T is for “turkey”, “Thanksgiving” and, and to some, a special kind of “person”. The case for hiring & working with “T-shaped” people is one I’ve encountered a lot lately. I think it’s a good description of the sort of person with whom I most value working and engaging. If you want to know what it means, and why I think it’s so great, including for our customers, watch the video that follows this paragraph. You can even play a little game: see if you catch my mistake, revealed below the video. Also stay tuned for Shannon’s cameo at the end. In spirit of holiday, I’m thankful for him always being on-the-spot with video equipment for recording my takes. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
As integration among our modules rises, I don’t anticipate too many users will “write a script about the task” as I mistakenly said on-camera. I meant more that benefits accrue when our software can allow contextual assignment of a task-about-a-script from within that script’s page instead of having to navigate away from it to a Tasks module page.
The past five weeks I’ve been taking an evening class on how to market & sell software-as-service or “SaaS” (the second “a” stands for “a” but for some reason it appeals to me more to leave that out). It’s the term for leveraging the Internet such that customers use their web browsers access software functionality hosted and maintained by vendors like us. It is the model that Market7 practices. Having worked this way for a couple of years now, the class has provided good opportunity to reflect on some of the advantages of this model, both for us and our customers, compared to my prior experience of customers physically taking on and managing technology products.
So far for us, two particular great advantages stand out:
Immediate responsiveness to customers’ needs and interests.
Market7 provides an expanding array of functionality to serve as a single resource for all of the ways people work together in the production of rich media, spanning the whole duration from conceptualization to approving final deliverables, and encompassing every mode of collaboration from strategizing about content to tactical logistics arrangements. So, at any moment, there is typically on the order of a dozen initiatives we are contemplating for introduction, mostly based on how our users and prospects tell us what they want. The SaaS model allows us to consider such initiatives flexibly, and to implement them rapidly. Instead of months or even years between releases, with the burdens of customers having to implement the changes on their own premises, we are able to deliver new functionality every few weeks (sometimes more than once within a week), and what’s new becomes seamlessly available to our customers, ready for them when they’re ready to discover it, without disrupting how they’re already using our software.
Just last night we released some new functionality after accelerating its development because two prospects had been requesting our growth in that particular area. One of those prospects has already become a customer, and we are advancing in our work with the other one to refine our future roadmap in this functional area, hoping to land them soon as well. That new functionality will be demonstrated in an upcoming blog post within the next few days. Later today we have a meeting with a long-time (by standards of a 2-year old company) customer that is eager to see some new developments in a different aspect of our offering on which we have just started some development. While that effort is in process, and a week or two from availability, we’ll be able to use a browser and the Internet to indicate the progress we’re already making towards this goal.
Granular scalability so customers can start at level comfortable to them, and vendors can leverage success towards expansion.
We endeavor to make our software as intuitive as possible, with the most basic features obviously positioned and based on familiar motifs, plus a lot of explanatory resources integrated within and provided as supplements as new users start. Combined with there not being requirements to install, configure and maintain code, it is easy for our customers and for us, when they get started with use of video.Market7 at any level of usage. Many opt to start by trying for a single project and then consider expansion with success. We would love for them all to start big, but our track record of success in these expansion trajectories is a good one. One of the customers we’re visiting today, that actually started with a pretty substantial commitment, has scaled up to three times their original subscription level in one year of use. By usage scaling granularly, we are able to land paying customers without the arduous sales cycles of deals that must start large, our customers can economically get a feel for how well we work for them, and we can both easily grow our work together over time (with the added benefit of our being able to be immediately responsive when their usage spurs great ideas of what else we should be doing).
Spidvid founder Jeremy Campbell recently asked Market7 founder Seth Kenvin to participate in brand new podcast series Spidcast. Hop over to the Spidcast site to check out the pretty in depth interview covering the genesis of Market7, Seth’s philosophies on the collaborative video space and what challenges/opportunities are coming down the road. Warning: Seth’s vocal chops get seriously upstaged by those of great interviewer Michael London.
Lastly, Spidvid themselves have some pretty cool thoughts around collaborative video efforts and you should definitely take a look at what they’re up to as well.
PS – Hey, nice to meet you all. I’m M7’s faithful PR guy and you’ll hear from me every now and then with updates like these moving forward!
In any exploration there needs to be focus and attention on the right details. We speak of the bigger picture, but very often the bigger picture is obfuscated by our own tendency to identify. The challenge that comes out of identity is using it as the right tool in the right context.
Through-out the software development process, identity shifts both on an individual basis and on the basis of perspective. In order to approach the Elephant our practice of learning and exploring as professionals must move back towards understanding the bigger picture.
Appreciating the bigger picture in the agile process is about respecting how much massive potential exists in the world and how limited our resources are.
It is about creating and publishing humanistic software.
It is about simplification and refinement of our own understanding. Understanding the external and internal models that limit our operation in both the world of software and the world at large.
Most Importantly, it is about transforming the conceptual into the concrete. Just as people cannot eat the sound of toast, our users cannot interact with ideas, they need widgets and buttons and text_fields (oh my!)
At Market7 we are approaching the collaboration elephant, come join us.
