Nuts and Bolts!

They say that time passes quicker as you get older. This seems to be true for New Edge Engineering as the last few weeks have pasted so quickly. We have been putting the nuts and bolts of the business systems in place and starting to act on them, such as:

• Bank account set up (picking the best deal from which4U list).
• Time sheets helping to track the use of time and to focus on the most important items needing to be done.
• Expense sheets to track costs.
• Marketing plan to determine how we intend to attract customers.
• Business plan for a new service (with the working title 'Food Planner') that New Edge Engineering is incubating.
• Market research at the British Library.
• Market research questionnaire created for the 'Food Planner' (click here to help).

As part of the marketing and sales process, we realised that New Edge Engineering had no face. As an initial start to this we decided to get some professional photographs taken to reflect the brand of New Edge Engineering. Lucky for us, we knew Tun Shwe at Go Logic who was willing to help out and had a fun day out and about London. Tun actually took some photographs on film, which he prefers over digital. Go Logic is providing a photography service and are able to help promote products, services or companies via the web. Check out Tun's personal Flickr Stream and if you contact Tun please mention New Edge Engineering.

We have discovered another interesting networking site 'Meet The Boss', which was signing people up at the IPTV World Forum a few weeks ago. Also attended the London Facebook Developers Garage evening that was about how people are monetizing their games, there were some interesting ideas, which could be used as part of the Marketing Funnel to start the spending.

The main focus for the last few weeks has been on the business and marketing plans that are starting to take shape, especially after reading the business link information. Also learning the marketing vocabulary and strategies to increase and attract customers. As part of the discovery we came across Marketing Spiral that seems to indicate a change in ideas, luckily some marketing friends were willing to talk and explain the basic ideas of what marketing aims and objectives. Thanks for that.

This new knowledge has been used to focus on the 'Food Planner' service, which lead me to the British Library to read about ABC1 consumers, Cooking & Eating, Telecommunications and E-Commerce: The Internet Grocery Market to help understand the current market that the 'Food Planner' will be helping. I had forgotten was amazing reference library it is. For people that have never been in or used the British Library, it free but you do need a Reading Pass to get into the various reading rooms. The usual id and proof of address needed to get your free Reading Pass. For us the Business and Intellectual Property area is great as they have all the marketing reports and assessments from all the major research companies providing information about many industries and is open till 8 pm most nights but check.

So after reading a lot about the internet grocery market I have put together an initial questionnaire to test the 'Food Planner' idea and get a better understanding of what people want. So please help, pass along http://research.newedgeengineering.com/foodplanner and thanks in advance.

Lead Generation?

Time flies! The week started (and that feels like yesterday) thinking about how well the sales and marketing teams should be doing. Some planning had been done last week to support the sales process:

• Basic logo design.
• Business cards.
• Digital stationary that includes letterhead, fax, sales invoice, technical specification, compliments slip.
• Identified some freelance sites that could use to pitch for work such as guru and elance could be used.

Also started last week was:

• The design and creation of the logo (more because it was possible to do it in house but we need to change this habit).
• The submission of the business cards order to Overnight Prints that delivered all the way from Germany this week. It's great to finally have something to give to people when they ask. It had been annoying to miss out on some of the opportunities that have appeared in the last couple of months.

Putting the sales and marketing hat on, which was unusual to wear, we started to think about how to promote the company and also how to measure the performance. The first step was to add the following to this site:

• Updated that blog to have a few more gadgets, including the logo and te!! a frend.
• Signed up and added Google Analytics, Quantcast, Alexa and Woopra (but be warned this is still in beta and even tho you can get an account it may take a while to get your sites approved and start receiving real time statistics).

The marketing plan was started to help the sales, communications, marketing and public relations of New Edge Engineering. Part of that plan was to get in touch with a few people that had asked for help from New Edge Engineering in the past (but no business cards to give to them at the time). This has started some good conversation but lead time and the accounting lag caused havoc with the cash flow, therefore started to think of other ways to create a cash flow. The obvious way was to sign up to a number of freelance websites and start pitching for work straight away but the process of filling in profile information, which is a necessary evil and the Linked In profile has served so well, slowed the progress. It would be great to find a tool that could populate other profiles based on the Linked In profile.

The other great thing that has been happening this week is the generation of ideas, especially other people sharing theirs. Great stuff but the ideas need to prove there is actually a market to sell to and determine if investment is needed.

Also had the chance to talk to a few experienced business owners about New Edge Engineering's ambitions and direction. Thanks to Judith who gave me, and everyone who attended the Money Gym property weekend, a chance of a free wealth consultation. Also thanks to Jon and Nick from Nativ who answered many questions about what they would do differently and gave some great insights.

The beginning of something fun and great I hope.

Wow, what an exciting experience - actually owning a company that I am responsible for. This may seem trivial to some people but I have been involved in a few start-ups in the past which had great ideas, which seemed to spark the imagination of investors but unfortunately failed.

So this is the end of week one for New Edge Engineering and a brand new and a brave new world for me personally. I am a technologist who has always been in charge of the creation of products, leading the development team through the long nights making sure they have fun along the way. When previous start-ups have failed they have been able to sell on the technology that I have been responsible for - a bonus for me!

So now it is all up to me with hopefully support from like-minded people that are interested in working on cutting or bleeding edge ideas and making money through innovation. So what is my vision of New Edge Engineering? Good question, I have been working on the basics of getting simple basic things together, logo, business cards, where the money is coming from, talking to people about joint ventures. So lots of idea but the business needs a clear focus and that is creating software for the media industry.

I personally have over 10 years experience in creating software for interactive TV, IPTV/WebTV, iPhone Applications, content management systems, publishing platforms and websites using a number of different techniques to deliver the software as product, i.e. waterfall, JAD/RAD, agile, JFDI, using the appropriate technologies to solve the business problems. Therefore I believe in producing high quality software that can flex with the ever changing media industry and constantly delivering to the business requirements.

So if you have some amazing ideas but don't have the technical skill please contact matthew@newedgeengineering.com to see if we can help.