Free mentoring programme?

Hello,
getting started with tryton is not so easy. I think this still is true, although documentation made so much progress. Tryton’s market share still is far away from its potential. The big market for tryton is small enterprises - as there are so much more of them than big ones. For small companies and startups, it’s often not possible to hire a consultant, especially not if you’re not yet sure if tryton is for you.

What I utterly missed in my introduction period was a mentor - somebody who could help to find out what I actually need, what questions I should ask, where I should search for help.

I myself would now enjoy very much to forward something of my now acquired very little knowledge. I’d never dare to do tryton consulting for money - and would in any little more complicated case forward the request to the professionals. But I’d like to help people to do the first steps, and I guess this can be really joyful, could create new contacts and new insights in tryton.

I feel there is demand for very low-level oral&online-desktop-sharing support, which will not take away turnover from the professionals, but increase tryton’s market share.

Guidelines could be:

  • offer is free of charge
  • service should normally not exceed 5 hrs
  • service person can choose date and amount of support provided
  • service person is always free to stop continuation
  • service person will always forward requests beyond his abilities to the tryton professionals
  • service person does “as good as he can”, but is not responsible for any casualties
  • [to be extended]

Does the community like that idea? - I would offer such a service for Germany, does anybody else for other countries?

Cheers,
Wolf

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I think this is a good idea.
I can offer this service in Romania.

For me for example it would have gotten me on board much faster.
I have been looking at Tryton since 2012. Only in 2020 did I start posting on discuss and make a service contract with a professional. It was the best decision that I have made in a long time to get involved.

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I think that it’s really true, is not easy to start but if you make the necesary efforts you got it. By the way I have no problem to “guide” people from my country (Argentina) to start using Tryton, I also think it may be funny and very powerful.
I think that would be necesary to have a server avalible with all the default settings for your country ready. Also I can show with a false DB of my company.
Cheers!

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A starting point could be putting a mention (with backlink to www.tryton.org) that you are offering this service. I see herrdeh has done this.

I just posted two back links.

This will also help people find Tryton independent of this mentorship service and also good for SEO.

For me Tryton - Service Providers is the place for such referencing (there is no condition that the service must be paying).
So you just have to follow: Tryton - Become a Service Provider

I think, these are two things:

a low-level approach, helping people just to do the first few steps
and
professional support on a defined level of quality.

I do not intent and I am not able to fulfil the requirements to become a service provider. But still think, I could be a little helpful to some people in a similar situation as I was one year ago. So I guess, there should be a different category for the “mentoring”, clearly distinguished from professional support.

Guess you mean what I placed on my web page, section “recommendations”. But hardly anybody who found tryton will find that page as well…

It is up to each service provider to define the level of quality they provide.
I guess visitor will understand that they can not expect the same level from a free service than paid.

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@herrdeh I like this idea. If it helps, then I am willing to offer such a service in India extending to South Asia (SAARC), South-East Asia (ASEAN), and upto Middle East countries.

Thank you for all your answers and your commitments. IMHO that’s enough to begin with, other folks may join in later. But we need a way to get that started.

Still I do not want to put myself into one row with professional tryton consultants - that would be insulting to these. And on the other hand: It would be a much higher barrier for interested folks than necessary if they had to filter out a “nice tryton talk, free of charge” from a list of professionals with a considerable hourly rate.

I made a suggestion here for introducing a “getting started” page at the place where the “downloads” page is at the moment. If you potential mentors agree, you could help to convince ced that this is a good idea.

Or do we have another good idea? - IMHO, that “mentoring” issue should be very well visible at the very top of “tryton.org”.

Cheers,
Wolf

From time to time I give talks and workshops at conferences, I’ve even given a few sessions about accounting software. The audience I am speaking to usually includes beginners and freelancers.

People find my talks and blogs online and every few weeks I receive an email like this:

“I’ve been working as a contractor and making invoices with a spreadsheet, etc. I went to see a tax accountant, he told me I have to start charging VAT because I am over the threshold. He told me to stop using a spreadsheet and start using Sage/Quickbooks/whatever. Can I use one of the open source solutions you wrote/spoke about?”

This is a common question. One great way to advertise the mentoring offer and Tryton in general may be to prepare some short blogs and videos, in different languages, spending 4 to 6 minutes on that question.

The type of person asking me these questions is usually involved in the free software community in some way. These are people who may have time and/or skills to make further contributions to Tryton so the time invested in helping them is also helping Tryton in the long term.

Their goals are usually quite simple:

  • creating invoices for services
  • creating invoices for products they purchased for a client. Most do not need to track quotes, inventory, manufacturing, etc. Example: they buy 5 laptops and deliver them directly to the client.
  • tracking expenses so they can reclaim VAT

Some people never used accounting software before so they do not see the benefit of using Tryton. After using software like this for 6 months, I typically get feedback from people that they wish they knew about it before, they lost time creating a spreadsheet. This is also an important factor for communications: how to help people understand they need something like Tryton before they spend a lot of time creating spreadsheets.

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