“Code customers only make up 8% of our customer base (today), it show’s you the move from code to SaaS, 100% of our customers used to be code” – this was a quote I noticed on a staff members Twitter account.
He’s right though. We operate a leading project management software company – www.proworkflow.com. We’ve been around since 2002 and have seen a few things over that time. The most obvious is the natural shift from a ‘Code Selling’ model to a ‘Subscription/SaaS’. I say a ‘NATURAL’ shift because over the past 4 years we’ve been marketing a single solution with both code download and subscription option.
When we began, we only offered the code download option, and listed in many code libraries. 2 years later, we started the subscription offering (SaaS/Software as a Service). At no point did we ever really push the deployment option as a marketing angle. Simply put, our approach has always been that we have a solution, and customers can either download locally or host with us on subscription. It’s their choice – not us pushing.
Continue reading about The natural shift from Code sales to SaaS (Software as a Service)
We’re now officially launched the new ProWorkflow blog. This will be used for product updates, tips, development thoughts, service updates and customer profiles. If interested in following the progress of the ProWorkflow solution as we develop it further, then visit the website at this address:
http://proworkflowblog.com/
…or grab the RSS feed here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ProworkflowBlog
We’ll be allowing the [...]
Every software or SaaS company has a certain level of customer churn. This can be for many reasons, ie: cost, features, service. Normally it’s simply because the solution isn’t a good ‘fit’ for the customer needs. This is normal and not a negative. It’s better to have fewer, loyal, long term customers than large numbers of ‘high churn’ customers if you want to build a sustainable business. Here at ProWorkflow, our churn is fairly low, and many remain as long term customers. I’ve seen quite a few companies move between businesses and employment and recommend ProWorkflow as they go. I can think of many instances where customers have used ProWorkflow at 3 or more businesses or places of employment. Read more…
Continue reading about What an encouraging, polite cancellation! Thanks! I guess? :-|
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.
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 [...]
