July 16th, 2008
Lessons Learned From the Online Referral Scorecard
At the beginning of this year, I invested a lot of time in creating a web application that allowed people to keep track of the activity they were doing to build relationships with their network of business contacts. By giving numeric values to the various activities, the scorecard turns the process of tracking your activities into a kind of game. More importantly, it gives you a metric that makes it easier to set goals and evaluate your performance over time. Although I still think the scorecard is a truly valuable online tool, it really hasn’t taken off the way I had originally hoped. Here are some thoughts I have on the experience.
Not Filling a Perceived Need
Many people who engage in referral networking really need something like this. (Just ask the Referral Institute.) Unfortunately, they don’t necessarily want it. Using the scorecard requires ongoing data entry that some people are just going to find monotonous.
The Paper Version
Starting out I assumed the online version of the scorecard would be an upgrade over the paper version and the Excel spreadsheet version provided by the Referral Institute. Why? Because when you’re holding a hammer every problem looks like a nail. I’m a web developer, so naturally I assumed everyone would prefer a web tool.
Showpiece
My motivation for building the scorecard should have been to create a tool that solved a problem. My actual motivation was to create a tool that demonstrated what an awesome programmer I am.
Credibility of Free
A few of the people I asked to test early versions of the scorecard thought I should be charging something to use it. The scorecard right now is completely free to use. It’s possible that part of the reason I have struggled to establish a strong user base is that people assume the tool must not be valuable since it is free.
Conclusion
The scorecard is still up and running. There are a few people who use it right now… barely. There’s no reason right now to take it down. It uses almost no bandwidth and lives on a subdomain of this site. It can always serve as a reminder to me of these lessons. Besides, maybe in a year or two I’ll dust it off and take another stab at getting the message out there to the masses.
