plus for any business owner.

I'm looking forward to your contributions to the forum. It appears you have a lot you can share with us.

vangogh
09-01-2009, 05:26 PM
the problem I think is that we tried doing this at the expense of the evolution of our product

Yeah buzz only gets the people there. You still need to be able to back it up once they arrive. But on the bright side you seem to have learned a lot for this time. As long as you learn something you haven't made a mistake or wasted your time.

Patrysha
09-01-2009, 06:10 PM
Welcome to the forum from another Canadian :-)

Your situation with the company reminds me of a quote "Nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising"

Not that your product was bad, just not quite ready yet...when expectations aren't met word of mouth (which is sadly a gazillion times faster to spread if it's negative) spreads quickly...especially these days...

It sounds like you've learned a lot from the experience though...and as Henry Ford said, "Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently."

Yes, I have been reading too many quotes lately...

cbscreative
09-01-2009, 06:47 PM
Yes, I have been reading too many quotes lately...

Maybe you should put a quote in your sig file. :)