Finally excited about marketing iPrioritize

Yesterday we had our weekly Pure Adapt meeting (still getting used to regular “status update” meetings). We re-discussed our short and long term priorities, and I think we came to an exceptional agreement on the goals of our business. The core components are clearly SEO and Detailed Image, but those are SUCH a given that we don't discuss them much – we know we've got great processes for each and we know they work because they are already very profitable.

The discussion focused primarily on the other 10-20% of our time – how to use it to grow our business the way we want to grow it. We went person by person and site by site, and came up with very simple growth plans for all of our sites. Obviously I'm the most excited about iPrioritize – even SportsLizard to me is largely unexciting compared to the potential I see for iPrioritize, particularly the mobile version in the years to come.

But since the day I conceived of it, I have had one HUGE problem – how to I go about getting businesses to use the damn software? It's not exactly the easiest thing in the world to get influential people in a business to listen to you. I was on the train home from NYC last weekend after visiting some fellow YE's when it hit me – the best use I have for iPrioritize right now is as a tool for my client work. I create a list for all of my clients, and give them the URL to monitor the list (one of my favorite features). It gets business owners seeing a real application of the software's potential for making communication within an organization or between organizations easier.

So why not offer free business accounts to all web developers/designers/SEO's with that same purpose as the selling point? I could use a few prominent web worker blogs to communicate the free accounts, and also start creating a spreadsheet of developers and emailing them using a mail-merge. I'll also create an affiliate account exclusively for web professionals. In THEORY they will try it out on a few clients, see how well it works, and eventually end up using it for all of their clients...who are all business owners, effectively reaching my target market! The affiliate program will just be an added incentive for them to get their clients to sign up.

Considering it's been about a year since I conceived of iPrioritize, and I didn't have this “ah ha” moment until last weekend, I'm pretty damn excited. It won't take up a ton of time (I can email as few as 5-10 developers each week and it will slowly grow) and it won't cost me any capital other than the capital lost from me programming an affiliate program (half a day at most). I'm pumped, and I think this is the way to slowly but surely grow this tool for business use.

Thoughts?