As founder and CEO of www.proworkflow.com – our web based project management software company, I have many challenges on a daily basis. Basically my day is troubleshooting and helping sort people out. So I’ve decided that this description of the term C.E.O. is a little more relevant.
Continue reading about CEO = Creative Entrepreneurial Organiser!
So the world is going to hell in a hand basket? Stocks going pear shaped? Mortgage or job looking shaky? Old ‘Bush’ about to pull 700 billion out of nowhere to devalue the economy further? Can’t sleep at night?
Join the masses – we’re all in it together. It’s pretty basic really, the economy goes up, then some years later it goes down. Guess what – than it goes up again… Wait for it… Then down… Spotting a pattern yet?
This isn’t going to be a groundbreaking blog post about recessionary survival tips for software companies, rather this is just a list of common sense reminders we should all apply and consider from time to time. It just happens that now is a great time (while the world is economically hurting) to apply them. It will get better, but now is an opportunity to make your startup or business more efficient so when the tide turns you’re in a good place to scale. So here’s my tips on some key areas:
Continue reading about Software Startups – Tips for surviving a recession
It’s a hard balance being in the Software/SaaS (Software As A Service) industry. We can put lots of time and focus into systems and development, but sales may suffer… or we focus on sales and then development suffers… or focus on acquiring new customers and current customers start leaving.
When current customers start leaving, we call this churn. Whilst churn is a natural occurrence in all software companies, it is also an indicator that something isn’t right with either the product or the business model. Software companies can be so focused on building online communities to gain traffic and new users that they often forget about the more important community – their user base. These are the ones that pay their bills.
Don’t misunderstand this comment as there are great benefits to building online communities. The point I want to make is that the community strategy surrounding your marketing efforts is very different from the community strategy to increase current customer retention.
Whether or not the current customers collaborate with each other or stand alone, they are still part of your user community, and it’s vital that you know the key factors that keep them using your solution, referring to others and not running to a competitor. Here are some of the main areas to consider when looking ways to increase customer retention.
I came across this website today www.735pm.com through Diversity.net.nz today and couldn’t believe what I was seeing – I thought that as an industry, these types of abysmal web business attempts were a thing of the past. Not just the bad design, but the fundamental concept as a whole and the dollars behind it all. If you think I’m just being negative, then read the comments on Ben’s post and you’ll see this is a general consensus.
Here’s the article on the New Zealand Herald if you want to read the PR guff… There are plenty of hard working genuine businesses out there needing a push – shame on NZ Herald for printing this…
I found an old email the other day with some thoughts on bootstrapping I’d written to a mate. I thought it was interesting reading over what I’d written, so decided to repost the thoughts here… Here goes!
Regarding bootstrapping, It’s a hard balance. We put lots of time into systems and development, but sales suffer… or we focus on sales and then development suffers… Bootstrapping is fun to a point, then if the intention is to bootstrap through to profitability, the issue is 100% correct allocation of resources between development, sales, systems and marketing.
We don’t have a lot of wasted resource, only a tight team, no flash offices and a few contractors but we do A LOT with what we have. We have a good number of dedicated servers in California and one in NZ, are in profit and have no debt. So the years of hard work are paying off. Not an industry legend yet, but we’ll get there.
Continue reading about Some thoughts on bootstrapping a software company. How we do it!
