threehv

I used to work for a company that built a complicated desktop application, let’s call it Roloduck. The original version was written in about 1999-2000 and subsequent versions (including a total rewrite) were built over the first six years of the new millenium. Over that time my job title varied between developer, senior developer, lead architect, project leader, team leader and technical director. Amongst other things.

One of the major trends in software development at that time (at least for desktop applications) was to offer options – make it configurable and you can please everyone. And you can then sell “consultancy days” as it takes two weeks post-installation before the thing is usable, as you tick all the right boxes and choose all the right options. It also means you can say “hmm, well, there are eight different ways to do that, each with different pros and cons” (as opposed to saying “we can do exactly what you want” or “no, sorry, we don’t do that”).

So this was a big complicated software project; large enough that no one person knew it all the way through, with a variety of different architectures in-built (COM objects is how you do this stuff; oh no, now it’s COM+, now it’s ADO-disconnected and so on).

But we were only a small company. At its largest there were probably ten people working on the product at any one time. However, if you read the company communications you could never tell – it was all the bland, marketing-droid, use three-hundred-words-when-one-would-do style. Our email signatures had the sixteen paragraph disclaimer – “this is only intended for the intended recipient and if you are not its intended then wipe your memory immediately and burn your computer to prevent accidental ingestion”. This worked so well, some of our customers were amazed when they found out how many people we actually had – they thought we were a multinational with hundreds of developers across thousands of countries.

Over the years, we would consistently come across a single competitor – let’s call them Crump Builder. We poached our sales director from them, so we had a pretty good idea of what they were capable of and how they worked. We were small fry, they had funding and a team several times bigger than ours. They had also been going longer than us, so they had an even bigger set of preferences, options and modules to choose from. Most of the time, the sales process would come down to a choice between Roloduck and Crump Builder, and in the vast majority of cases, the prospect would choose Crump Builder.

At the time, I thought this was because we were behind them. They had the more polished, more finished product that did more and went further. But, since the demise of Roloduck (the company went bust recently) I’ve had to revise that view. You see, one of Roloduck’s old customers has chosen Crump Builder as the replacement for their now defunct Roloduck system. And she said that Crump Builder simply does not do a lot of the stuff that they need, whereas Roloduck does.

This news amazed me. Why did we consistently lose out to Crump Builder in those countless sales pitches?

Having thought about this, the only reason I can come up with is that we were not playing to our strengths. We were chasing their tails all the time. “We know they do X and we don’t yet; but we will soon”. “Yes, their version is pretty slick and ours is a bit clunky”. We were trying to present ourselves as their equals, equivalent in size and structure, in fact bigger than them in size and structure. But, because we were smaller, we were being found out. Not once, in our competitive analysis did we say “they are strong there, but we are strong here, so we should push this instead”. We should have pitched it as “we are the small guys – meaning you will get personalised service”, “our bit isn’t finished yet, so we can tailor it exactly to how you need it”

This is exactly what we have planned for our new venture. There are only two of us, so you will have the focussed attention of at least 50% of the company. We can’t afford lawyers or committees, so all the personality won’t be mangled out of our communications (bad jokes and all). And as we’re only small we can’t afford any waste, in either resources or time. So we will do what you need in the quickest, most efficient way possible. It will not work for everyone, but it will work fantastically for some. Those are our strengths and we will play to them.