The CoachAccountable Blog

After 365 days of living and traveling abroad, my wife and I returned last month to the US.  Last weekend we moved into a home here in Denver, and just yesterday I setup my desk and my trusty ol’ desktop computer for working.

Prior to leaving the country last summer we road tripped about the US for 3 months.  Thus this marks the end of a full 16 months of working on CoachAccountable exclusively on my laptop.

Put another way, the bulk of CoachAccountable 2.0’s creation thus far has happened with my very minimalist setup whilst traveling.

» Continue reading “Back in the USA!”

Literally since the 5th day after CoachAccountable’s public release back at the end of last August, I’ve received slow yet steady stream of inquiries regarding the ability to house multiple coaches under a single account.  The specific needs and desires expressed in each of these inquiries have varied, but all point to a real need for coaching software to manage things at a team (or organizational) level with administrative oversight.

My response in private emails or telephone conversations has been to allude to a forthcoming “Enterprise Edition” of CoachAccountable, but first things first: there is to perfect the supporting structures for the fundamental building block in all this, the coach-client relationship.

Things are close enough now to that point that it makes sense for me to publicly announce the plan for supporting teams of coaches at the organizational level.

If you’re interested in CoachAccountable for teams, check it out.

In the wake of the two substantial outages earlier during my 10 days offline (I tell you, nothing takes away the peace of mind feeling from a meditation course quite like learning that your server was offline for a total of 11 hours while you were away), I see now that there is to again upgrade CoachAccountable’s hosting setup.

During the outages, the VPS (stands for “Virtual Private Server”) environment suffered from the impacts of other tenants on the machine.  Between downtime and occasionally VERY SLOW performance, I’m clear that this mission critical application for a growing number of coaches is no longer suitable for that kind of vulnerability (indeed, things were simpler when I had more like four customers!).

To that end, CoachAccountable has now just been moved to its new home: a fully dedicated server with a quad core processor, 8GB of memory, and a zippy SSD hard drive.

My sincerest apologies to those coaches (and their clients) who were affected by the outage times earlier this month.  To them and everyone else I sincerely thank you for your patience during the growing pains of CoachAccountable.  I take reliability of the platform very seriously, and am happy to have taken the suitable (and indeed necessary!) measures for greater reliability and speed as things continue to unfold.

It’s hard for me to know for sure as my shaky internet connection here in Nepal has every page taking some 10 seconds or more to load, but I’m told that things are running much faster than there were before.

Right then, back to developing more useful new features!

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”