It may be tempting to forgo getting a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) if you are a start-up – after all, they consume precious resources. At a minimum, they require administrative  investments, but more likely there are also subscription costs.

You are a small organization, you know your customers already and you really don’t have that many to keep track of. A simple shared spreadsheet can probably do the trick. Do you really need to be wasting money and head-space on a CRM?

5 Things to ask yourself when you consider whether or not you need a CRM

1. Will your product be available to be brought offline (i.e. sales will not be strictly be online and self-service)?

2. Will you have a dedicated sales-team?

3. Will your product require customer support?

4. Will your product have a sales-cycle?

5. Is your product renewable (e.g. on a subscription based model)?

If you’ve answered yes to even a few of the questions above, I would recommend you consider investing in a CRM and doing it early. It gets progressively harder to roll something like this out as your organization grows. You’ll need to retrain staff on software, change how you interface with customers and the entire day-to-day processes for your sales team will be different. Start Early and Scale. 

Done well, your CRM will become the home for all the data on your customers (and partners, resellers, investors, even press contacts). If you use it as the central hub, it can become a very, very powerful tool for forecasting, calculating revenue, recognizing problems in early stages and catching opportunities to grow revenue.

 Let me provide a few scenarios related to the questions I asked above:

Your Product is available for purchase online and offline:

If you are selling your product(s) both online and offline, a CRM is critical because you need a place to marry the work that your sales team and your sales platform are doing. How else are you going to ensure that your sales people aren’t phoning leads that have already purchased online? Or perhaps more importantly, how are you ensuring your sales team has access to customers who have made smaller purchases online so that they can contact and up-sell to them? What happens when a small division of General Motors uses their credit card to buy 10 seats online? Use your CRM to note this and get Sales on the horn to expand to new divisions.

You already have or plan to have a dedicated sales team

Sales teams are critical, particularly for B2B plays. But they need a platform that allows them to track all their work. A place to store contact info on leads, keep a history of what contact has been made with them and gradually move them along from being cold contacts through to warm leads, then opportunities and then the sale. Even at that sale point – where are you tracking contract changes, if it was signed, when invoicing occurred and when to follow-up on their renewal? Spreadsheets and corporate memory just aren’t suited to today’s sophisticated sales cycles and processes.

Additionally, how are you tracking your sales team’s performance? Are they converting leads to opportunities at an acceptable rate? How many sales are they making? How much opportunity pipe is coming down the next fiscal quarter and will it be enough to sustain your burn rate? These are all things that, properly used, the regular reporting in a CRM can help you determine.

Your product will require customer support

So you are selling SaaS or some other digital product. Is it going to require support? Assuming so, how are you tracking this support? Where are you going to keep track of the support calls and inquires you receive? How are you going to track which ones occur most often, so you can dig in and figure out what causes them? When you get support calls, where is your support team going to look up information (like previous support cases) on your client, so they can provide them excellent service? How is your sales team going to know that they shouldn’t make a renewal sales pitch this week because the customer has had three support calls and isn’t happy? All valid questions. You can learn more in this post Why You Need a SaaS Customer Service Platform.

Your product has a sales cycle and/or has renewals

If you sell a subscription based SaaS, you fall into this category. You might not be thinking about renewable revenue now, but getting a repeat purchase is much less resource intensive than bringing a new customer on board. Churn is a big problem for start-ups, often because in the race to get new paying clients, little or no attention is paid to keeping the ones you have. Renewals are seen as less sexy and dull – but they are the heart and soul of your business.

In terms of sales cycle, there are very few products that don’t have one. If you sell something that has a higher price point and longer lead-to-sale process, this is even more important. You need a way to track your leads as you nurture them from being a random person that visited your site, to a form completion, a request for a trial, contacts with the sales team and then hopefully a sale. And then of course renewals. How are you going to ensure that customers are followed up when they plan their next budget, so you aren’t on the chopping block or how are you tracking when their credit card expires, so a friendly sales rep follows up with them to update it?

Convinced?

For most start-ups, a SaaS CRM (as opposed to something like SAP or Oracle’s traditionally products) is going to be the right option, so I will focus on these solutions. 

You have a few choices, the gorilla in the room is Salesforce.com. They pioneered the SaaS CRM space. There are many others though, Sugar CRM, Netsuite and 37 Signals’ Highrise come to mind. 

Disclosure, I recently worked for a company (Radian6) that was acquired by Salesforce.com. While I am no longer with Salesforce.com, I am a believer and implementing Salesforce as the CRM was one of the first things I did when I beginning my latest adventure with a new SaaS start-up.

If you are planning on scaling and building out a larger organization, my advice is that you strongly consider Salesforce.com. The start-up I am with now is the fourth organization in a row that I have worked in that uses Salesforce for their CRM. Clearly this makes me biased, but it also points to a few other things.

Why you should consider Salesforce.com

• It is very mature. Salesforce has been around the longest, they essentially created the space

• It is the largest platform. Quite often, I value the start-up over the established player. But your CRM may not be the place to do this. Being the king of the heap means that Salesforce has the largest number of integration partners, and this is critical. It means that your customer service portal like Desk.com, Click to Chat platform like Olark, Marketing Automation service like Hubspot and everything else ties seamlessly into it. The point of the CRM is to store all your data on each person in one place and integrations are what facilitates that.

• Odds are very good that experienced sales people will have used Salesforce already. That means as you build a fast-growing team, your on-boarding time is shorter. You can focus them more on learning about your product and less about the tool that will be their most important interface. If you are a writer, Word might be your platform, if you are a graphic designer it is probably Photoshop – for your sales people, it is the CRM.

That is not to say Salesforce.com doesn’t have its own weaknesses. The User Interface is clunky and it can be painful for new users to understand the nuances and jargon. Additionally, it is certainly not the cheapest SaaS CRM on the market. It starts out $5.00 per month/user (more on pricing here), but as your needs grow (especially if you want API access), costs scale quickly and Enterprise packages cost $125 per seat. More problematic is their policy of forcing a 12 month renewal on your contract in order to upgrade from one version to another. For example, if you are six months into your first year and realize you need to move from Pro to Enterprise, Salesforce will force (pun intended) you to sign on for another 12 months. That is if you are willing to pay the full year upfront. If you want to go month-to-month or quarterly on payment terms, you will need to sign on for 18 months.

As mentioned at the beginning of the post, this is the second in a series on building a SaaS ecosystem for start-up success. The original post, which discusses all the other tools you should consider tying into your CRM is here.

Are you using a CRM or considering implementing one? Let me know your feedback below.

In many cases, the solution lies in Software as a Service (SaaS) tools. Most founders understand that they can be deployed quickly, scale and are generally cost-effective, but what is often overlooked is how much more powerful they become when they are integrated and used as an ecosystem instead of as stand-alone solutions.

A start-up is a special thing, but in many ways they are no different then a regular business. Think about what regular businesses need to do to be successful.

Acquire leads and customers, keep track of them and keep them happy

That being the case, what tools do you need to do that?

• A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system: This is the heart and soul of your business. It is what ensures you know who your prospects and customers are, that you bill them when you should and that as you grow quickly – your most important asset (paying clients) aren’t lost in the shuffle. Salesforce.com is the gold standard (disclosure – I am a former employee), but there are many. To learn more about why start-ups should consider using a CRM and things to consider when choosing one, check out this post.
• Marketing Automation: This is how you convert your website visitors into leads, your leads into customers and your customers into loyal brand advocates who spend more. It is more than just an email platform – if used correctly it accelerates your sales team’s efforts. More leads that convert faster for your best sellers. Hubspot is a fairly start-up friendly player in this space and integrates with the major SaaS CRM’s.
• A Support Platform: One of the most common, and detrimental mistakes that start-ups make is to focus too much time chasing the early sales and not enough ensuring those customers stick around. It can cost five times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to keep a current one. That’s why you need a platform to ensure you handle support as well as you handle sales. A platform will help you manage all your email, phone, social media and online support requests – not only ensuring everyone is responded to in a timely manner, but also helping you spot where your customers have the most problems and fixing those issues. Learn more at this post Why You Need a SaaS Customer Service Platform.
• Click to Chat: Online chat is one of the most overlooked lead generation and customer support tools that start-ups have at their disposal. Can you afford to miss any opportunity to sell to customers in the moment – like when they are on your pricing page and have a question? Using a product like Olark that is free for basic use, you can generate qualified leads easily and reduce friction in how your best prospects reach out to you. All the major chat providers have integrations available, Olark for example syncs with Salesforce and Desk.com.
• Other Products: The items above are the framework you need to build a rapidly scaling SaaS ecosystem focused on acquisition and retention. There are other tools you might consider to leverage these even further.
  • A Sales Data Platform: Products like OneSource’s iSell, Salesforces’s Data.com, ZoomInfo and InsideView all can help complete and update information on leads for your sales team. Give them everything they need to know about a potential client before they make the call. You increase their chances of converting leads to opps and opps to sales and reduce the amount of time it takes for them to prep for calls.
  • A Project Management System: If you are a technical founder, you are probably inclined to use BaseCamp (which is a great product). Don’t forget though – it is primarily used by developers. Other teams (Marketing for example) may not like it. Consider something like Do.com for them – it is free, and it integrates with things like Google Calendars, Gmail and Salesforce
  • Google’s Suite: You are probably already using Gmail, Google Docs and Calendar, but if you aren’t, consider it strongly. It is much cheaper than most enterprise email platforms and you don’t have to worry about maintenance. It also has two-factor authentication, which you should be enabling for all your staff.
  • Expensify: Managing expenses is a big time-waster for founders. You should be focusing on keeping funders happy and growing your business, but you need to keep a very close eye on where the money is going. Expensify (and Concur) help you with this. I would say that conservatively they can cut the traditional amount of time you and your staff spend on expense reporting, approvals and payments by fifty percent.

Finally, if your product is a digital one, don’t forget what a rich source of information it is. More importantly, don’t silo that info where only the development team can see it. Doesn’t it make sense to sync that data with your CRM so your sales and support teams have access to it as well?

Overwhelmed? That is a lot to take in and you are probably wondering if you really need all this stuff. As someone who works at a small start-up with about a dozen staff, I can say (proudly) that we use all the tools above to keep our organization growing.

Why you should use SaaS tools

• They accelerate growth
• They help reduce customer churn
• They are cheap (comparatively), many are even free for smaller organizations
• They allow you to scale quickly
• They are integrated. Everything I mention above integrates with Salesforce or other CRM’s. If you use a CRM, you can easily tie each of the platforms mentioned back into it so that all your data is stored, accessible and examinable in one place

Most importantly, they make things easier. Are you thinking of, or are already home-brewing something in-house? Unless it is your core-competency, I recommend you stop now. Whatever you have built is going to suck up precious developer time you should be allocating to your product. More over, whatever you build is going to be less feature rich and not nearly as upgradeable as what is already available cheaply. Think you can build a better platform for managing customers than Salesforce? Unless it is the only project you are going to be working on, I am here to assure you are wrong.

This post is the first in a series on building a SaaS ecosystem for start-up success. The second is on Customer Relationship Management systems and why they are important. You can read it here.

Are you using the products above at your start-up? Is there a piece of the puzzle I’ve missed? Let me know below.

The marketing project brief, sometimes called creative brief,  is likely one of the most maligned, misunderstood and misused documents in marketing today. In over a decade of marketing, I have never heard anyone say “oh boy, I get to fill out a project brief” (well at least not without a heavy dose of sarcasm). In general, people really dislike completing these briefs, not because they don’t appreciate the reason (it helps keep their project on track), but because they are sometimes misused.

Project briefs are often used as a blocker by the Marketing group. This is done for two reasons.

The Good: As an indication of your commitment to this project

Everyone has an idea, in fact many of them. However, most people don’t understand the amount of work and resources that go into marketing. As a result, your Marketing group are inundated with requests for materials/resources etc that people ask for on a whim. Forcing someone to spend even 15 or 20 minutes to fill out a document fleshing out their idea – makes a very large portion of these whimsical projects disappear  never to be heard of again. To be fair to your Marketing team – if you aren’t willing to spend 15 minutes firming up your idea, it probably wasn’t that important to you. Moreover, spending that 15-20 minutes will save you (and them) many multiples of that as the project is completed.

The Bad: As an intentional attempt to stop your project

A much more negative impetus for forcing someone to fill out a project brief is to stop their project because it isn’t wanted. Marketing departments often suffer from the arrogance of believing that they know best what is good for the organization (they are not alone in this fallacy). Marketers are also smart, we know people hate process and sometimes putting extra process in place and then enforcing it is enough to kill a project dead.

Why should I write a brief

1. To communicate your priorities. If your brief isn’t clear (or doesn’t exist at all), you risk it mutating as it is communicated to the separate groups working on it. A clear brief helps keep the individuals working on copy, graphics, messaging etc are all on the same page. Moreover it also helps ensure your work isn’t co-opted into someone else’s similar, but divergent project that they have been waiting for a way to shoe-horn into production.
2. To help your project land on time. Marketing groups always have more work than they can accomplish. A concise brief, with a clear deadline and reason why that deadline is important, helps ensure your work doesn’t get re-prioritized in favour of some other departments.
3. To save you time. Consider this, if you don’t write a brief and someone asks you via email to clarify a few things; by the time that single email thread (with three or four people going back and forth for a day), you’ve wasted yourself the twenty minutes it would have taken to write the brief.

Getting Your Brief Done

The easiest way to write a brief and ensure it covers your key points is to use a template. Every organization and project is different, so there are some fields you will need and some that can be removed or require customization, but this will cover the main points.

What you Need

• A firm due date: Not including this or being wishy-washy is a recipe for an overdue project.
• A reason why: In no more than one sentence, why do you need this project. Why is it so important that it deserves to be placed in front of the projects that all the other departments are submitting requests for?
• A project lead: Who in your group is taking complete control of this project? Who will answer the questions that Marketing will have about exact wording, legal questions (if you have a contest for example) and the finer points of the project that won’t come up until work begins?
• A budget: How much do you have to spend on this project? This can be a ballpark figure and is one of the items on the brief that will require some back and forth with your marketing team. More important than an exact dollar figure, is the age-old question – do you have a budget? You may not (and one may not be required), but it will give Marketing an idea of if your wants and needs are realistic.
• Audience: Who is this intended to target? Is it internal or external? Is it a particular age group or geography? everything you know about who you are going after include here.
• A key message: In no more than one line, what is the most important thing that you want your audience to walk away knowing.

Get your brief delivered early and ensure it is complete.

Delivering a brief that only has half the fields completed is basically the same as saying “I don’t have time for this, I’d prefer you wasted yours pestering me for details later”. You might save some time now, but you will pay dearly on the backend. In some organizations work won’t start until the brief is complete. At a minimum though, you are slowing down your own project and demonstrating to the people working on it that you don’t care about it that much – why should they?

Get on the phone

The day after you email that brief, get on the phone with the person you sent it to. Get confirmation that they have read it (and if necessary have them read it while you are on the line). Find out what else they need to know, who will be leading this on the Marketing end and, if necessary, set a time to brief the team further on the project, with all the stakeholders in that meeting. This isn’t required for smaller projects, but at a minimum have that call. It says “this project is important to me and I want to ensure it is done”.

Follow up

Do not assume your project is moving along in the background as your deadline approaches. Regularly follow-up and ask about the status and what you can do to help keep things moving. Not only will this make you feel more confident, it also keeps sending that signal that “this is important”  and “we care about it being delivered on-time”.

A lot of what I have said here may come off as being negative towards Marketing teams. That isn’t the intent. However, I am a marketer, I have worked on small and very large marketing teams. They all share a few things in common; they are buried in projects no one cares about and how much time it takes to complete work is often misunderstood by other teams.

Your success depends on ensuring they understand that you care about your project, it is an important project and you want to help them deliver it successfully for you.

Thoughts on the Creative/Project brief process? Hate it, love it? Let me know below.

What Is A View-Through

A view-through occurs when an online ad is presented, but no click occurs. Then later the visitor goes to a web property belonging to the advertiser. As an example, if an ad for a Kindle e-reader appeared in your web-browser and a week later you visited Amazon – that could be counted as a view-through. You can find a more robust definition at Wikipedia here.

One of the primary reasons that the VT continues to be a popular unit of measurement, is that it is highly touted by agencies and display ad vendors. Ad vendors and agencies both have a vested interest in defending the view-through, because it gives them something that can be massaged to defend the results of a campaign. Especially with naïve buyers – it can make a compelling case. Almost every time I have seen the VT used as the primary post-campaign metric in a report – it’s because the campaign did not go well and:

• No accurate measure of success was initially agreed upon before the campaign began
• The campaign was poorly planned and the wrong sites/networks were bought
• The campaign was well planned, but didn’t perform (bad creative, bad timing, bad product to begin with etc etc)

Because the VT is so often used as a crutch for defending failure – the metric is justifiably viewed with disdain by many. That said, the errors above are actually the fault of the client. The person who initiates a campaign should have these in place before the agency or ad vendor begins their work.

Why the View-Through is Still Valid

The view-through is however a valid campaign metric, it doesn’t deserve the bad rap it gets. Most importantly because it acts as an early warning system.

If a few days in, a campaign has a high VT,  but a low conversion rate, it should serve as an alarm. Dig in on that network/site etc and start testing other creative/offers etc. It is likely you have the right audience, but they aren’t being presented with the right incentive to sit up and take notice. Even if you can change that site from a big VT to a big Click-through locale – then you can start retargeting in earnest to those new clickers to generate conversions in another way.

A high VT with low conversion might also mean there is something less desirable happening and a site is intentionally or unintentionally generating wasteful impressions. Again, dig into the site or site section. You may notice that the creative blends into the background, the ad unit is poorly placed below the fold or the page contains content that is so desirable that a visitor is unlikely to click away. If caught early, these problems are solvable and your results will improve almost immediately.

The VT is not necessarily a good metric of success, but it is an excellent sign of where things can be improved. It shows that you are hitting your audience, you just need to tweak/toggle/adjust to get the desired action.

What are your thoughts on the view-through?

This recipe was originally taught to me by my great-grandmother and has been a popular treat with four generations of our family.

Ingredients

• 2 cups of white sugar, plus a cup of sugar in a wide-mouthed shallow bowl for dusting the finished donuts
• 3 lbs of lard
• 5 eggs
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
• 2 cups of milk
• 6 cups of flour (sifted)
• 8 teaspoons baking powder
• ¾ teaspoon of salt
• Pinch of cinnamon
• Pinch of nutmeg

Implements

• Donut cutter or an appropriate sized large glass with something to cut small holes in the middle
• Rolling pin
• Large wok (or very deep frying pan)
• Flour sifter
• Wooden spoon
• A candy thermometer (for checking the heat of the lard)
• Usual baking implements like measuring cups, bowls, wire racks etc
• Two large baking pans, lined with wax paper
• Clothes you don’t mind getting grease splatter on

Directions

Place the 3 lbs of lard in a very large wok and slowly heat to 375 degrees. Once enough is melted, remove 6 tablespoons for your recipe. While preparing and cooking, keep a close eye on the temperature of your lard. Keep it as close to 375 degrees as possible. Be very careful, the lard will pop and bubble (especially as you add donuts). It is hot and will scald you.

Now prepare your batter. In a large bowl, mix well the 2 cups of white sugar, 6 tablespoons of melted lard, eggs and vanilla extract. Then add the milk and mix again. In a separate large bowl, mix the flour, baking powder, salt, nutmeg and cinnamon.

Mix the dry mixture into the wet mixture a bit at a time, beat until smooth. The dough should be very heavy and sticky.

Divide the dough in half (to make it easier to handle) and place it on a well-floured board. If necessary add a bit of flour until the dough can be handled easily. Roll out the dough until it is ½” thick. Begin to cut out your donuts.

Using the handle of a wooden spoon, pick up your donut by the hole and carefully slide it down the edge of the wok into the hot lard. You can probably cook 4-5 at a time.

Once golden brown on the bottom, flip it over until the same on the other side. If your pan is deep enough, they may flip themselves when the first side is ready. Do not flip them a third time (this will make them greasy).

Remove your finished donuts one by one with your spoon handle and drop them on a wire rack. When cool enough to pick-up (carefully), drop them in a bowl of sugar, flip them and then place them on a pan covered in wax paper.

These donuts are homemade and have no preservatives. They will taste best on day one, pretty good on day two, but be soggy and lacklustre on day three.

If you try the recipe – let me know what you think of the results.

I have learned a few things along the way. Some will be controversial and of course, there is bias here (as an example, while I have used many agencies, I have always worked in house). Additionally, there are exceptions to every rule, but if you don’t have the time or budget to test yourself, I’d recommend taking the advice below:

Advertising

• Your site isn’t as secure as you think and someone is trying to hack it
• Rackspace isn’t perfect. But they sure scale fast
• Everyone loves the new CMS and website for three months. Have a plan for updates in month four
• There will be scope creep. You know. I know it. We all know it. Budget for it
• People are visiting your site on a mobile phone. If your site isn’t built to adapt to that, you have a problem
• Marketing Automation systems work. They increase conversions and allow you to act like you have a much bigger staff than you do. Use them

Disagree on some of these items (I’d be disappointed if you didn’t)? Have your own thoughts on what I missed? Let me know.

Oddly, many of the hotels I stay in seem ill-prepared to serve me, the business traveller. Our needs are simple and we are a cash cow, but we are often treating as a secondary thought (or gouged).

Here is my list of things that I, the business traveller, want to see. They are cheap, they are simple, they are achievable. Go make this happen.

• Full sized iron and ironing board with real padding. Business people wear business clothes. I was just on a plane for 8 hours and all my stuff was rolled up in a carry-on suitcase. Give me an iron that is full-sized, has some heft, doesn’t leak and let’s pair it with an ironing board that has enough padding that my shirts don’t look like waffles when I’m done trying to smooth them out.
• Free Internet with no hassle sign-ins. Charging me (and my company) $15 for 24 hours of wifi is a slap in the face. If you think we don’t care because work pays for it – you are wrong. Additionally, don’t make it a pain for me to get each of my devices (phone, laptop, iPad) on your network with passwords and user agreements. Get one standard network and roll it out nationwide. Club Quarters gets high points for this - I walk into a location now and all my devices are online.
• Easy to access plugs that are on the desk. I need to charge a laptop, a phone and probably an iPad. Two little plugs at the base of a lamp, so close together that only one power cord can be used at a time are frustrating. Don’t make me unplug that fridge or pull out the chair and crawl under the desk.
• A rewards program that remembers me (instead of me remembering a number) and upgrades my room (as opposed to giving free rooms). Free rooms aren’t a huge reward if you have to stay in hotels for work (and would prefer not to on vacation). What I’d really like is my stays to automatically get bumped to a better room.
• A floor without kids. I recently stayed at a hotel in Fredericton and the floor I was on was an “adults-only” floor. The sign when I got off the elevator even said so (no kids, no running, no pets etc etc). Nothing gives me more fear than seeing a junior high sports team unload in the lobby while I am checking in.
• A receipt sent via email. Hotel receipts are big, multi-paged and annoying to keep until I file my expenses. I love knowing I’ll get it by email instead.
• A clock that I can dim the display on. A lot of places I have been staying have iHomes which have this option and are intuitive to use. I can play music while working and charge my phone while keeping it by the bed at night.

Sadly, most major chains fail to provide the items above. I have much better luck with the boutiques and smaller chains like Club Quarters and Klimpton. Club Quarters is my personal favourite. Their locations are downtown, they are no-nonsense, reasonably priced and they hit almost all the things I mention above.  You can check them out here.

Travel a lot for business? What are your personal must-haves at hotels?

Recently my wife and I added a daughter to our family. We have long been campers and have a Canada Day tradition of back country camping at Kejimkujik National Park (more on this amazing spot here).

When we began to plan our camping trip we were disappointed to find that Google let us down. We could not find any solid online resources with tips on back country camping with an infant (perhaps some would have taken this as a warning sign).

Role Models are Important

I have always been camping. I mean that sincerely. I grew up next door to the Cape Breton Highlands National Park (more on it here) and do not remember a time in my life when we were not camping or using the park in some other way. In 1986 my parents put my sister and I in a station wagon and we stayed in a tent the entire summer – driving from Cape Breton to Vancouver and back. I remember my grandparents (already retired at at the time) doing something similar and my sister had her twins in a tent their first summer.

If she could do it with twins, surely a single baby would be half as much work…? Here goes:

Breastfeeders Have It Easier

If you breastfeed your baby, your trip gets a lot easier and a lot lighter. No worrying about keeping milk/formula fresh, prepping it, carrying extra fuel to boil water etc etc.

Planning is Important

All back country camping (a place you hike to instead of driving to) requires planning. You cannot simply throw everything in the car and drag it out as you need. You plan exactly how many clothes you need, each meal has to be planned, so does water – everything you need to take has to be added to a list and checked off as packed. Then you take stock of what you have and cut it in half. Historically we’ve shot for packs that weigh under 50 lbs – and that requires making tough concessions.

Don’t Go Overboard

For our first trip, we chose a site that was only a about a one kilometre hike in. That meant we could pack multiple days of clothes and leave them in bags (one bag for each day) in the car. Overall, a single baby added enough clothing and extra gear to warrant an extra 75 litre pack over what we would have normally taken. An impressive haul.

Additionally, a site that close meant cell reception and the piece of mind that if anything went wrong, we could call for help and get to a vehicle quickly.

What To Sleep In

One of our biggest worries was what would the baby sleep in (in terms of shelter and bed). We are back country campers, so our current tents were too small to accommodate another body. We’d been really pleased in the past with a smaller Eureka tent, so after trying several options, we decided on a Eureka Scenic Pass 4XTN (pictured above). There are bigger tents, there are pricier tents and there are lighter tents. But this tent was the perfect size, the weight was reasonable (given the square footage) and the price was low.

In choosing the tent, we had the store assemble them and laid down, with the baby, in each of our top three options. You need to know that you will have enough room everyone and their gear. We also use drysacks. Room in a tent is tight and these things are unbelievably waterproof. You pack them up at night and throw them outside. They keep things much dryer than a tent (which may not leak, but dampness is inevitable). With all the diapers and extra clothes – you are going to be glad to have extra space. Retailers like Mountain Equipment Coop sell these drysacks in many sizes, I’d recommend getting one with backpack straps. Easier to carry (or portage with), and hoisting them in the air at night, to keep pesky raccoons and bears away, is much faster.

We also struggled with what our baby would sleep in. We needed something light that folded up small, but had sides that would keep the baby from rolling out and us from rolling in. After considering a number of options, we found the Summer Infant Travel Bed online. It folded up into a small pack (with a strap), it was light and the baby loved it. You can check it out here. We placed this between us, on top of our smallest Thermarest (to keep it off the damp tent floor).

What To Pack

Packing was the most important pre-trip consideration. A baby can create an impressive amount of laundry in just 24 hours and we were going to be gone 3 days. A few things were simple: 3 boxes of diaper wipes. A sleeve of diapers.

We went on a road trip to PEI the weekend prior to camping, which acted as a trial packing-run. We were gone just one night and packed 4 of everything: sleepers, onesies etc. But fewer long sleeve outfits (which we ended up not having enough of).

Armed with our PEI experience, as we stood looking at our daughter’s wardrobe, wondering “How many sleepers should I pack?” The answer was “all of them.” How many bibs? All. How many socks? All. Hats: a lot. We packed in 3 bags. The first bag had the most clothes and came in with us the first night.  The second and third stayed in the car and we hiked out to replace items we were low on each day.

Bag number one had all of her bibs, socks and hats. It also contained: four light and four fleece sleepers, six onesie and pant outfits, two long sleeve onesies and two baby hoodies.  We use sleep sacks and brought 2 light ones – both in bag number one and three fleece ones- two in bag number one and one in the car.  Bag #2 and #3 had four of each light sleepers, fleece sleepers, and onesie/pant outfits.

Baby barfing volume and frequency is unpredictable.  On day 2, we needed to restock our light sleepers.  We never got into bag number 3.

How To Keep Your Baby Warm

Keeping the baby warm at night caused the most pre-trip worry. As avid campers, we have often woken up seeing our breath. Fleece clothes and sleep sacks came along with us. Our back up plan was to take the baby into the sleeping bag with mom, if it got really chilly.

As it turned out, the weekend was a scorcher and we ended up trying to keep her cool, while covered, to keep bugs off. It was still 25 celsius at bedtime and we put her to bed in a light cotton sleeper.  For the first time in camping memory, Mom and Dad went to bed on top of sleeping bags. Even at 3am, it was still about 18 degrees.  As the night went on, we worried she was cold and put her in a light sleep sack and added a hat. Later we added a fleece, mostly for our piece of mind.

It was equally warm on night two, so we laid her on an unzipped sleep sack. Around midnight, she was zipped in and a hat was added.

Setting Expectations

Our daughter is an incredibly enjoyable little girl – especially at this so-called honeymoon-baby age, where she loves to play. She is bursting with smiles and there is lots of cooing. We’d call her an easy baby. We’ve put some thought into her “easiness” and have come up with an equation. We figure it’s 33% baby personality, 33% parent personality and 33% parent expectation.

Expectations were really important in the success of our camping trip. Overall, we expected that we could make this trip a success. And we expected that our daughter would act like a baby. She was 10 weeks old and 10 week old babies cry. We expected that she would cry while camping and knew that crying alone would not be the measure of camping success.

Our camping baby cried when hungry (like normal), cried a few times when she got bored (just like at home). As in regular baby life, our girl’s fussiness was no match for a sleep-inducing walk.

The Lesson

We both believe that a passion for outdoors should be started young. Our daughter loved camping. There were new smells, sounds, colours – everything was exciting. Her parents were with her the whole day, every day. No competing with jobs, email, chores and all the other things that come up when you are at home.

This baby and post are co-productions with my wife Erin Poirier. You can read her blog here.

Finally a shout out to the staff at The Trail Shop, TAO Adventure Outfitters and Keji for acting as if this trip was a perfectly normal thing to do.

Ordering: The First Touch Point

1. The Nest website is crisp, clean and well thought out. It is a level of work I aspire to. Additionally though, it does a fantastic job of explaining the value proposition behind the product (not easy with something as traditionally mundane as a thermostat). It also includes a handy tool and video explaining how to determine if the Nest is compatible with your heating system. I was unsure, but after using the tool, I knew the Nest would work in my home.
2. The actual purchase process was elegant in a way that most people won’t notice, but if you do any User Interface (UI) and/or User Experience (UX) work, you will admire. Smooth transitions, a very conversion focused, streamlined process. Again it is well thought out and aesthetically pleasing. In short, it is very “Apple-y”.
3. Shipping was fast, very fast. I ordered on Thursday and without expedited shipping, the package arrived on Tuesday.
4. The packaging was well done. The unboxing experience was very similar to the iPhone. Some nice touches were included – instructions directing you to video tutorials, a small disposable (but well made) screw driver, screws – everything you need to complete an install, regardless of your technical experience. Still nervous? Through the site you can arrange to have a professional come and install Nest for you.

Installation

Installing the first Nest took under fifteen minutes for the first unit and under five for the second unit. As soon as the Nest started detecting a current, it lit up and began to walk me through the rest of the set up process.

It was amazingly simple, with one exception – if you have a good wi-fi password, inputting it takes a while. The UI on the Nest is very well-designed. Exactly what you would expect from someone who helped design the iPod and ran the iPhone division at Apple. However, you input commands either by pressing in on it (“enter”) or dialing it like a safe combination. In normal use it works well, but to input a wi-fi password with 20+ characters that are a mix of numbers, symbols, upper and lower case letter….well it is a challenge.

Some kind of integration with Apple’s Airport Utility (for those of us with Airports) would have been great.

Daily Use

After about two weeks of use, I am very pleased with the product.

The more I use it the more I realize how well thought out the whole experience is.

• Very subtle audio signals compliment the graphic interface
• The screen changes color to indicate if it is active (for example it turns red when the furnace is on)
• There is a motion detector and while the screen is normally off, it becomes active as you approach it. One flaw here – it doesn’t do this quickly enough. It needs to detect me walking up sooner.
• When you set the temperature to something that is considered “enviro-friendly”, the Nest presents you with a little green leaf on the screen. It is subtle, but oddly rewarding.
• One unusual thing about the Nest is that it always displays the temperature it is set at (unlike most thermostats which display the temperature the room is at). First I found this disconcerting, but I realized over time that it makes me less likely to turn the heat up (and the point of the Nest is to conserve energy). When I walk up to the Nest and see it is set at 19 degrees, I don’t turn it up, because I know 19 is a reasonable setting. I can’t explain why, but it works.

Learning

The biggest selling feature of the Nest is its ability to learn from your habits and adjust the temperature in your house accordingly.

• The web interface and app interface for iPads and iPhones (iOS)  to set up your schedule initially is terrible. It is not intuitive at all.
• The first few days of using the Nest were frustrating, because it adjusts the temperature in what is a logical manner – but contrary to what you would want if you have a new baby you like to keep warm. Each evening we’d have to get up and turn the heat back up, because it had gone into power saving mode. For most people this would be fine, but it was a big headache at our house (and the Nest lost a lot of credibility with my wife).
• The motion-sensing feature to determine when you aren’t at home (and adjust heat accordingly) is slick. However, the Nest needs to learn that sometimes during the day, a quiet, motionless house is actually a house with a sleeping baby.
• When you change the temperature on the Nest, it will briefly display when the next automatic change will be and what the temperature will be set at. The display of this is too momentary, I never catch it in time to see the details.

That all said, two weeks in and the Nest seems to have learned most of our habits. As we are into summer (and our heating needs are minimal), I’d be very interested to hear how it does at controlling Air Conditioning (which our circa 1930′s house does not have).

The Failure

The entire end-to-end Nest experience is almost seamless. From the day you order it to you start using it, you feel like you intuitively understand how to complete each step. Where it falls down however is the iOS and web interfaces.

The iOS (iPad and iPhone) app is adequate. But that is all. It does little to live up to the standards set by the Nest website and the product itself. This is disappointing because being able to check and control the heat of my house while I travelled was a big selling feature for me. While it is usable, it is disappointing in comparison to the device itself.

The website interface for controlling your Nest suffers from the same flaws. It wastes space and misses obvious features. For example, when displaying the outside temperature – why not let me click to get a forecast? When displaying the set temperature for the Nest, why not allow a hover to display what the actual temperature is?

Interestingly, I also don’t think that my Nest is checking on my location via my iPhone. If the temperature is set to away and my iPhone is approaching the house – shouldn’t that be a signal that my arrival is imminent? This may be happening in the background, but not that I can tell.

Summary: Recommended Buy

Long story short, I would recommend the Nest. The price point is high, but I deem the features to be worth it if you are someone who takes pleasure in a slick User Experience and/or (like me) are constantly worried about the temperature at your house while you are away. It even includes a safety setting, creating a “floor” temperature it will not let your house get below if you are worried about freezing pipes.

Do you have a Nest? Notice any UI and UX features I missed? Let me know.

Finally, here is a video from Nest about their product. You can learn more about it at their website here.