When we talk about customers and their adoption of QuickBase we tend to use the analogy of "light bulbs going off". We’ve broken these light bulbs into three different "ah-ha" moments:

First: When someone realizes that QuickBase can solve their current problem (e.g. "I can track my project’s status the way I want").  These folks tend to have one application that they regularly use.

Second: When someone realizes that QuickBase can solve a few of their problems (e.g. "I can track my project’s status and the pipeline of potential projects coming down the pike").  These folks tend to have one person creating and managing many applications.

Third: When someone has that "oh my gosh…QuickBase could help our entire organization solve its problems" thought.  These folks tend to have many people creating and managing many applications.

Recently we’ve done some work to try to understand how broadly QuickBase has been adopted by our customers and I’m happy to report that our rough estimate suggests that a vast majority of our customers have had the second and third light bulbs going off.  While this was considered good news internally, it did make me wonder…why hasn’t everyone had the second and third light bulbs going off?…   

• Are we not doing enough to promote different uses and to make people aware of what’s possible?
• Are there forces at work inside our customer organizations that are limiting the growth that we can help people with?

What do you think? 

• If you’re still at the first light bulb and are just using QuickBase to solve for one internal pain, how come?  Do you consider QuickBase for other problems, but dismiss it?  Do you not even consider QuickBase for other problems?
• If you’re at the second or third light bulb, what was it that made the second or third light bulbs go off?  Was it something we did or was it something that happened internally on your team?

Bottom line is that we’d love to learn from your experience what has helped / hurt your adoption of QuickBase and what we could be doing to facilitate it. So…if you’re at all inclined, please let us know which light bulb you’re at with any context about how you got there (or why you’re still there :->).

Happy Holidays,

P

On Thursday, December 14^th at 2:00pm EST, QuickBase Product Manager, Phil Gross will be hosting a Webinar, Best Practices for Managing Your Workflow with QuickBase. If you are a prospect or new to QuickBase, this session will teach you the best ways to use QuickBase to:

*Build forms that will make it easier for your team to follow your process.
*Automate emails so the right information is sent to the right people at the right time.   
*Report on any aspect of your processes in real time.
*Empower your co-workers, partners, and clients to work together over the Web.

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Register here:
https://www.gotomeeting.com/register/450528473

So I had a funny experience the other day that I thought I’d share.  In a nutshell, I was in a meeting where we were talking about how to track some budgeted expenses that we’re expecting in upcoming months.  Typically the answer has always been, “let’s just create a QuickBase to track it”, but no…not this time.  This time the response was, “let’s put it in Excel”.  It totally threw me.  Why did it throw me?

First, to understand my reaction you need to know that Intuit uses QuickBase for just about everything.  There are roughly 7,000 employees and in any given month over 10,000 unique people access approximately 7,500 unique QuickBase applications “owned by Intuit”.  The applications used range from the office-wide “RSVP for the holiday party” to the mission critical SOX compliance, CRM, IT resource planning and general project management applications.  So it isn’t surprising that most people’s knee-jerk reaction to most operational challenges is “we should start a QuickBase for this”.  That’s what I’m used to.

Second, I’m obviously totally biased towards QuickBase and generally don’t even imagine using Excel for anything other than extreme analytics projects I’m doing on my own.   So the thought of using Excel to track expenses didn’t immediately make sense to me, but upon further reflection I realized it was the right thing. 

Third, it made me realize I hadn’t recently thought through when it does / doesn’t make sense to use Excel vs. QuickBase.  While I am biased towards QuickBase, I’m also not naïve and I do get that Excel is the better tool in certain situations…it’s just that the emotional first reaction is towards QuickBase.  I must admit, it’s also a bit of an ego thing for me because I love having the challenge to make QuickBase do something really hard.   

So, after a few minutes of thought I realized that it does make sense to use Excel in these situations:

-          If only one person is responsible for maintaining the information and sharing the information isn’t that critical.  Or, if sharing with others is important, it will need to be in a way where security on subsets of the information isn’t that important.

-          If there’s tons of “modeling” required (e.g. being able to make assumptions and have complex calculations).  For example, if there’s financial analysis required (aka…you need the advanced functions) Excel is definitely better.

-          If need a great deal of charting flexibility.

Not a big deal, but I figured I’d share the experience because I am constantly asked if it makes sense to build a QuickBase and I am now going to consciously recommend Excel…but only if the above criteria are met :->.