Snowflake Queries

I read Patrick's post about snowflake queries again. If you have not read this post (and many more by on his blog) you are missing out on a ton of great information. I've been thinking about this and wondering how to leverage this on my site. I have an idea. One of the things I have on the list of things to do is create a demo account for people to try out the application without having to input data into it. Some of the feedback I got last week was that for new user, the site is a little empty and they were not quite sure what to do. This is a big issue because if a potential customer takes the trouble of setting up a trial account, and when they get into the application if it is empty, they might simply leave not realizing everything they can do.

So my thought is to create a trial account that is fully populated with data and allow anyone to log into as a manager or employee and see what they can do. Now this opens up some issues. I'll have to turn off some features (email notifications, changing passwords, etc. ) One problem I've seen when people do have trail accounts is that a lot of the time, the data is so bad because people enter random stuff into, and it affects the "realness" of the application. Its hard to image you using scheduling software if the names are foobar and schedules have 18 hour shifts and working 7 days a week. It just doesn't feel right. So I'll need to reset the data every couple of hours or days. Not quite sure which. I'll also need to populate it with realistic sample data. This should increase the number of potential customers who take a more in depth look at my product and the number who will get a chance to see it in action.

And now the snowflake portion. There are few key markets I'm targeting including restaurants. So for each market, I will create a unique URL and page for that market which will be my snowflake query. Its a no brainer now, but before Patrick's post, I probably would created a /demo page and a link for each market. Now I know better.