Hi,

I’m on a quest to power my business‘ entire backend using only Software as a Service (SaaS), teach others how to do the same, and in the process help revolutionise the way small businesses run.

This chronicle is a record of my journey to a fully SaaS-based business backend. Here you can see how I am implementing SaaS in my business and get an idea of what you can do too! Why not sign up for the monthly newsletter and not miss any important Saas-related goodness?

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Today I was at the library and I was using Firefox portable, when I noticed my browser was being hijacked and sent to ad sites…

I looked to see if there was a portable app for anti mal-ware, ad-ware, spy-ware, etc. but found none useful.
They have clam win but it had an error.

So anyway, as I read on the forum I got the idea that there may be a Scan as a service website somewhere.

Enter Bit Defender free online virus scan! How great is that?!

Today we are here with Andrey Oskolkov, CEO of PointLoyalty for an exclusive interview. It is my hope that this will be the first of many interviews with the great companies that bring us SaaS solutions. And to start off with PointLoyalty is definitely to start off with a bang. Read on to learn why they are one of a kind!

“High costs for development and deployment of specialized management and control systems for properly calculating bonus points were always a factor that hampered the establishment of bonus loyalty programs. Implementing such systems always required significant amount of time and resources. Our company gives free online access to software product for loyalty bonus programs management tunable for any type of business, from online shop to social networks support site.” (from pointloyalty.com)

And the small businesses rejoice!

Taiyo: Where did you get the idea for the name of your service?

Andrey: One of the company founders suggested this name. The domain was free, so we took it.
We think this name is easy to remember and it perfectly reflects the company mission.

Taiyo: What is the mission/vision of your company?

Andrey: To make establishing loyalty programs easy for every company – big or small.

Taiyo: What features of your service do you think would be most interesting to small businesses?

Andrey: Any company can start its own loyalty program for free. “Easy, free and flexible“ – written on the first page of our web site. We support the full cycle of loyalty program management – from creating loyalty programs to program members’ notification about transactions and earned bonus points.

Taiyo: How can small businesses receive the most benefit from your service?

Andrey: Small businesses can reward their clients, use loyalty programs, bonus programs as marketing tools. Earlier only large companies could use such instruments.

Taiyo: How can your service change the way a small business runs? And what new possibilities does your service create?

Andrey: Any small business company is now able to do things it previously did not even dream about because of restricted budget.

Taiyo: What motivated you to start your service? What great problem were you trying to solve?

Andrey:The Internet brings a lot of opportunities for businesses but there are no online tools available. There is a lot of hype around SaaS but there are not many quality offers especially for small businesses. We want to be among the first companies of such kind. Besides, the loyalty marketing area is not standardized yet and having a lot of experience in developing custom software in this field we tried to make a universal, simple and inexpensive solution.

Taiyo: What was the most difficult part of starting up your service?

Andrey: It is still ahead I believe. So far it was to achieve a balance between simplicity and being universal in our complex marketing sphere.

Taiyo: So, where do you see your service going in the near future?

Andrey: We make efforts to simplify our solution so it will be easier to use by small business owners.
On the other side we want to continuously extend system capabilities and introduce new useful features.

Taiyo: What is the most interesting project, feature, etc. that you are working on for your service?

Andrey: We are developing a plugin for an online e-commerce solution. It is fascinating to see how easy it is to integrate our system with customizable e-shops. We want to show our potential customers that integration is fast and straightforward.

Taiyo: What part of running a SaaS service is the most fun for you? What excites you?

Andrey: Interesting people who contact us and ways they use the service. Sometimes we are really surprised how universal our service is and how creative our users are.

It will be exciting to see how PointLoyalty evolves in the future. As the first, and so far the only (as far as I can tell), free customer loyalty program software as a service provider, they are already very unique.

Here is a quick look at the PointLoyalty interface:

As a last note Andrey told me that they would be more than glad to answer any questions on using PointLoyalty. So, dear reader, be sure to ask.

They also have a good user manual.

I know as I use the service more for myself and my clients I will have more questions and I will be sure to share the answers with you. Remember, the more we (as small businesses) help SaaS-providers the more saas-providers are able to help us. We need each other.

I really enjoyed this interview with PointLoyalty and I hope you have enjoyed it too.

Have a wonderful and saasy day!
- Taiyo J

The main goal of this website is to facilitate an exchange between these two groups. And to do so I am focusing on organising saas-related information, conducting interviews with both groups, and also sharing my own story.

The enemy is limited time and the difficulty of organising information in a user-friendly manner. These are always the enemies. And I will likely always have to fight them.

On a happier note, I have already contacted and interviewed a few SaaS providers and am very excited about the responses and eager to post their interviews for all to see.

Stay tuned!
And feel free to drop me a line in the comments or email
tori [at] taiyojohnson [dot] com

But how can I count and compare the # of “I”s to the # of “you”s?

so I googled…
“count word occurrence”
And i found
http://www.wordcounttool.com/

It is a web based tool (exactly what I wanted) so I was happy

Hope it helps you too.

Have a SaaSy day,
TaiyoJ

For anyone looking to make money by their knowledge or products online and to give a bit of the knowledge away in order to gain traffic, blogging is probably going to be part of the equation. But how can you manage running a blog when you have other important things to attend to too?

Being overworked already and on the constant look out for SaaSy web 2.0 solutions to time/money problems I turned early to various blogging by phone solutions.

On my personal (and productivity) blog tori.taiyojohnson.com I experiment often with various ways of blogging by phone.
I was first inspired to do this after using the THEN free/cool service Jott.com.
They have since gone paid-only and greatly chaffed their loyal early adopters. But that’s another story.
After Jott I tried other services like Dail2Do.com, etc. most of which I found through sites like lifehacker.com (they get a link, Jott doesn’t ).

I was also an early grandcentral.com (Voip phone awesomeness) user which became google voice. And I realised early on that Google Voice could be used easily to record long podcasts with just a phone (or record phone interviews), using its call recording feature. I called this “GoogleCasting.” And for a bright shining moment all was well.

Just recently however it looks like Google Voice has dropped its call recording feature. I am not sure if this is truly the case or not but it looks like it. Perhaps it will come back.

In either case, this prompted me to go searching for other podcasting by phone solutions and luckily I found a few [hopefully] good ones.

First up is spoink.com. A free service. I like free.

GabCast.com is another, but not free. 0.10USD per minute.

And of course you can google for yourself “free podcast by phone” and find others.

Is saas taking over the world?

Have a wonderful and saasy day,
TaiyoJ

Here is part of an email they send out to new users:

Did you know you could send email directly into your new BatchBook account to automatically create or attach to contact records? It’s true: your unique BatchBox address is listed below. Just forward or “bcc” a message to your account and it will be logged in BatchBook:

batchbox+11111@[company-name].batchbook.com

Ahh, I love you too SaaS!

Here is an idea for a logo should I decide to use one.

I created it with the portable version of the FOSS (free open source software) graphics program ”GIMP” that I run from my USB stick. (part of my obsession with being completely mobile)