The CoachAccountable Blog

Following shortly after the sharp and fitting chastising I got the other week for shoddy audio quality on the CoachAccountable homepage videos, I had a really fun session in the Voice of Peace recording studio located in Chiangmai, Thailand.  With the help of Poe, VOP’s in house audio technician, I was able to do 2 solid takes for each of the videos (including one on scaling coaching programs, still yet to be animated).

90 minutes very well spent!

The result is now finally in place for the current set of homepage videos.  I don’t have a terribly well-trained ear for audio quality, but when I got home and listened to the studio recordings and then again the ones I had earlier (with my $19 headset), the difference was STAGGERINGLY clear.  So overall I daresay it made quite the upgrade.

I’ve now finished remixing and uploading the 3 videos.  Doing so called for a lot of tweaking of the visual elements’ timing, and while at it I also made a bunch of updates to make things even prettier.  The end result speaks for itself.

Right then, so that should make it much harder to discern that CoachAccountable is a one-man operation.  Should be easier now to keep that fact on the down low.  Mum’s the word. :)

Just launched, a tidy redesign of coachaccountable.com.

Designed by the talented Anne Richardson of Local Flavor Marketing, the newness is geared to highlight the (relatively) new explainer videos.  The videos are doing a bang up job of telling the story of CoachAccountable, so I figured they deserve more front-and-center treatment (rather than just sloppily tacked on, one after another, as I had been doing.  Ahem.)

The result is light, clean, and crisp.  You can see in the comparison of the old homepage to the new:

I also took this opportunity to remix the login screen.  Rather than having it tucked away amid lots of other things going on (which presents coaches and moreover coachees with way more informational content than they generally want to see when just accessing the system), I gave it it’s own tidy little screen:

Thanks Anne for the bang up job on the aesthetic remix!  I’m delighted to see your pretty pixels up in place, and reckon others will agree.

Earlier this week I got an email in my inbox that positively tickled me:

Subject: Feedback on your website presentation…..

Guys, its looks like you spent a lot of time and effort on your product, your website and your branding. For a company to spend this much effort, but then have the speaking portion of your presentations done on a very cheap headset microphone is INCREDIBLY limiting to the perception that potential clients will have of you. I can’t believe that a company that has this much talent, would allow something as simple as your message to be portrayed with such serious lack of quality.

It’s not the speaker, the information which is articulated well, or the speed in which it’s delivered. it’s the recognition that it was done through a $12 microphone headset. I hope that you’ll read this and go back to your website and update your videos with some quality. Believe it or not, that one improvement will raise your value tremendously. Just an FYI from a professional business owner who trains people in sales and marketing….

Sometimes criticism comes your way that is so raw and on point that you can’t help but snap to attention, I imagine not unlike how a Private in boot camp reacts when the drill sergeant starts yelling.

Here’s my immediate reply:

» Continue reading “Busted on Shoddy Narration Quality”

One of the most common inquiries I get about CoachAccountable goes approximately like this:

Can you tell me the major differences between your coaching tool and Coaches Console?

At the risk of appearing lazy and/or ignorant, my answer is always, well, no, no I can’t.

For better or worse (and I think it’s better, bear with me here), I’ve willfully remained ignorant of other coaching software solutions that are out there.  This may seem like a fool-hardy gap in my attention considering the industry I’m in, but turning a blind eye to the goings-on of my, I dunno, “competitors”, I guess, has served me quite well.

The reason is this.  If you aren’t confident you’re making a dynamite product to serve the uses you are aiming to serve, then looking out at what other people are doing is going to leave you in a mindset of needing to keep up with the Joneses, pitting you in a sort of features arms race.  (For example, “They have email newsletter blasts?  Well then I’ll have email newsletter blasts!” or, worse yet “Well then I better have email newsletter blasts or my system WILL BE INFERIOR.”)

If you are confident that you’re making a dynamite product for your intended purpose, then looking out for what others are doing is going to be simply a distraction.

» Continue reading “Still Intentionally Oblivious to Other Coaching Software”

Well, technically speaking CoachAccountable is about the same size.  But the server on which it is hosted is bigger, and sure enough the CoachAccountable application runs noticeably faster.

On the heels of a pair of downtime issues with the previous hosting provider over the last 7 days, I decided CoachAccountable has outgrown its modest hosting home and deserves a little faster & more reliable hardware on which to run.  Just a few hours ago I switched things over during a maintenance window of just 12 minutes, and things are up and zooming delightfully faster than before.

The difference is most noticeable when you first log in!

A fast, responsive user experience is one of those things that never goes out of style in software.

The CoachAccountable user base and database are getting large enough that certain processing bottlenecks are starting to become noticeable, and thus the system is ripe for a bit of tuning and optimization.

After a fine session of profiling the performance of database interactions that happen with software, I’ve identified a number of wins.  It used to be that a coach with 10 clients would require about 190 queries for data from the database to render the dashboard screen (about 40 of them were to fetch, over and over, the symbol of the currency chosen by the coach–yeesh!).

Now it’s down to about 70.  About 0.5 seconds of total database work to load that page has been reduced to around 0.039 seconds.  Similar wins were reached for loading client pages.  Saving half a second in load time may sound minor, but this amounts to about a 10x increase in the capacity to comfortably and speedily serve users.

More optimization tricks up my sleeve to come over the next month.   Making the system zippier and more responsive is fun and super satisfying, and I know you and your clients appreciate software that is just plain fast.

I’ve several times been asked what I was thinking to inspire the functional design of CoachAccountable.  I find it easiest to answer in terms of certain tendencies I’ve noticed over the course of coaching relationships, drawn from both coaching and being coached.  I’ll share those tendencies and how they pertain to CoachAccountable’s design, and I invite you to read along and see for yourself which ones you recognize from your own experiences, both of coaching and being coached.

» Continue reading “Tendencies I’ve Noticed in Coaching Relationships”

It’s exciting when something you’ve been working on a while has finally borne its first fruit.  Here, 31 days after launch, CoachAccountable has earned its first dollar with the billing of accounts whose 30 day trial has just expired.

Moreover, as I reckon my fellow coaches (whose programs and guidance touch the lives of the people they coach) will recognize, it’s exhilarating to create something of value for people.  I look forward to on the road ahead whereupon I get to build and improve on what’s already in place.

Yikes.  Two nights ago I introduced a subtle bug into the system which resulted in disabling sign up for new accounts.  No problem for existing users, problem for new ones.  Talk about a poor first impression.

To the three people who emailed to let me know of the issue I thank you for the heads-up.  To others who tried to sign up for an account today and yesterday, I apologize for the hassle and hope you’ll give it another try.  This time you’ll get what you came for in the 60 seconds as promised:  https://www.coachaccountable.com/signUp

I love using CoachAccountable for managing my coaching relationships.  But I have an unfair advantage in understanding why: I have access to coaching relationships in the system that are well under way.  I see it containing data that reveals trends, hosting a comprehensive history of notes, a overall serving as a running illustration of progress.

CoachAccountable looks good as a repository of records and progress because of this, in a way that blank slate graphics stating “Click here to add your first…” simply can’t.

Today that changes.  Coaches who sign up for an account now have their account pre-loaded with data from a 4-month long running coaching relationship, giving them a real sense of how the system serves to track and document progress over time well before they otherwise could with their own clients.

» Continue reading “A Proper Look at a Coaching Relationship for New Users: the Demo Client”