Meet Dazza Follow-Up: The Secretary for the Loose Ends
Most small businesses don’t have a follow-up problem because nobody cares. They have one because everybody is busy.
A quote goes out.
A customer says they’ll get back to you.
A supplier promises something Tuesday.
You’re waiting on a subcontractor.
Someone is waiting on you.
None of those jobs are difficult by themselves.
The problem is remembering all of them while you’re also quoting, driving, answering the phone, ordering materials and trying to get some actual work done.
That is the problem behind Dazza Follow-Up.
Think secretary, not another giant system
Dazza Follow-Up — or DFU — is being built as a digital follow-up secretary.
Its job is deliberately narrow.
Remember:
who you’re waiting on;
who is waiting on you;
what needs following up;
when it needs to come back to your attention.
That’s it.
It isn’t being built as another CRM, job-management monster, sales pipeline or marketing platform that wants you sitting behind a computer entering information all afternoon.
Small operators already have enough systems asking for their attention.
DFU is supposed to give some of that attention back.
The app is already more than an idea
We’ve moved well past drawings on a whiteboard.
The current version of Dazza Follow-Up has a working secretary dashboard, follow-up records, reminders, urgency, snoozing, pausing and a history of what has happened.
A follow-up can sit in one of a few simple positions.
You might be waiting on them.
They might be waiting on you.
You might pause it.
Or it might be finished.
The idea is that when you open the app, you shouldn’t have to decipher twenty columns to work out what matters.
You should be able to see what needs your attention.
DFU is there to remind you — not annoy your customers
One decision we made early was important.
The current direction is remind me, not “let the software start firing messages at customers without me”.
There are plenty of automation systems that will happily send emails because a timer went off.
That isn’t what we are trying to solve first.
The first job is simpler:
Make sure the business owner remembers the loose end.
You still decide what needs to be said and when.
Dazza remembers that it needs saying.
The secretary view
The current dashboard is designed around the things a business owner actually wants to know.
What needs attention?
What am I waiting on?
Who is waiting on me?
What have I snoozed until later?
And when something becomes urgent, it should stand out rather than quietly disappearing into another list.
That simple view is becoming the heart of DFU.
Where it is up to
There is already substantial working software behind Dazza Follow-Up.
We have also been building and testing ways for it to receive follow-up information from other systems rather than expecting the user to type absolutely everything in manually.
Some of that integration work is already functioning.
More connectors are under development.
But DFU is still under development.
There is no release date being announced yet.
I’d rather show what is being built, test the important bits properly and keep improving the connections than put a date on the calendar just for the sake of having one.
Over the next few days I’ll show more of the actual app and explain why we have made some of the decisions we have.
Because the goal isn’t to build the biggest business system.
It is to build the secretary that remembers the stuff you shouldn’t have to.
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