A Follow-Up Should Take 30 Seconds — Not Live in Your Head All Day
If recording a follow-up is harder than remembering it yourself, the software has already lost.
One of the traps with business software is that a five-second thought turns into a five-minute data-entry exercise.
You think:
Ring Steve Thursday about that quote.
Simple.
Then the software wants a customer record, opportunity type, sales stage, category, probability, project, tags and probably your mother’s maiden name.
By then, writing “Steve Thursday” on the back of a Bunnings receipt starts looking pretty efficient.
Dazza Follow-Up is being built around the opposite idea.
Get the loose end out of your head
The current New Follow-Up screen is intentionally simple.
What are you following up?
Who is it with?
Who currently owes the next action?
That’s enough to get started.
If you need a follow-up date, set one.
If you don’t, the record can still exist without turning a tiny job into a form-filling competition.
The objective is to capture the loose end while you’re thinking about it.
Not two hours later when you finally get back to the office and have forgotten half of it.
The important question is responsibility
A big part of DFU is deciding whether:
I’m waiting on them
or
They’re waiting on me.
That sounds almost too simple to build software around.
But think about how many small jobs go wrong because that answer becomes fuzzy.
A supplier said they would ring back.
Did they?
A customer asked you to send something.
Did you?
A quote went out.
Are you waiting for approval, or did the customer ask another question that you still haven’t answered?
Those are completely different situations, even though they might all appear in an inbox.
DFU is designed to keep that responsibility visible.
You don’t need to organise your entire business first
Another thing I don’t want DFU to demand is a giant setup exercise before it becomes useful.
You shouldn’t have to migrate every client, job and historical email just to remember to call someone tomorrow.
Create the follow-up.
Carry on with your day.
The cleverer connections can build around that simple core.
Not everything has to be entered manually forever
Manual follow-up creation matters because there will always be things that start with a phone call, conversation or thought.
But it shouldn’t be the only way information reaches your secretary.
That is why a lot of the current development effort is going into connections.
The broader goal is for DFU to recognise appropriate loose ends from the systems a business already uses, while still keeping the final follow-up experience simple.
The complicated work should happen underneath.
The tradie shouldn’t need a degree in integrations.
Small enough to actually use
This is probably one of the bigger lessons from everything we’ve built at Dazza Does It For You.
Software doesn’t need fifty features on the first screen to be useful.
Sometimes a useful system starts with one small promise:
Put the loose end somewhere dependable.
Dazza Follow-Up is still being developed and there is no release date yet.
But the New Follow-Up screen shows the direction pretty clearly.
Capture it.
Decide who has the ball.
Get back to work.
Tomorrow I’ll show why that who has the ball bit is probably more important than it first appears.
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