I’ve been fortunate enough to spend a little time over the past few days with Google Business Development Manager Tom Duterme, as he’s been chatting to and giving advice to a bunch of online companies at the XMedia Lab conference held in our home town in Silicon Welly and talking about what google looks for in potential acquisitions.
Visibility Mobility and Freedom for you and your business
Tools: We run our business very heavily around web tools, not because we like tech, but because we value visibility, mobility and freedom. We use gmail for email, google calendar for central calendaring, google docs and spreadsheets for word processing and speadsheets , PlanHQ for Planning, team collaboration and project management, Xero for accounting, Pipeline Deals for deal tracking and bunch of other tools like google analytics for website tracking, feedburner for blog reader tracking, crazyegg for usability analysis, campaign monitor for email marketing, silverstripe for content management wordpress for blogging and I’m just picking out some of those we use most frequently to make it happen.
Integrated Experience: When I get sent a document or spreadsheet, I open it in gmail and just click on the open in google docs link, or view as html if I’m just going to quickly scan it. When I hit my google calendar, I see all the appointments I’ve scheduled in and the key actions I’ve got to get done to stay on track with our master plan feeding in from PlanHQ, so I don’t just end up in meetings all day. As you can see, google doesn’t have a product for everything, (although they play a role in most areas of running your business now), and they rely on the eco-system around them delivering good products.
Fitting in to the eco-system
When you provide an online business management tool like PlanHQ, you build it with this eco-system of other products in mind, and always assume more will keep turning up. You try and avoid building something that someone else does, you build to plug-in to them as the ecosystem grows. When looking at google, you always assume they’re going to do the basics, and probably give them away for free, so you build the more targeted and niche applications that will use and connect with the basics they provide. (eg. Google have google docs, so they want to see products making and managing documents in their engine.)
PlanHQ linking in: It’s early days for PlanHQ connecting into the eco-system, its something we also want to do more of, but like everything, it has to be timed. We link in with Google Calendar and the iphone in the most basic way, which works cool, but we’ll over the coming months be doing a lot more, including pushing out plans and progress reports directly into google docs and spreadsheets, and making it easier to manage actions in PlanHQ from anywhere including close to your gmail inbox.
Free Adwords vouchers coming soon to PlanHQ customers
BTW - We’ll also soon be offering free google adwords vouchers to all of our paying customers who don’t already have adwords accounts, more on this soon when It gets to the top of the plan ; )
