The Heart of What You Deliver

One of the pizza places in my little town is the higher-quality version of pizza. It's made in a stone oven with wood firing. They use amazing ingredients. It's an upscale-without-being-fancy experience. Feels more hippie inside than fancy. Kind of like 'all organic' and the like. You with me?

The place here is nice. It's in an old factory building so super high ceiling, exposed beams (like where I live), and it's so very bustling and warm and full of happy people. It's the kind of place you go to celebrate, not just throw back some slices. You know what I mean?

What Makes The Place Special?

This is a question you can ask yourself while we talk about this. What makes your product/your company/YOU special? What's the actual heart of what makes it what it is?

I love that the place can take their show on the road. The ingredients and the way the pizzas are made are the heart of the experience is the bet this restaurant made. I think it's the right answer. It's food. The actual food part should be the most important part. HOW they make it is what sets it apart from the other five or so pizza places in the small town.

So What About You?

What is the heart of what you deliver? I think the way we see it at Appfire comes down to being able to take software you want to use and make it work even better to fit the exact way you want to use it. Maybe you need to keep a document compliance repository that works better than Google Docs or a folder on Dennis's desk. I think our "little pizza oven on wheels" is how we build apps that make your job easier to handle.

Me personally? I think my little pizza oven on wheels is that blend of lightness and humor mixed with my ability to communicate in a firm-but-caring way about what needs doing. I'm straightforward but not mean. And my goal is to help you progress and align. That, plus I'm good at giving people perspectives they might not immediately otherwise see.

What about you?

It's So Rarely What You Think

I could be wrong about what my little pizza oven on wheels might be. I think most of us are wrong. And one reason is that it might differ from person to person. Meaning, what I want out of you might be different than what someone else wants out of you. Right?

Same would be true for your business. I was talking with someone yesterday about how a major regional sporting goods company somehow had an email list with zero segmentation. That means if you were a figure skater, you'd still be mailed when new football jerseys were ready. If you were a basketball player, you'd hear all about yoga mats. What a mess.

People want what THEY want. Right? They don't want everything. To them, you exist to solve a problem. If you're lucky.

What problem do you want to solve.

This pizza place solves the "love pizza and want a higher quality taste because of a wood fired stone oven?" problem quite nicely.

Come visit. I'll take you out for some.

Chris...