The CoachAccountable Blog

Yesterday I had a fun chat come in to me from the website.  A fellow from Poland started it off by writing:

I just found your web software
are you really founder of this?

To which I replied “I am indeed.”

wow
can I be frankly?

To which I replied “Please do.”

sound like: hmm is they have so SMALL about of business, that founder can spend time to chat ??
because for example I am founder of my own company and its hard to talk with me – only via coaching session :)

To that I chuckled.  That’s a fair assessment, and since I have no hang up about CoachAccountable being a tidy, one-man operation realized then and there just how comfortable I am with projecting that appearance.  I replied the truth, the last line of which was an insight which came to me on the spot:

Yep. For the time being I’m going to enjoy for as long as I can the luxury of being able to talk directly with the community I’m serving.
It makes a huge difference for me to be able to do so,
you might think of it as the best sort of market research one could possibly do.

That about says it all.  Being available to chat keeps causing great conversations.  These conversations bring super useful insights to me and helpful answers to people who chat me (to say nothing of the sense of connection to this being a real thing made by a real guy and not just some faceless company).

So THAT’s why, yes, you can still chat with the founder of CoachAccountable.

I’m gonna ride this train for as long as I can.

No, seriously.

That was oddly satisfying.

I just released a major update to the CoachAccountable code base and database structure, and if I’ve done it correctly no one will notice any change whatsoever.

What’s the big deal?  I’ve spent the last week overhauling the mechanics of user accounts, news items, and customizable widget items including note areas and task lists.

(Especially the widget items, which were a kludge of bloated code to cover left-column widgets for the coach’s dashboard, the client centers, and the client view pages.  My only excuse is that this code harkened back to nearly five years ago in the early days of CA 1.0’s development, and this is largely the reason why widgets are some of the most useless and least interesting parts of the system.  This too shall pass.)

All of this under-the-hood work was in the interest of making a more robust and generally powerful platform upon which to build Team Edition.  As mentioned in a little update note a week ago, my fall emphasis on Team had given way to more immediately relevant work of marketing and outreach.  But it feels good to be back on the case of building Team.

Remixing user accounts was to enable a single user account to have multiple roles within CoachAccountable (e.g. admin of a Team, coach to his clients, and client of some other coach).  Remixing news items was to enable Team Admins to get new alerts just as coaches do now (and who knows, down the road coaches who would like to send news alerts to their clients may get their wish).  And remixing widgets was to enable Team Admins to enjoy flexible configuration of tools to be easily added in a variety of contexts, as well as to pave the way for more interesting ones.

All in all a good week, and Team Edition continues to progress.  Soon I’ll be setting my beta testers up with Team accounts of their own, bringing CoachAccountable a giant and very real step closer to supporting multiple-coach coaching organizations.