The Alpha version of Mercury Grove’s CRM application “… looks conceptually like Highrise from 37 Signals, but with less polish and more potential. However, the fact that you can collect information and generate reports on deal pipelines puts your solution way ahead in the longer run.” according to one user.Continue Reading

Scott and I grabbed a quick sandwich at Goonies on Friday. A series of last-minute meetings and the need to deliver on a speech request (read: It’s 9:30, I need to see something from you by 3:30, but I can’t meet you until 11:00) had hijacked what was supposed to be a casual Friday after Continue Reading

The Alpha version of our CRM system (codenamed “Blackbook”) was released last week and I’m really excited about this initial build. This first build represents the skeleton of the application with the key data components. There’s a lot of great functionality in this first build including: Dashboard Charts Company and Person management CSV imports (worked Continue Reading

The next generation of software will be built by companies with vision, the ability to execute, and a vibrant, engaged, and active customer community that will drive product innovation.Continue Reading

Our first focus was building contact management for CRM. We had the major functionality already in our Groups application. We ported that over from groups (which is in CakePHP), taking advantage of single table inheritance in rails (which CakePHP doesn’t support). This allowed for less code for contacts in Rails than we had before and Continue Reading

Customer retention is a defining factor for the validity of a SaaS company. A high (or low) customer retention rate is a symptom of company’s quality. For a Saas company, a 90-98% customer retention rates is considered excellent. In its almost 3 year existence, Mercury Grove has yet to lose a subscriber – a fact Continue Reading

We are building the new apps in Ruby on Rails. The decision came down to how we were going to manage templates for extranets and how we were going to manage credit card processing across the new apps. Thanks to our friends at Shopify (http://shopify.com) for releasing Liquid (http://liquidmarkup.org) and ActiveMerchant (http://activemerchant.org), Rails was the Continue Reading

Yesterday I sent out a “Friends of Mercury Grove” email announcing the launch of our blog. Below are the click rates from the email using our email campaign tool (code name marathon). The Friends of Mercury Grove list is made up of personal contacts and people who have signed up for our newsletter over the Continue Reading

We spent a lot of time talking about the right message for Mercury Grove’s splash page before there was much to show for it. I think that this particular task took on serious significance for Scott A. There’s a lot riding on this call to action and so it needs to be just right. We Continue Reading