I was fortunate enough to get a comment from Narinder Singh of Appirio on one of my recent posts about software as a service being different. I have not met Narinder personally (yet) but did see him do a fabulous presentation with Salesforce’s Mark Benioff at the Pacific Crest Securities on-demand summit last week. Here’s his post on it. Appirio heavily leverages the salesforce.com/force.com platform and the joint presentation highlighted that usage. It was really great to see an early stage company (and Narinder) share the stage with the Chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com. Very cool.
Take integration off the table as a sales objection
I repeatedly heard this in various forms last week citing integration as both a sales obstacle and market limiter to software as a service adoption. There are no shortages of tools to do integration with out there and a handful were on display at this event, but it still begs the question for all those SaaS application companies or even technology enabled services out there – do you really want to do the integration heavy lifting yourself?
Simon Peel, SVP of Strategy at Cast Iron, had a really great point during the integration panel discussion which I will paraphrase as "the applications have the value and we (integration solutions) are the enabler of that value."
Every SaaS customer has or will have an integration problem as the software application functionality is increasingly consumed by that customer. Expectations are high for time to production and value given all the benefits that SaaS is suppose to provide. You want to have deep (and renewing) relationships as an on-demand software company and getting the integration question right is essential.
Aspire to lead
Great post by Kevin Merritt of Blist on the difference between "foxholes and potholders" in your organization. I read this a couple days ago and can’t get it out of my mind.
"I like to think of a team’s passion for and support of their leader as being measurable on an imaginary scale from foxhole to potholder. Foxhole leaders are the ones who jumped in the foxhole and fought the battle right alongside the soldiers. Potholders are the ones who seem to appear just as the pie is ready to come out of the oven. A potholder uses his position of authority to demand the potholders, with which he removes the pie from the oven and gleefully presents it as though he baked it."
I think we’ve all experienced more potholders than we care to remember. Great stuff Kevin.
Examine your words
Political campaigns are, I believe, pretty heavy marketing exercises with candidates and their messages being constantly tweaked, adjusted, and analyzed. This election is a lot about words at this point so thought I would pick up Frank Luntz’s Words That Work for travel reading. His focus groups are pretty interesting to watch after the major debates and he has brought us many of the phrases that dominate the news and pundit-speak these days. I’m not all the way through it just yet but did want to highlight what he sees as the ten rules of effective language at the beginning of the book. Here they are:
- Simplicity – use small words
- Brevity – use short sentences
- Credibility is as important as philosphy
- Consistency matters
- Novelty – offer something new
- Sound and texture matter
- Speak aspirationally
- Visualize
- Ask a question
- Provide context and explain relevance
Why software as a service is different than just software
This is a good Q&A post with Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital. Here’s a couple really compelling quotes on the difference between being a product company vs. a service company:
"A product business is transactional. You sell something, you get the money, and the relationship is over. A service business is about serving 24×7."
and
"You have to secure the renewal"
I had a great couple days in San Francisco at both the SaaS Summit and the Pacific Crest Securities On-demand Summit. I’ll share some thought and feedback as a consolidate my notes and digest a bit.
Best Buy as an economic indicator
I was at the Best Buy in Bellevue today in search of a cable connector thing and have to tell you that after having difficulty trying to find a place to park, I’m not sure there is much economic slow down in my backyard. That doesn’t mean there isn’t one or it isn’t coming, but I really couldn’t believe the number of cars and people not to mention the same thing going on at its big box cousin next door – The Home Depot. Of course, I couldn’t tell if folks were shopping with cash or credit…
Dr. Dewett on leadership
A business school classmate and great friend, Todd Dewett, has recently published a new book Leadership Redefined
Solve problems, don’t state them
This certainly applies to how I manage (reference my "spot it, got it" post) but is also one of the more interesting notes made in a small notebook during the launch of Idapta in late ’99 by one of our early investors. This was recently re-discovered along with the PRD cover sheet I just posted on and is an interesting trip down memory lane. I’m not real sure how I ended up with it or managed to keep it over the past ~9 years but there are some valuable (and blunt) points in these few short notes. We were still a very new company (~6 mos old) and our messaging and value proposition were not strong. We wanted to tell people "how" and not "why" and had prospects telling us our value (the last note on the page calls this out).
My first PRD
Marel found a box of stuff that included a few items from the wayback machine including the cover sheet to the first product requirements document I ever prepared in my first gig as a product manager. If you follow this blog and worked at IntelligentDigital/Idapta, your signature may be on this PRD cover sheet dated 9/21/99. The goal was to get the entire exec team to buy into what we were building and in what time frame by signing the cover document.
This was my first start-up experience and I learned some harsh but valuable lessons. It was during the last boom/bubble so sound business principles were not at the forefront of decision making. The company re-branded as "Idapta" after a very expensive and useless branding project – at least the number syllables in the name was reduced.
The experience was formative and I am blessed to have met my wife there as well as made many great friends. I believe that everyone needs one of these experiences to truly "get" what it takes to start, grow, and run a new venture. For those really interested in nostalgia, here’s the last version of the website (hosted by talented designer and alum Jamie Martin) after we repositoined to attack the enteprise market.
Headed to SaaS Summit and Pacific Crest Securities conference in SFO
I’m going to be at both events end of this week. If you are there and want to connect, shoot me an email – robertcpease at gmail dot com.
Venture Vice 