Cash coming in - reflections on a dot.com product
 A discussion with a contact on Linkedin has reminded me of the days I spent working with dot.coms in the height of the bubble. At that time I was running my own consulting business, making my crust from Insurance Brokers and Companies, then using the income to fund small scale projects with start-ups. Constantly I came across people who couldn't come to terms with the idea of putting their product into the market, who felt they had to keep innovating and consequently missed the boat.
Case in point was one character who had a substantial pot of money care of Venture Capital and had spent several months building a system to manage eMail traffic. Today we'd think that was rather quaint and basic, but at the time it was cutting edge. He just couldn't get his developers to build the bespoke software he needed.
After a meeting with him where he expressed his frustration at not being able to deliver, I went home, pulled out my copy of FileMaker Pro and a week later showed him a system that did most of what he wanted. The missing bit was the customer couldn't manage their own mailing lists and mail outs online, but so what? It was good enough to deliver a managed service offering.
No doubt that product would have been eclipsed within a year at most. What it would have done was given him some cash coming in so he could invest in his own product, built up a customer base and given him opportunities to gain insight into what his customers really wanted.
Moral? Sometimes just enough is good enough. Build something people will want and take it to market. In this day of software and technology, upgrades and add-ons can be as big a money spinner as the sale of the initial product. But if you don't even make it to market you'll never know for sure.
Previously on this blog...
the global leader in Contact Center Consolidation 2.0
2.0 has become a meaningless addition to already poor tag lines.
A dozen beautiful images of Saturn
Wired presents a dozen of the best images from the Cassini mission
Setting up shop in a new country: beyond the website
Building a website for multiple languages is not just about translation. It is a critical business decision that has to be taken carefully.
Why call centre staff deserve your respect
If call centre staff set the first impression for your business, why do we treat them so badly?
Becoming a Specialist? A hard decision to make ...
Specialising requires hard strategic decisions to be made about your business.
When good people move on
Losing a member of staff to another company is not necessarily a bad thing
The quest for quality in Agile Software Development
Why quality assurance remains a central part of project management, regardless of the use of Agile methods
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