Stage 00 – The Story Behind the Entrepreneur
Stage 01 – The Business Idea
Business Stage 02 – From Idea to Brand
Business Stage 03 – From Brand to Product to Ice Box
Business Stage 04 – From Ice Box to Re-concepting and Re-pitching
We started our working relationship really energetically.
My developer asked really intelligent questions, he made me think, he challenged what I thought about the site, the user journey and the look and feel.
From having pretty weak contact with the original hire, my new guy has been the complete opposite… I get emails at all hours, he chases me if I’m taking too long to make decisions and actively makes suggestions for improvements – even of it means more work for himself.
Things are going well.
I have had to write a full user journey, something I’ve never done before… In my day job I often have to out myself into the mindset of consumers for various global brands in order to understand how they think, what they need, what they expect to see and how best to communicate with them in the right ways at the right times… So this was not too dissimilar an exercise, just much more focused on functionality and how to give tools to enable users to use the site to their maximum benefit…
Quite weird to think of a site that is so visual in such a linear, this happens, that happens, users do this, admin does that kind of way…
User visits site, loves what they see, clicks on a link to a page that gives the three tiers of membership, at the bottom of each features column is a button – each one goes to registration but Plus and Premium members get routed to PayPal to set up the subscription for their price tier, once done they are sent back to the site for a thank you for registering page, all users get email to click a link to activate their account.
Once they click the link they see a thanks for confirming you’re human page and a message to direct them to login
Once logged in there should be a dashboard that displayed latest live projects, last three closed projects, encouragement to complete their profile, latest news from the twitter feed, area to upload and build their portfolio/albums. They will also be able to download or order a disc of their images as a backup file (depending on membership tier). They should also be able to set their personalised URL that links to their profile and albums/portfolio page which will have contact details etc. message through the site. There should also be a calendar of events that I will setup in the admin dashboard.
At the beginning of each month I will start a new project (competition), I will give it a title, a text intro and I will upload a couple of images to it and set the date it will close. Once I have finished setting it up an email will automatically go out to all users telling them the new project is live.
It will also go live on the site’s home page and user dashboards.
Users will them click on the link… Or click in their dashboard or from the home page to go to the project page. Plus and Premium users can then upload images to it (number allowed to be uploaded based on their member level). And comment and vote on other images uploaded by other users. free users can only comment.
At the end of the month the project will close automatically on the date I specified when setting it up, I will be able to go in and download all images from that project in one zip file, with the user details for each image. Then away from the site I will design the PDF of them all and once finish come back to the site and upload the PDF to the project. Once I upload the PDF an email will automatically go out to all paying users saying this months PDF is ready to download. Paying users will then go in and download it.
There is also an area on the site that explains the concept.
There is also an area for feedback and constructive feature modifications – like a help support thing, see ideas.starbucks.com.
There should also be an area for me to share tips and tricks… Like a blog or message board type thing but nice looking. This should have a section that I can put links to articles from around the web for the, to somehow be displayed on the site.
My developer said this was perfect and gave him everything needed to get going and to understand the flow of information and usage so off he went…
Greg Dillon, founder of Phopus.com, is a senior brand strategist by day who specialises in leisure, retail and sporting brands, but by night he is an entrepreneur who is setting out on his quest to be his own boss and build something that connects with people at their fundamental need for recognition for their great work.
