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.
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.
This wasn’t intentional, but we’re allowed a small marketing win occasionally. Our huge www.proworkflow.com project management software ad was shown alongside the PR piece for another NZ based job management software provider. So they’ll get some traffic, and so will we ;-)
I’ve just read an interesting article over at http://diversity.net.nz/ about Telcos and SaaS business that caught my attention. It’s an area of interest globally currently; finding ways for SaaS business (powerful software) to partner with Telcos (powerful infrastructure). But it does pose some questions…
Continue reading about Telcos and SaaS – Interesting Article
Here’s some interesting stats from a SaaS software company that looks to be doing very well.
