Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: PR-ArtofGetting Frontier/Manila in Door!

Author:Robert Cassidy
Posted:6/4/2000; 9:18:50 AM
Topic:PR-ArtofGetting Frontier/Manila in Door!
Msg #:17564 (In response to 17562)
Prev/Next:17563 / 17565

BTW, I think Frontier is inherently a back-door thing, given the pricepoint and ease of use. Like PCs it's easy to hide a Frontier license in the budget for pencils and cab fare.

Yes! As they say: what happens after the boss leaves becomes infrastructure.

The customers Manila needs to find first are smallish offices/departments that can't afford a full-time programmer/web admin individual or may be dependent on a far-removed IT group. The pricepoint is very appealing and the learning curve for most tasks very approachable.

Manila is very much like Filemaker Pro in it's appeal (and perhaps in it's customer base - I'm a huge Filemaker user and fan, for all the same reasons I love Manila.) and might be best marketed along the same lines, to the same types of communities. Filemaker in nearly every instance that I can think of was a back-door purchase that stuck. The admin assistant was smart enough to realize that a database would help their lives and FM was cheap enough and easy enough that the boss wouldn't mind the experiment. 2 years later, the whole place runs off of that purchase.

I've been around here for a while, used Frontier from *way* back off and on, and Manila finally really hits home for me. I'm sold - but I got to it by a strange path. However, now that I'm getting my Manila site deployed it's clear that the true value of this product to our user base is getting all of the other departments where I work to deploy something similar. So, by demonstration, I hope to send a lot more customers to Userland.

I mention this, because I don't see how any of my (truly non-technical) counterparts would buy Manila based on a web page or feature list. They might buy with a demonstration however, which is what I'm planning. I'm thinking about scheduling a one hour workshop where I pick one department at random and set up a site for them, from start to finish (feature complete, not design/content complete). Manila is a hard product to pitch without demonstration, because everybody that has seen my site get built (by and large a normal Manila site) has been simply astounded that such a product even exists - they don't believe the words.

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