Blog

 Most of you on Mavenlink are not software developers - you come from many different industries with many different specialties. For those of you who aren’t familiar with building software, there’s a relatively new methodology called "agile" that many of us use to develop our products, including the team at Mavenlink. Our agile methods are what we use to prioritize our work and meet your requests, requirements, and feedback in a timely manner.

If a picture tells a thousand words, I’d love to find out how many words a video gets across, especially an animatics video in the deft hands of The Incite Group.  It is an incredible medium for story telling.

In thinking about our anchor video, there was no question that it needed to speak to the independent consultants and freelancers.  After talking extensively with these independent professionals about their world, we wanted to try and capture the intersection of their story with the story of Mavenlink.

We hope you enjoy our take on how Mavenlink supports the ever changing workforce.

This morning Nicole Black released a screencast (audio & video) review of Mavenlink’s comprehensive online collaboration platform built for the consultant/lawyer and their interactions with clients.

In the screencast, Nicole asks Roger Neel and myself questions about Mavenlink in general, walks through a demonstration of the product with us, and speaks to the specific applicability for the legal profession.  It is a short 15-20 minute screencast, and provides a great opportunity to hear firsthand our impressions of the technology.  In the screencast, you will hear about:

• How to invite colleagues/clients into a workspace
• Collaboration options within the workspace
• Upcoming Mavenlink features (Private Networks, Task Management)
• Pricing

No matter what your area of expertise is, who you consult for, or what your role is on a project, there is almost always a need for a private conversation between a few of the participants.  People working on a project generally have a role:

• The guy who’s the main collaborator with his feet on the ground
• The lady who signs the checks, but isn’t really involved in the day-to-day
• The boss who’s fragmented and should only be involved in the final review phase
• The peanut gallery that asks if "that should be blue…?"
• Etc…

In our old workspace, unless you kept the project participants fairly tight, it was difficult to keep things private without reverting back to email and losing the power of capturing all conversation/documents in one place.  With the new Mavenlink workspace and private messaging, this is an issue of the past.  You can now have all interested parties participating in the project, but be confident that you can include only the right audience on any message/attachment.

We were pretty sure this would be a big request and we were correct. We didn’t want to build it until enough people asked. Try it out and get on our GetSatisfaction page to let us know what you think and what we should build next!

Over the last 6 months, we learned a lot about the consultant/client relationship and what’s needed to manage this relationship in the networked economy.  This new release of Mavenlink is a testament to the generosity of our charter community and their willingness to share ideas and recommendations.

Four Key learnings that have strongly influenced our business and technology direction:

1. Mavens (Consultants) and Clients found our underlying software very valuable to collaborate to get work done by having all documents and conversations in one place.
   • There is a tremendous need for a complete application that helps consultants and clients manage their business relationships from proposal to payment to feedback.
2. The “Post a Project” marketplace presents some important challenges for professional, collaborative service engagements, including:
   • Clients often need expert assistance to clarify requirements and define projects prior to posting
   • Talented consultants are often reluctant to invest the time required to pursue projects in an open marketplace
   • Consultants are uncomfortable inviting their existing clients into Mavenlink because the public listing of potentially competing mavens being made visible to clients.
3. Businesses are seeking new and better ways to work with and manage external talent.
   • Businesses need help finding the right expertise at the right time on an as-needed basis.
   • Consultants are seeking new ways to showcase their talent and speed the engagement process.
4. Businesses and Consultants alike are seeking purposeful business networking opportunities that help get valuable work done.

 
What’s Next

Comprehensive Technology Platform:  Our core technology, released this week, supports our mission of enabling an entirely new way for businesses and consultants to work together, making it simpler, more efficient, and more economical to get work done.  Enabling both businesses and consultants to leverage the platform within a trusted relationship, rather than an open marketplace, was a frequent request that we are now making possible.  Immediately following this release, we will be making continuous improvements…daily and weekly.

As a team we get together early, just about every morning, to catch up, discuss direction moving forward and generally get on the same page.  I will certainly do my best to spare you from the unappealing details, but in an effort to shed additional light on our company direction and our perception of the SMB consulting market, I will be sharing a couple of relevant highlights from these meetings here in our blog.


Thought for the Day

It seems like the world of consulting proposals and contracts with their talk of scope, approach, tasks and deliverables have ventured away from the simple needs of independent consultants and their clients, "Here is what we agreed to go do".

Company Updates

Product: New Designs almost complete mapping out the new Proposal Process for consultants and their clients.  The team is focused on providing everything you could ever want in a proposal with the flexibility you need to pick and choose the pieces necessary for your project.  And if that wasn’t enough, we’ll make sure to keep it simple.

Marketing: Getting ready to launch our Innovation Group, a core group of users who have graciously volunteered to give us early feedback on upcoming product releases.  Upcoming fun for the Innovation Group includes a first look at the new comprehensive software platform designed for the independent consultant (including the aforementioned Proposal Process) and some video reviews.

After spending countless hours over the last week thinking about, researching, designing, paper prototyping, and generally becoming an online proposal, a thought occurred to me, "Is the Independent Consultant (i.e. my audience) ready to walk away from the Paper Proposal?"  It’s not an easy question.

On the one hand, there’s no shortage of griping about the current proposal process, and rightfully so.  It’s a time sink, no matter how you look at it.  No one I know looks forward to creating or adapting pages after pages of Cover Sheets, Self Promotional Marketing Pieces, Tables of Contents, Executive Summaries, Project Scope Statements, Approach Summaries, Deliverable Overviews, Pricing, Discounting, and the kicker, Terms and Conditions associated with the proposal.  You might not have to add each of these to every proposal, or you might be lucky enough to leverage boilerplate language for a bunch of the pieces, but any paper pushing is too much paper pushing for most.  Next in line you get to deal with the inevitable discomfort associated with putting yourself and your hard earned prospect at the mercy of a couple of bound pages.   It would be one thing if the waiting was short, but everyone knows yes’s never come fast enough.  How long do you have to wait before you burst through your Client’s door demanding a response?  Polite email and phone follow-ups can only sustain you for so long.

On the other hand, the upside of so much time sunk into the development of your paper proposal is that it might be quite good.  If nothing else, every word that jumps off the page reflects you, your business, and your blood, sweat and earnest brain strain.  Some of you might even say the paper proposal is a differentiator for your practice.  You’ve read Allan Weiss’s "How to Write a Proposal That’s Accepted Every Time" 15 times, and can’t wait for the Client to utter the magic words "Shoot me over a Proposal".  Even if you haven’t had the chance to get your own Ph.D. in proposal writing, others amongst you might rightly appreciate the opportunity a paper proposal presents to express yourself in another medium to your Client.  Some things are easier said in a logo, a page layout, or a well-crafted paragraph.

My new perspective is one of fascination.  I don’t know if we can put any more thought into ways to make the proposal process better by bringing it online.  Even Dr. Weiss would be proud of our efforts to focus on the collaboration and communication between the consultant and the client above all else, taking advantage of the online world to promote a highly interactive process.  Having said that, I’m sure once we release it you’ll give us plenty of good recommendations for improvements, and I look forward to the learning.  But what I’m really anxious to find out is how many amongst you will be able to once and for all leave the paper behind.  Mavenlink is going to let you choose whether or not you want to attach that paper beauty, and I can’t wait to see what you’ll decide.

We’ve just updated our blog to have a new style - we hope you like it! As we’ve mentioned to many of you in our community, we’ll be rolling out many new, exciting features over the next couple months. We thought it would be a good idea to update our blog to use better software and make it more attractive for our upcoming announcements.

In addition to rolling out the new blog, we have also updated our RSS feed to use FeedBurner. Please update your RSS reader accordingly by subscribing on the right. The old feed address will be pointed to the wrong place!

We’d love to hear your feedback on the new styling through comments or directly. Thanks!

In gathering feedback and planning future features, something has continued to come up with many of our mavens - they would like to be able to propose to their current and prospective clients.  We’re extremely thrilled to be announcing that feature starting today.

As anybody with consulting experience knows, proposing to a client can often be tricky.  A good consultant knows to clarify and set the scope of work, understand the client’s time frame, and get a sense of the client’s budget.  With those terms nailed down and a mutually agreeable services agreement in place, the price can be negotiated, agreed upon, and the work can begin.  It sounds so simple, but how many processes break down somewhere in that series of steps?  Maybe it begins with a lack of clarity around the client’s needs, maybe the consultant isn’t responsive enough, maybe an email gets lost, maybe, maybe, maybe - the list goes on and on.

Mavenlink is looking to change this game for both clients and consultants (mavens).  As a client, you have a need that you may or may not fully understand, but you need someone to help.  As a maven, you have expertise and your client has come to you to solve their problem or you’re approaching a client you haven’t worked with in the past, thinking that you have the skills to help them.  No matter the situation, work needs to get done; Mavenlink’s Maven Proposals make it easier to come to terms, engage in work, and successfully complete the project for both the client and the maven.

Our proposal system allows you, the maven, to propose to clients who may or may not already be within Mavenlink and use all the collaboration tools we’re providing for "regular projects" with your client.  We think it’s dynamite for getting work done, so give it a shot.