From 15Five to PeopleSpark, and back
Last January Giuseppe Vis (thanks!) introduced me to Medium and sent me a link to download the last book of Mitchell Harper #DoItAll.
Since that time, I started to read Medium (and to contribute to it). I also read the book (very good, IMHO) and started to follow Mitchell Harper stories.
As a strong enthusiast of Vineet Nayar seminal book Employee First, Customers Second, it came with no surprise that I fell immediately in love with the promise of PeopleSpark to engage your employees, boosting — though their involvement — your company performance.
I applied for a trial account and I even fantasize to collaborate from Italy, deploying the software in selected companies across my region. On PeopleSpark website I found a contact form: I filled-in the information, added a message, and submitted. An immediate reply “a smart person will contact you back soon” sounded extremely encouraging.
Unfortunately no any smart person contacted me back.
I also faced the annoying need to use my corporate account to join the trail, since a personal email address (@live.com) was not supported.
But the real trouble came when I wanted to add some fictional users (for test purposes) and failed. I wrote to the support team, received a first answer, but when I reached them back for further explanations, silence.
During those days of frustration and disillusionment, I came across David Hassell story What it feels like when a competitor utterly rips off your entire company.
A few days later I’ve got an email from Mitchell Harper informing me that PeopleSpark has been shutdown. No explanation.
Since then, I’ve opened a trial account on 15Five, using my personal email account and having been able to create the needed fictional users for test purposes.
I’ve been immediately offered the opportunity to setup a live chat and last Monday I spent quite some time with Emily who has been extremly supportive to further introduce the product and the ideas behind it. She also suggested to me to read below book. And she introduced to me their partnership program, with which I could roll out 15Five to companies across my region and get 30% commission. It sounds good.
