I forgot what I planted here.

Cherokee Purple heirloom tomatoes.

Bell pepper. The end.

With much excitement, we just rolled out a re-designed version of our product Tripleseat’s marketing site… looking good!

Reasons for a Redesign?

We’ve only been selling Tripleseat for about two months and the initial version, which was created by Andy, did a great job of presenting our product.

Tweaking our Marketing Message

However, after a few months of selling, Jono decided that we needed to switch our online marketing strategy to sell Tripleseat based on its value and not its features. As the experts call it, value-selling, not feature-selling.

So, we re-tooled the site to have more “how and why Tripleseat is beneficial to restaurants” and less “Tripleseat is cool because it has feature x, y and z.” The value-sell is best demonstrated in the slide presentation on the learn more page. I guess we’ve moved on from being car salesmen

Streamlining Content

After playing around with a number of design layouts, it was apparent that we were trying to cram too much content onto the site. To get around that, we cut down the overall number of words, and we also implemented this blingy scroller control by Victor Stanciu, as seen in our customer quotes section.

The scroller has allowed us to fit more valuable content onto the page without taking up more realistic – not a bad way to be.

Bling Bling! (note: see site for actual bling)

Helping to Direct Login Traffic

With Tripleseat, each customer gets their own Tripleseat subdomain. So, for instance, Joe’s Restaurant’s site lives at the URL: JoesRestaurant.Tripleseat.com.

This has caused us some grief because, as we’ve discovered, many people don’t remember the subdomain part of their site’s URL. Understandable, for sure. To help them out, we’ve added a login interface to the Tripleseat home page, which helps direct our customers to their respective login page. It also gave us another opportunity for a little more javascripty shininess.. but, you’ll have to go click on the login button to see for yourself

Will it Make an Impact?

We’ll have to wait and see. Hopefully, yes.

Hot diggity! Our first honest to goodness product has launched: Tripleseat.

What is Tripleseat?

Tripleseat is a customer relationship and event planning software designed specifically for the restaurant private dining room business. With Tripleseat, restaurants no longer have to rely on manually tracking and planning events, but can simply log on to a website to view and manage their events.

Traditionally, restaurants have handled the problem in one of two ways. Either they managed their private dining with pen and paper, or they used costly and cumbersome client-server based software applications. Tripleseat provides a better experience for both of these users, allowing for improved organization (vs pen & paper), as well as improved ease of use and better accessibility. With Tripleseat, there are no contracts to sign, and no complicated software installations. It requires only an internet connection and a web browser, you pay only $89/month, and you can cancel at any time.

What’s the Technology?

Like most of the applications that we build here at BrightMix, Tripleseat is a Ruby on Rails app, built entirely from from the ground up. It’s hosted using the completely awesome and powerful Amazon EC2 (for servers) and S3 (for image/file hosting). This is our first application to launch on the Amazon Web Services platform, and so far we give it an A+! The pricing is phenomenal, and the promise of being able to scale up and down as demand grows, is very compelling.

Outside influences

We make no bones about borrowing concepts and ideas from other successful web apps. Some apps that are similar to Tripleseat are highrise and Salesforce. What we’ve created though, is an application thats specifically targeted at the restaurant industry. We’ve taken the principals from apps like Basecamp and Highrise (easy to use, nice to look at, not jam-packed with features), and have packaged them in a web app that is built solely with the restaurant user in mind.

Some Tripleseat History

We got in contact with Jono, the president and primary founder of Tripleseat, through a bit of happenstance and good luck. Jono was looking for some smart programmers to build out this web application concept.

Development

Loyal readers may remember that in January we took a trip to Boston to hash out the details of the Tripleseat development. This trip was the official kick off of the development effort. After returning to Omaha, we spent the next 4-5 months getting the software to the point where it was ready to beta test. Keep in mind, that we were not working on this 100% of the time, but rather were spending our 20% time hacking on Tripleseat. It was developed right along side our client work, and as such, we had to prioritize it and fit it into our schedule. It took some serious pluck, moxy, and grit.

Beta Period & launch

We launched Tripleseat into Beta in July of 2008 with roughly 15 beta customers. Locally, we have one of our favorite restaurants, the Upstream Brewery, using the product (and loving it!). In late August of 2008, we released version 1.0 of the Tripleseat and are now in the process of selling to more customers!

Last week, Dusty mentioned BrightMix.tv, a new site I’ve been working on lately. It’ll be a live video feed of us here in Brightlymixedland – as well as other Vimeo gems & Flickr goodies. There’s no real business purpose or reasoning – other than novelty and just because we can. We’re doing it for the lolz.

I guess we could put it in marketing-speak-press-release-esque lingo: “Our latest venture is an extension of our brand and corporate personality. It’s a cross section of who we are and the essence of what we do. We believe in transparent business solutions and that is just what this site is. Focus group research has shown that viewing this new site will probably cure malaria. It’s a ‘green’ site with a high miles per gallon. It’s really all about the children.” Yikes, so many buzz words.

The real deal is still in the works, but to help promote it and have fun in the mean time, we launched the ‘coming soon’ site yesterday. I designed it with tongue firmly planted in cheek… designing intentionally ugly is fun. This time it’s a step back 10-12 yrs when the web was but a wee pup. Our sincere apologies to any seizures induced by the graphics. The jackhammer guy is my personal fave, i’ve wasted countless hours just watching his hat keep falling as he works away.

And make sure you check out the favicon – it’s a classic. (Ironically, there were no favicons when that image was around – which makes it even better.) We’ll launch BrightMix.tv in a few weeks or so. Now you know that’s not an empty promise.

Silicon Prairie News is a website and blog covering the tech / startup / entrepreneur scene in Omaha, of which BrightMix is happy to be a part of. A “startup scene” in Omaha you say?!? Yup, crazy as it sounds, there is one, however hidden it may be. Our intention with SPN is to highlight some of the unique and interesting companies and individuals around the city who are doing great things. Shoot videos, do interviews, report news…

By “we”, I should most definitely mention that the whole project is spear-headed by our good friend, Jeff Slobotski. Really he’s the one that’s moving the project forward – blogging, talking to people, etc. We’re simply providing the technology and video camera And, occasionally providing subject matter.

In addition to shooting video interviews of interesting entrepreneurs, and covering local news about startups and the creative class, the hope is to have Silicon Prairie News sponsor and host events… In fact, the first event sponsored by Silicon Prairie News is Thursday, July 31st (today?!)…

Sarah Lacy – Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good

When: Thursday, July 31st 6:30-8:00pm
Where: Nomad Lounge
More Info: Sarah Lacy Event Details

Sarah Lacy is an award winning journalist and has been a reporter in Silicon Valley for nearly a decade, covering everything from the tiniest startups to the largest public companies. She writes a biweekly column for BusinessWeek.com called “Valley Girl” and is co-host of Yahoo! Finance’s Tech Ticker.

Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good is the story of the entrepreneurs who learned their lesson from the bust and in recent years have created groundbreaking new Web companies. The second iteration of the dotcoms—dubbed Web 2.0—is all about bringing people together. Read More…

Everyone’s welcome, please come join us for a night of interesting conversation surrounding startups, entrepreneurship, innovation and everything in between!

Sojern, a client of ours, has partnered with some of the major airline carriers, to provide targeted information and advertisements on boarding passes. This information includes weather, restaurant & event recommendations, fun facts, and other targeted advertisements.

The launch of the boarding pass project brought with it a LOT of press coverage.. Here’s a couple of the highlights…

• Wall Street Journal – Delta Launches Online Boarding-Pass Ads
• USA Today – Airlines turn boarding passes into ad space
• Venture Beat – Sojern gives airlines a new way to make money — your boarding pass
• Mashable – Sojern Turns Your Boarding Pass Into Travel Recommendations
• AdAge – Airlines Stamping Ads Onto Boarding Passes

And hundreds more… Check out Google News…

What exactly was BrightMix’s role in the development? We can’t give out many of the details, but we were heavily involved with the backend processes and systems necessary to get all of the information collected and presented to the end user. It was truly an awesome project to be a part of, in the sense that its not often that you get a chance to launch a product to millions of users from day one. The technical challenges and obstacles were very exciting indeed.

Congrats to the whole Sojern team, and everyone involved in getting this project off the ground. It was truly a great experience, we’re happy to have been a part of it, and we’re excited to continue to help Sojern with their long-term success.

• A parish-level website – A site for the individual churches, where they can list events, upload photos, and connect with their members.
• A diocese-level website – A site for the ECUSA Diocese, where users can search for churches / parishes.
• A “resource center” – A “portal” where the churches can manage their content, learn more about marketing, and get help using their sites.

Under the hood, it’s a complete ASP.NET content management system for churches, so they can manage and update the contents of their websites easily. Beyond simple content management though, the sites are integrated together in a manner that will allow for rich interaction between the various Episcopal Church Parishes. Think social-networking-meets-episcopal-church. We’ve got some exciting ideas planned on this front, and these site launches are just the beginning. This first phase was important to get people using the sites, and to give us a solid platform to move forward on.

This project has been quite some time in the making, and we’re excited to see it go live! Our congrats to the Granger Group on the site launch, we look forward to working with them on future projects and site enhancements!

Resource Center – Visit Site

Sample Parish Site – Visit Site

Sample Diocese Site – Visit Site

For more information about the ECUSA web solution, visit the Granger Group.