Our Reminder app for Microsoft Teams is KTi’s Personal Assistant, Kippa, and he is named in honour of Kipper, a fictional character in the novel Napoleon’s Gambit, by one of Kippa’s parents.

This series of posts relates the story of Kippa’s birth. We took a strange path to get here. After designing Kippa, our Microsoft Teams Reminder app, and while our engineering team was busy developing him in the beginning of the pandemic lockdown, we created our COVID Response. We decided to pay forward our experiences working  in Canada’s tech industry, by offering a free course and free consulting on how to launch and grow a Startup.

These 9 posts, each one a real-world example of the course’s theory being put into practice, began with the first post in this series and introduced our course: Take Control: Seven Steps to Independence©. Download it here for free, no registration required.

Post #2, covered Klippas Technologies inc use of the course’s theory to produce our Personal Assistant, Kippa, for Microsoft Teams. We explained how the idea for a reminder app for Microsoft Teams occurred to us, and how we validated its market.

Post #3 in this series reviewed our calculations and walked through the course’s Exercises 4, 5 and 6.

The 4th Post in the series explained how to use the exercises to develop a business plan for Kippa – Reminders for Microsoft Teams.

How to design a solution was detailed in Post #5. We showed you the process we used to design Klippas Technologies inc’s Kippa, your Microsoft Teams Personal Assistant.

We continued the story in Post #6, by applying yet more of the Take Control theory to design Kippa, our Reminder app for Microsoft Teams.

A brief overview of our marketing process and strategy followed in Post #7. If you’re carping about it being brief, just remember please: It’s a competitive world out there. There is already one Microsoft Teams app available. It’s an exact copy of /Remind from Slack, a rip off, but also a compliment to Slack, I guess.

We coined the name Klippas when we were going to produce a plastic clip, called a Klip, because of the availability of the .com domain name. It was a game in which players, obviously Klippas, used Klips to erect complex playing card structures. And then we realized we were being just plain silly: we returned to a field we know well, building apps, this time for Microsoft Teams. We retained the name because it:

  • Had a registered NUANS search to prove its name was unique (hence the terrible spelling),
  • Was a registered corporation, a legal entity.
  • and, most importantly perhaps, klippas.com.

Read Step 6, Implementation, in the course, for details on how all this works.

Our big news, is that Kippa, our Reminders app for Microsoft Teams, is alive and about to enter his Beta Test!

Developing software for Microsoft is a complex and difficult process. Our reminder app lives inside Microsoft Teams, and thus developing him is made more complex by parts of our Microsoft Teams implementation relying on OpenSource. The difficulty increases with each additional app or technology stack we use, because it’s easy for one of the ten tools we use, to get out of synch when it’s been updated. And then, Kippa, our Reminders app for Microsoft Teams, falls into the bit bin and it takes us a while to revive him.

But we’re a couple of weeks away from our beta test. They are expecting KTi’s personal assistant soon, and are looking for this:

 

Kippa, the reminder app for Microsoft Teams, seated, wearing his KTi hat

Kippa, waiting for Reminders from Microsoft Teams members!

As we related in Post #8, our marketing and sales strategies are being implemented. The search on Google, “Reminders for Microsoft Teams,” finds us on page one already. And please, don’t ask me about our sales strategy, ‘cos that’s none of anyone else’s business!

You will be able to buy Kippa – Reminders for Microsoft Teams from the Microsoft Store before the year’s end.

And that brings us to this post’s part of the story – the 7th and final Step in our course, which is of course the concept of Continuous Process Improvements. What we like to think of as CPI.

Given we haven’t yet completed one cycle all the way round, you’d expect us to not be able to try and fine tune much, not so? But here’s the thing: we are cycling around the Continuous Process Improvements loop! We’re developing software, a process; we’re marketing and selling – both processes, and so we’re able to do the same, Think, Plan, Do, Measure and Repeat activities that any CPI practitioner does. So yes indeed, our developers are becoming more productive, and our marketing is generating higher quality leads, and our sales force is negotiating deals!

This final post ends the series on how Kippa, our  Reminders app for Microsoft Teams was born. As always, reach out in the comments if you want to ask a question.

Stay safe and well, will ya?

Featured image by one of Kippa’s proud parents. Taken in Singita Game Reserve, South Africa.

Bit-by-Bit #191