Market7

Pace Well, Gain Ground

The CEO of my last company told me that despite the common claim, building a start-up’s not so much like running a marathon as it’s like running a short sprint and realizing that crossing the finish marks start of the next sprint. It’s very clever and I was compelled, but now that Market7 nears two-and-a-half years old, I’m back to embracing the established marathon metaphor.

It’s news to few that the 2009 business environment has been challenging. Market7 finishes the year stronger than it started, with additional, expanded, more integrated, faster & more reliable functionality across all of our modules; a larger customer base; entry into some new market spaces; and even a growing team with multiple valuable contractors who’ve joined our core team during the year. We’ve gotten a lot done and have done so, moving challenge-to-challenge, by distributing steady efforts among multiple initiatives and progressing incrementally in each. Our record of 2009 accomplishment, like the fact that you’re now reading our one-hundredth blog post of the year, would surely have been more volatile if we were constantly re-directing all resources and efforts towards whatever single opportunity promised most at any moment.

The photo above is me running, and under-pronating, in the year that will become 14-ago starting at midnight. It’s from the one literal marathon that I’ve run. Recalling that experience, the metaphor is very apt for building a start-up. Market7 goes into 2010 confident we’re pacing ourselves well and ready to gain some serious ground, and we look forward to sharing such a year with our community. HNY!

Using The Model For Immediate Responses To Customers, Steady Growth By Vendors

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).