Ben Kepes just posted his thoughts on the XERO end of year results on his Diversity blog. Go have a read as it’s an interesting business venture that many are following with interest.
I’ve had a few good chats lately with Patrick Macfie from http://start-up.co.nz about what they’re up to with the Start-up venture. This is a great New Zealand based resource for people needing startup advice, info, resources or simply to see who else in in ’startup mode’ as well. Whilst our company ProActive Software, developers of the ProWorkflow Project Management Solution aren’t in startup mode any more, I wish this website had been around when we were. There’s a lot of great material worth checking out. I asked Patrick to send through a bit more in-depth info about the website and what they’re doing. Here’s what he sent through.
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… ProActive Software (www.proworkflow.com) has bootstrapped (growth through no funding, and only sweat equity) to profitability thus far and this is fun to a point however if the intention is to bootstrap through to profitability as we’ve done, the issue is 100% correct allocation of resources between development, sales, systems and marketing.
We don’t have a truckload of resource, rather a smaller dedicated team and no massive flash offices (ProActive is largely a virtual team). There are a few contractors globally but we do A LOT with what we have.
We’re up to a good number of dedicated servers in California and one in NZ, and are in profit. So the years of hard work have paid off. Revenue is looking healthy and we all earn good salaries (founders work 16hr days).
The biggest problem I see in both the local and global market is the high number of software/SaaS co’s trying to scale, but using (old school) high inertia sales and marketing.
Here’s some interesting stats from a SaaS software company that looks to be doing very well.
Our SaaS business focuses on a project management solution we rent to a global user base (servers in the USA, the business is remotely run from NZ). No matter how hard we drive home the ‘Value & ROI’ message, there’s always a large number of ‘Price driven’ customers as we all know. The way to [...]
