Fun and Games In Start-Up Land: What's A Good Tired?

I'd like to say I get it now, but I won't. 

I don't want to lie to you. 

I'm tired. 

It's a down deep to the bones, from the nose to the toes, kind of tired. My hair is tired. Good thing there's not much of it. 

Yes, even my ass is tired. I don't mean that gray hairy one either. I mean the... 

Well... Come to think of it, "gray and hairy" sort of fits.

Anyway...

A bunch of you volunteered to beta-test my Web App. I know I called Feature-Lock, but some suggestions made too much sense to ignore. (tweet this)

Unfortunately, those great suggestions forced a full re-write of much of the code. That took fever-pitch coding for two straight weeks.

I'm getting too old for this shit!

Danny Glover in every "Lethal Weapon" movie  

It didn't help that Twitter threw me a curve ball. 

Somewhere along the way, Twitter started using user ids that are nearly twice as long as they used to be. That means that anyone with a newer account had their tokens cut off short in the database. 

Joy!

It's an easy fix that took less than 2 minutes. It also required several more minutes of colorful diatribes in five languages. 

Yes, that color was blue. 

Yes, I can curse in many more languages than I speak politely. 

Can't we all?

You would think there would be some sort of mention. Maybe there was and I missed it? Twitter is usually good about such things. 

Whatever... the issue is fixed.

So, yeah, I'm tired. 

Maybe there really is such a thing as a good tired. Maybe it's just that now that it's done, I plan to collapse shortly.

I earned it.

I'm looking forward to it.

When I started this, I just planned on creating a meek, mild, little web app that would build Click-to-Tweet links with images. I should have known better. Start-ups always have a mind of their own. (tweet this)

We decided to add scheduling capabilities. 

That was no biggie (so I thought). The scripts were written months ago as part of the big-assed Beast I wrote for myself.

And therein lies the problem.

I wrote the things for myself. I wrote them for the way I use Twitter.

When I write an article, whether for a client or not, I promote it through Twitter. I zip off a tweet schedule and move on to the next project. 

It's strictly Fire and Forget.

As they say in Texas, (or so I'm told), "That dawg don't hunt!"

Different Strokes for Different Folks

The fun thing about this start-up is that I'm seeing how others want to use Twitter for their stuff.

• Gloria Ochoa wanted to manage multiple accounts without logging in and out each time. That made sense. I know I hated having to log out as me, log in as the client, do stuff, log out as the client, log back in as me, do more stuff, etc, etc, ad nauseum. Since I was the only "user," I never bothered.
• Gary Sharpe wanted to be able to schedule Twitter Cards using all the  methods. That made sense too. He also wanted to schedule with or without images, relying on cards for impact. That made less sense to me but why not?
  
• While I was looking into Gary's Twitter Card idea, I decided it would be great to be able to categorize scheduled tweets along campaigns too.
• Pamela Williams and Franci Hoffman wanted to be able to click a Share-to-Twitter button and schedule tweets from that. Done. A share to twitter is basically just a Twitter Card.
• Gloria also wanted to be able to delete scheduled tweets quickly and easily. We did Gloria one better. Gloria, you can delete scheduled tweets, but keep the stored one, or delete everything, stored and scheduled. Your call.
• Pam wanted to delete scheduled tweets too. She also wanted to edit them. Okay.
• Both Pam and Franci wanted a simpler faster way to build the tweets in the first place. 
• Gary didn't ask, but I noticed he would schedule similar tweets pointing at the same post. He would post with subtle changes in the text. That got me to thinking that tweet cloning would be helpful. Gary should be able to create clones of existing tweets with some modification. He might use different images or none at all. Maybe he could try out different texts. 
• Gary also wanted a counter to let him know how long his text was. Easy.

All that stuff is done. Along with some other stuff to help prevent errors along the way, and make it easier and faster to schedule tweets.

A new Dashboard

To get it done, we had to change how tweets were built and scheduled. 

In the past, tweets were built directly when scheduled. They were one-offs. Now they are stored for future use/re-use. 

Storing them also allows us to apply editing, deletion, categorizing, and cloning. 

We can also further simplify the process. 

You still need to start from a manual tweet. There's no getting around the need to know where Twitter stores your image. We extract where Twitter keeps the image from the embed code.

Here's the thing. Everything about that tweet is in the embed code. Everything!

We must use the embed code for the image.  Why not extract everything else while we're at it?

Now it does.

This is the new process. 

• Manually tweet once. 
• Copy the embed code. 
• Paste it into the app
• Click save

Using the New Dashboard

The scheduling methods have left the dashboard. They are replaced with a Campaigns list. For now, your Campaigns list will be empty. None of your tweets are saved. 

We'll fix that.

Any beta-tester who wants me to categorize their existing scheduled tweets can just email me. Include the Text you used to tweet and the category you want it in.

Going forward, every tweet will be stored. Stored tweets appear in the Campaigns list.

There are no limits to how many campaigns you can have.

Clicking "View Stored Tweets" will bring up a list and an icon menu. That menu is to view, schedule, edit/clone, delete scheduled, or delete saved tweets. 

Any beta-tester who wants me to categorize their existing scheduled tweets can just email me. Include the Text you used to tweet and the category you want it in. I'll add them on the back-end.

Next on the To-Do List.

The next step is to implement the cooperative retweeting system and RSS integration. Many multiple account managers are excited about the idea of forcing child accounts to retweet parent account tweets (and vice versa). That's best done through RSS.

Exactly how we will implement that remains to be seen. 

I will also re-write the multi-account thing to remove the 50-account maximum. Maybe 50 is enough. Maybe it isn't. People should be able to link all their accounts. It's not up to me to say how many.

Later, much later, I will add growth-hacking to the mix. I'll show you how I went from 400 half-assed targeted followers to 14,500 targeted ones in less than ten months.

Here's a tip: 

If you don't have Twitter linked to your beBee account, add it asap!

Do we really need to talk about the Birds and the Bees and why that's a good thing? (tweet this)

For now, though, I need a few days break.

Passing out in 5... 4... 3... 2............................................................................................................

OY VÉ!

I'll put them back tomorrow.