Webstrong Ltd

Earlier this week we launched The Board. And now we’re looking for as many business owners as possible to join our Facebook Page.

The Board is an exclusive support structure for your business delivered in the form of monthly board meetings. These meeting are chaired by a trained facilitator who controls the meeting, ensuring that everyone gets a fair share of the allocated time.

This is an exclusive club. So it’s not for everyone. We want entrepreneurs, innovators, natural sales people, people with boat loads of experience. We want the very best people, so the advice they give is of the very best quality. If this sounds like you, then The Board needs you.

To find out more, visit The Board website and apply for an information pack or you can visit us on Facebook at our fan page.

We’ve also compiled at quick Q&A, addressing many of the questions we’ve received about The Board so far. If you’d like to know more, then reading these will be a good place to start:

Is my information confidential? Confidentiality is a key area. All members sign a non-disclosure agreement as part of the sign up process. Only members can attend meetings and a member must sign an NDA in advance of attending a meeting.

Will my competitors be at the meeting? Each meeting will be made up of members from non-competing sectors. Actually it is expected that members’ services will compliment each other and there may be market opportunities from within the group.

Do I have to stay in the same group for 6 months? No, if you are not happy with the expertise in any particular group we will facilitate you in joining another group which is directly suited to your needs

Define what I receive for €200:

• A three-hour monthly meeting with four fellow experts.
• Access to emergency meeting to discuss any urgent business issues.
• Online 24-hour confidential forum to ask members advice based on their experiences (launch date tbc).
• A structured environment to focus on your business.
• Procedure to set goals and continuous monitoring to ensure goals are achieved.
• Complimentary negotiation service on behalf of your business. You only pay if we save you money and what you pay is a percentage of the savings achieved.
• Internal Meeting Management Software (available in June 2010). Our software makes it easy for our members to implement their strategies.
• Discounts – Members qualify for exclusive discounts. Our boarding card will be updated monthly. We will add a new discount every month.
• Our monthly fee will not increase but we will continually add to our services

Is this like BNI (business network international)? This is a not a networking service. However by its nature it will offer networking opportunities between members. Our service it to allow business owners to step back from their business to focus on and grow their business in order to increase profits.

You should be paying me for advice! I am in business 12 years and I have no issues. All businesses evolve. To be the best business in a sector, owners must continuously be in tune with the market and customer demands. Our meetings gives members an opportunity to discuss cash flow, banking, taxation, sales, staffing issues or any other issue a business owner may have. By joining The Board it will help you secure your business for another 12 years!

I am a one-man band, is this suitable for me? This is a perfect structure for you. Business can be a lonely place. We are offering you a virtual board of directors. We are giving you a soundboard to use to bounce ideas off, to share their experiences with you. You will never have to make a decision on your own again.

I already have a board of directors, so I don’t need another? Using The Board can help you to impress your directors. You will go to your internal board meetings focused, with clear thought out strategies and solutions. You can use the board to solve operational levels that your directors will not be sympathetic towards.

How will I know there will be other members equipped to help me? Every member is a business owner like yourself and an expert at running a business. They like you have extensive experience and their experiences mirroring your advice will be very beneficial. At any stage if you have a specific area of expertise required we can arrange an extraordinary meeting to deal with that issue specifically.

35 minutes seems short, how will this sort my problems? This is a three-hour meeting and we plan to launch a 24hours Q&A online forum for members. Our members to date have found that by giving advice they are actually learning themselves. All the advice given around the table is generic to all business so everything that happens in the meeting is relative to your business.

What is the negotiation service? We can negotiate a deal on your behalf. You can always do your own negotiations but our results speak for themselves. We saved one company €18,000 on rent alone in the last 6 weeks. You only pay for the service if we achieve savings and our fees is only a small percentage of the savings you achieve.

What is the PA for a Day? This service is optional and is very much on a need only basis. You can register for it at no cost and then if you ever need a PA it will be available. We can book flights, tidy your office, type letters, record minutes of meetings etc. Our philosophy is to offer a solution to fit our members needs. If you need something tell us, if we don’t offer it today, we will strive to add it to our services.

Where’s the catch? There is none. Join The Board to focus on your business, in order to grow your business, in order to increase your profits.

Can anybody join? No, this is an exclusive club and we have a strict application process in advance of granting a new membership. We want entrepreneurs, innovators, and natural sales people, people with boatloads of experience. We want the very best people, so the advice they give is of the very best quality to fellow members.

Further information can be obtained from The Board website.

We’re excited to be introducing Writecamp today.

It’s a startup project we’ve been working on behind the scenes for a little while but now we’re ready to tell you all about it.

Writecamp will turn your Basecamp Writeboards into a powerful content management system for a normally static website. It’ll be ideal for web designers who want to give their clients some control over the content of their website. If Joomla, Drupal or even WordPress have proven too complicated for your clients then you should definitely check out Writecamp.

We’ll be blogging our experiences in detail over on the newly launched Writecamp Blog. We’ll also be updating our new Twitter account dedicated to the project.

We want to hear from anyone who has something to say about this concept. Drop us an email here as usual or on hello@writecamp.com.

More details to follow on the Writecamp Blog.

Today we’re quietly launching a new client site aimed at people wanting to do a bit of entertainment at home this Christmas.

PoshPuds.ie is a simple site that lets you browse and order fresh cakes and other desserts from the Mardi kitchens out in Deans Grange. These desserts are all hand made and use the same ingredients that you’d use in your own kitchen so they taste totally amazing. Believe me, I know!

We’ve grouped the desserts into different categories that reflect the event at which they are probably most appropriate. These include Dinner parties, weddings, birthdays, christenings and even afternoon tea, but you can mix and match whatever you like.

You can order these desserts and they’ll be delivered out to you. And feel free to take the credit for them with your guests as well!

There will be a more formal launch in January, but we couldn’t wait until then. Feedback welcome and please remember to tell your friends!

We have always provided email marketing services, it’s an area in the business that’s received constant growth over the years, but lately we’ve seen some exceptionally strong demand for this service so we decided to launch a dedicated site to give it the presence it deserves.

Mailbag is the new name for our email marketing service, and it has been built exclusively for our email marketing customers. It shows people exactly what we provide, explains all the costs involved and gives examples of previously sent campaigns. There’s also a simple sign up form and a direct link for existing customers to login.

We’ve got some great software to send the campaigns, manage subscribers and track all the open rates & click throughs, but for the customer, the real value is in the service and the quality of the email designs we provide. That’s the difference between us and the next guy.

For all you web developers and designers reading this post, relax, this isn’t for you anyway. Mailbag is a service we provide to non technical, non geeky people. There’s huge value in this software and in the design and support services that surround it. It’s been a great source of business for us in the past, and we’re really excited about launching it as a dedicated service.

The website URL is http://mailbagmarketing.com

Comments and feedback welcome.

Every day on Twitter we see people with the same problem. They can’t send direct messages to people who don’t follow them. Do a search any time and you’ll see dozens of people complaining about this every single day. We wanted a way to help these guys, and came up with Relayto.

Relayto is a message relay service that passes on any direct message it receives to another Twitter account. Getting started is easy, just follow @relayto and you’ll be sent instructions on what to do next.

We believe there are a lot of legitimate cases where a Twitter account would want to receive direct messages from people they don’t know. For instance, a business listening to customers and receiving negative feedback, or answers to an account that’s running a competition or a raffle. This is the target audience for Relayto to begin with.

How Do You Use It?

Using Relayto is simple, and best explained with an example. Say you want to send a relayed direct message to @shortdotie, you would write “d relayto shortdotie Hi there! I really like your site.”

The Relayto service will receive your message, figure out who you want to send it to, then forward your message to that account. And, if it’s successfully delivered you’ll receive a delivery report in much the same way that you would with a text message on your phone.

What’s The Catch?

There’s just one catch. The recipient must be following the @relayto account for it to work. We like to think of this as akin to any other opt-in service. And we believe there are some genuine benefits to a service like this. For example, it’s a silent account, so you won’t be bombarded with tweets from all those people you don’t want to listen to, and you’re opening your account up to receiving private feedback or private messages where a public message might not be suitable. It’s just another option.

Promoting The App

Last week I made a short presentation at The Connector Launch Event in Kooba on Leeson Street. I got some really good feedback on the night and I think it went down quite well. A lot of people can relate to the problem we’re trying to solve and that’s why we decided to build it in the first place.

Here are a few shots from the night. Many thanks to Conor for giving me the opportunity to launch Relayto at his event.

Check It Out

Relayto was something we built as an answer to all the Twitter folk who have had an issue with this in the past. So every time you hear somebody complain that they can’t DM you, and you’re not that bothered following them, why not follow @relayto instead?

So please, tell your friends, tell your colleagues because this app needs a critical mass before it becomes useful. Right now though, we’re just getting started, and when you think that everything big was once small, it doesn’t seem like such a crazy idea to give this a go.

It’s been almost two weeks since we launched TrackPath and it’s been amazing to hear all the great feedback and comments from people checking it out.

In our rush to make the July 6th deadline, we spent absolutely no time on the logo and just put up a simple but meaningless icon. But now since we’ve had time to work on a few extra bits and pieces like the daily email reminders, we’ve also managed to design a permanent logo for TrackPath too.

(more…)

Today we’re launching the first phase of a little app called TrackPath. Available at http://ontrackpath.com, this simple tool lets you track your quotes and proposals. It measures their success rate and provides meaningful statistics to help you make better decisions so you can write more effective proposals in the future.

(more…)

DooSync is a little project we’re working on to help connect different web apps together. Whilst working on Footprint, we wanted a way to synchronise a users’ account data with other popular productivity apps. So instead of cluttering it up with complex synchronisation code, we thought it would be a lot more elegant and useful to launch this as a seperate app.

(more…)

Today we’re announcing our new business model: web applications as a service. It’s our answer to companies that want to become more efficient and take advantage of all the benefits of a custom built web app without the typical (and often large) up front costs.

(more…)

We’re delighted to announce that we’ve been short listed for two Net Visionary Awards. Both of the nominations are for the work we’ve done on Twission, which is a new kind of search tool for Twitter users.

The nominations are for ‘Best Use of Social Media’ and ‘Web Developer Excellence’.

(more…)