Market7

Week Of Deep Thoughts Post #1

Per the sub-headline here, a plan was that during this week after just getting a knee operation, I would be mind altered by Vicodin and could daily offer brief opinions on various weighty topics with chemically enhanced color. But Dr. Colin Eakin’s precise hands have me quite literally feeling no pain, so here are the first of those thoughts, in full sobriety.

Let’s start with Google eliminating China presence as a topic. Some of the controversies about this include whether the company is putting principle above fiduciary duty to its shareholders, whether the “do no evil” ethic can be selectively applied here whereas there are other areas it is arguably diluted (ex: constructing profiles based on observation of personal on-line behavior), and whether it all might just be posturing while selecting a more tactical retreat versus tough, local competition.

This post’s quick analysis acknowledges such compromises as potential factors and salutes Google nonetheless. Even if not absolutely purely, the company is overtly embracing principle that is consistent with the identity it’s cultivated. That identity is in fact reason why many choose to trust much of our online lives to Google. And by & large there is evidence that it’s been thusfar abided. So, in fact Google’s public embrace of principle is a driver of its popularity and hence its success, and this weighty demonstration could bolster such positioning perhaps with greater benefit than its ofsetting & significant consequences.

Market7 has yet to reach stature where our demonstrable abidance of particular principles makes much impact on our success, but we do have resolution of what some of those principles are. They motivate us (another factor that may favor Google here — internal, cultural pride in the workplace) and we look forward to the day we can exercise them (likely in  less Star-Wars-esque manner than the Google slogan) to the business benefit of our company through generation of extensive goodwill among multiple key constituencies.

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).

We Share Belief In Right Timing To Bring Together Previously Disparate Worlds

Big tech merger & acquisition news this week with announcement of Omniture, which provides web services used to maximize performance of online marketing and ecommerce, combining with creative and rich media software giant Adobe for $1.8 billion.  This deal is largely about bringing full circle the development, delivery, analysis and optmization of use of media in business. This cycle proceeds from domain of creative professionals to that of the marketing professionals and others who commission and utilize creative content. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen highlighted just such a point in a conference call that included coverage of the deal:

“Adobe’s Creative Suite products and Flash platform help customers create and deliver engaging experiences. The addition of Omniture’s online marketing suite will help customers measure, analyze and optimize the impact and value of those experiences creating a continuous feedback loop.”

Market7 salutes and shares this belief in the time arriving to close the gaps that tend to separate the sources from the patrons of  creativity.  One of my common citations in describing Market7 is that we address fact that creatives are from Venus wheras those who commission and utilize their work are from Mars, and our role is to help these disparate groups comprehend each other, communicate and organize the work they must do together. Adobe and Omniture are principal players in many settings of video.Market7 use, and we look forward to witnessing the implications of these formidable players combining.