The Tuesday Push is a crowd-sourced approach to PR with a little word-of-mouth marketing thrown in. It gives Irish businesses a push on the web and occasionally a little advice.

Photo via asmundur@flickr

Decisions for Heroes provides an interface for rescue teams to manage their teams, and measure all the details of a rescue operation – from the time it took to get to the victim, the injuries encountered, to the wind speed at the time of rescue.  This allows for detailed logging, measurement, and metrics which can be analysed to determine the effectiveness of their teams in precarious situations and lets them determine if they need more members with particular skills or training in a specific area. As it logs all the data it builds up a detailed picture of how the team operates, and can print immediate incident reports, making it very easy for teams to keep a paper trail.

I had heard of Decisions for Heroes before FOWA Dublin and thought it was quite a nice idea – but when Robin Blandford blew away the competition at the small business pitch session, then I really took notice. Robin’s years of experience as volunteer cliff rescuer has obviously opened his eyes to the potential for a team management application.

So, in terms of a business model – how does this stack up? Decisions for Heroes has a nice niche market for whom the product is definitely a “must have”. My only question (knowing little about rescue services) would be how large the potential English-speaking market is? I would think that there is certainly enough money to be made before the need to localise the application into another language presented itself, and in the meantime the product can quite easily be adjusted to suit similar niches or customised for very specific types of rescue or medical teams. The software-as-a-service model promises to deliver a recurring revenue stream which should have little churn providing there are no serious competitors in the market. This is as far away from “me-too! (dot-zero)” as you can get.

In terms of  marketing D4H hits the nail on the head with great used of AIDA and clearly answers the customer’s potential questions of:

• What is the product and what can it do for me? – Nicely explained with a video, a tour, and clear feature set descriptions. Additionally all application features are positioned as benefits to the customer, not just a list of things that the technology does.
• Why should I care? (‘Why are you credible?’) – The main page has several credibility indicators, namely the logos of several internationally recognised rescue services who have used the service and given testimonials.
• What do I do next? – The “Get Started” and “Take a Tour” buttons are repeated throughout the page, with notes directing attention to them. All in all a very compelling page designed to convert the user.

As might be expected from a company making software to analyse data, the analytics behind the scenes on the main page are impressive. Bytesurgery are not only measuring how often people visit the page, but how often they’re playing the intro video, when exactly they’re pausing or stopping the video, and if they’re watching it through to the end. I’m sure there are a dozen other events that they’re tracking so that they can tweak their main page to optimise conversion.

My only criticism that I can think of (and it’s a stretch) would be the quality and position of the video on the front page, at full-screen it’s very grainy and hard to see the product features and I’d also expect it to centre on the screen. Minor criticisms aside, I think this product has a huge amount of potential.