The Power of Community

At Zapproved we have so many reasons to feel lucky, but right at the top of the list has to be the burgeoning community that is growing around the app.  Our beta site is a little more than two weeks old and we have received dozens of suggestions via our myidea@zapproved.com address. 

The new rules of the Web that have emerged as part of the 2.0 revolution have given every user a voice.  Everyone here is a participant in making comments and forums for other apps that we use.  However, seeing the thoughtfulness and ownership of our users is awesome and humbling.

We are taking all of your ideas and are implementing them in future revs.  Our dev team embraces agile development so that we aim to have the shortest amount of time from our inbox to implementation.  In fact, we are planning an update next week that will include many of your ideas.

So this post is a small thank you to our users who have taken the time to make Zapproved better and better.  You should be proud of what you are doing and keep the ideas coming!

Lifehacker: Zapproved Helps Groups Come to a Consensus

For anyone trying to stay on top of the accelerating pace of managing time and information in today’s connected world, Lifehacker is an oasis.  This blog looks out for new tools and ideas that can be a shortcut for improving productivity and quality of life.  We are proud to see that Zapproved is one of the tools that Lifehacker is suggesting to its readers in a post from August 24 entitled “Zapproved Helps Groups Come to a Consensus.”

The post on Lifehacker is a concise overview of Zapproved and its benefits to users who are driving an approval process.  The blogger, Jason Fitzpatrick, reinforced an important point which is that “Zapproved tracks who has approved, denied, or not responded to proposals to foster accountability among team members.” 

Zapproved is all about the idea of helping give users the power of accountability in the decision-making process.  Our app promotes this notion by organizing and creating a simple system of managing the approval process in order that it will encourage everyone to take more ownership in the outcome.  Hopefully this will make the workplace a better place, one click at a time.

WebBizTech: Zapproved’s Support Makes a Big Impression

Keeping users happy is a big priority for everyone at Zapproved. When someone needs a hand, we get involved. We’re not satisfied until our users are satisfied.  Most of the time that service flies under the radar.

When Dan over at WebBizTech encountered a problem, he sent an e-mail to our support e-mail. I guess he liked what happened next because he dedicated an entire post to it entitled “Good Support & Bad Support.”  It has to make you feel good when you read something like this on a blog: “Aside from having a great product (which we all need), Zapproved.com has a great staff!”

We strive to make every user have a great experience with Zapproved. No blogging required.

WebWorkerDaily: “Zapproved: Streamline Decisions”

The WebWorkerDaily blog, part of the GigaOm Network, is a must-read over here at Zapproved. That’s why we were pleased to read Mike Gunderloy’s quick hit on our beta entitled “Zapproved: Streamline Decisions” that he posted today.  Mike found us on his own, so it is both exciting and humbling to see that people are tracking our progress and see the potential in Zapproved.

I particularly liked this line: “If your team is distributed and you spend an inordinate amount of time chasing down consensus on routine matters, it’s worth a look.” reading how individuals imagine using Zapproved is always fun. Everyone sees how it would have solved a problem in in his or her past worklife.  Happily, the one that Mike called out, the distributed-team-with-inordinate-time-spent-consensus-chasing market, is quite massive based on our estimates.

The Unique Power of Transparency

When I chat with people about our company, a common question I get is, “What is unique about Zapproved?”  It’s a natural question since it helps people figure out what unsolved problem we are targeting.

Well, let me start by responding with a question of my own: Have you ever felt the frustration of a slow or broken decision-making process? Endless e-mails back and forth. Bottlenecks. People who avoid accountability like a disease. Or, a pet peeve of mine, making the same decision over and over and over. I can go on and on, but it doesn’t take people long to start nodding up and down vigorously recalling their personal pain.

I have felt that same frustration and then I realized there is a better way. The first requirement is that it has to be simple. Dead simple, in fact, so simple no software or registration is required by recipients. Next, a solution would keep an audit trail of who said what and when to keep everyone accountable. Third, in recognition of the global nature of today’s business collaborations, it has to be securely accessible to anyone (inside or outside of the firewall), anywhere and in any time zone.

Finally, the most important requirement is to apply the unique power of transparency. Zapproved takes the learning from Web 2.0 applications and uses the power of the community in a business context. This enables concrete answers to decisions to be taken seriously.  Bringing decisions into the light is incredibly powerful for people. Transparency makes events like slips in schedules more data-driven and reduces the politics around agreements.

Above all, we are creating a tool that is singularly focused and works for many people, from the big to the small and across any technology platform.  It uses the power of the ‘cloud’ to bring people together and make decisions easier, faster and more accountable. That is what makes Zapproved unique.

We (heart) DemoGirl

Could DemoGirl be our new BFF? It’s possible. 

Molly McDonald, aka Demo Girl, created a “how to” video entitled “Zapproved Helps Groups Make Decisions” that she posted to her site yesterday. In 2-½ minutes, Molly uses her extremely cool screencast technology to walk a user through the steps to creating a proposal and how to manage them in archives.

For me, it’s like a great film. I’ve watched it more times than I care to mention and I always find something new in there. Be sure to check it out!

Thanks again, Molly, you’re phenomenal!

Greatapps: “Making people more accountable with Zapproved”

Validation is a good thing. That’s why we were so excited to read what UK blogger John Wilson had to say over on his Greatapps blog.  Yesterday he posted his thoughts about Zapproved in a post titled “Making people more accountable with Zapproved.”

John found our beta, gave it a test and instantly “got it.”  One of the great motivators for creating Zapproved was to address some of the issues that John mentioned — such as the lack of accountability and slow decision-making that can occur in large corporations. Some people have elevated non-decision-making to an art form and Zapproved’s peer-to-peer techniques and action-oriented e-mails help cut right through that. 

Accountability. Transparency. Simplicity. That’s what Zapproved is all about.

PeloLife: “The Software Experience”

Troy Malone over at PeloLife posted a thoughtful piece called “The Software Experience” that discusses Zapproved and another productivity tool called Meeting Sense. Troy read about us and it reminded him of this other co. that he knows in San Diego where he lives, and it got him thinking about why Outlook doesn’t fit this role. 

His premise is that users remember the experience, not the features.  The winner in any given segment will be the company that delivers the best experience.  He relates it to his own company, Pelotonics, and their own philosophy: “Keep it simple, provide experience above features and listen to your evangelists…”

We couldn’t agree more. Our mission at Zapproved is to create an incredibly useful tool that focuses on what it takes to make decision-making easier. It’s simple and our goal is to do that really, really well. We won’t necessarily have all of the bells and whistles, but we will execute it in a clean and elegant way that is dead simple.

I am reminded of one of Dolly Parton’s great quotes.  She often says that “it costs a lot of money to look this cheap.” Okay, we’re not trying to look cheap, but in that same vein, it takes a helluva lot of work for us to do our app right and do it simply. We’ll always try to make it easier. Always.

There Is Such a Thing as a Free Lunch

Team Zapproved decided that we were tired of hanging out by ourselves now that our beta is launched so we ventured into downtown Portland to attend Portland Lunch 2.0. The turnout at CubeSpace was truly impressive with well over a hundred folks coming out for a lunch hosted by Rick Turockzy of Silicon Florist. Thanks, Rick!

It was fantastic for us to feel like part of this group. Portland has such a supportive community and it showed today. Everyone was so welcoming and they were interested in our new little venture. It helped us tremendously to share our story and to describe how Zapproved works and its benefits. We got lots of great ideas that we will be working into our site that will improve our usability.

As I got a Diet RC, I struck up a conversation with a nice guy. It ended up being Marshall Kirkpatrick who writes the ReadWriteWeb blog. After telling him about Zapproved, we were surprised that he thought we were worthy of blogging about. Not exactly what we expected when we headed out for some grub. You can read what he had to say at Read Write Web.

I am excited to have people checking out our beta so that we can work on refining it. Thanks for the free lunch, we made a lot of friends and will look forward to the next one!

– Monica

Zapproved Beta Goes Live

We had a huge milestone here at Zapproved today. We pushed out our beta site and sent a note to a few folks in our network so that they can take a look and start putting it through its paces. It is truly awesome to see our little baby out on the ‘net!

We have received so many nice comments in just the few hours that it has been out. Thanks for those, we love to hear them!

However, we need the other comments too. The reason we pushed this out is so that people will kick the tires, play around with the site and (gasp!) even break it. We know our code is sound, real-world testing is essential for finding those outliers that can cause a problem.

It isn’t only problems that we want to know, we’d like any feedback you have. Did you like using it? Are there tweaks or additional features that would make Zapproved even more useful – even if you think it is a feature that only you would use. Send them all to us at myidea@zapproved.com.

Thanks for being part of our beta launch, we appreciate it! This is the very first step we taking into the light and it feels great! Next, watch us run!