David Cornwell's blog on PleaseTech, document review, document co-authoring and collaboration

We are having a crack at social marketing

2012-01-17T14:08:00.001Z

Last year we looked at our marketing mix and, having spoken to a couple of consultants, identified that we needed to get involved in social marketing. What fun – or not!

I’m afraid the cynic in me was asking the question ‘what is the point of Twitter and Facebook?’! I’d used Twitter as a convenient means of updating relatives, friends and supporters when climbing Kilimanjaro (send a text and the tweet appears), but I just couldn’t see how its immediacy was relevant to our business. I mean, it’s not like we can tweet great contract wins – almost every deal we get has a ‘no publicity’ clause.

I’ve stayed away from Facebook although my wife has a profile and she is friends with certain people on my behalf. This does, by the way, make for interesting friends' requests!

Now, LinkedIn I understood – or thought I did. I’ve been a member since 2003 and have built up a list of connections following best practice (i.e. not accepting all link requests) and thought of it as a useful business contacts directory. Also we use its groups facility to run the PleaseReview user group.

However, when you begin to understand the totality of the conversation with the market it soon became apparent that it does have something to offer. The combination of blogs (this update is part of social marketing), Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn is social marketing but it also has an effect on search engine results and positioning. For example, LinkedIn is another opportunity to promote the business as LinkedIn’s content is indexed by Google. So you may have noticed that my profile has changed a lot over the last few days and there is more to come! Twitter is indexed by Bing.

So, thanks to Carina (@birtie) and Mary (@concisetraining) I am now reformed and, as we all know, there is nothing so virtuous as a reformed ‘individual’. I'm even becomming something of a Hootsuite (@hootsuite) whizz! Feel free to follow me (@CornwellDavid).

Obviously it’s critical that you establish an objective. I’ll tell you that one of my objectives is to continuously promote the key words “document review”, “co-authoring”, “document collaboration” and so on – see how I’ve slipped them in – so that ultimately I establish myself as an authority on these topics.

So, my aim is now to blog weekly. I shall continue to provide some insight to PleaseTech on a quarterly basis, but the new social media campaign demands that I blog more often (Google likes blogs and especially those which are active I’m told) on my pet subjects, namely: document review, co-authoring and document collaboration!

Another successful year, new plans and more marketing

2012-01-10T12:01:00.000Z

Last year in my January blog post I said “In many ways the January blog is getting quite repetitive.” And so they are. It’s yet another successful year – thankfully! We continue to work hard and focus on what we do and it seems to be working.

In 2011 we exhibited 37% revenue growth over 2010. Not too shabby. We remain profitable and retain a large cash balance which is still running at approximately 12 months of projected overheads. Given that we have taken on more staff this year and are still recruiting (thus increasing the projected overheads) this is an excellent position.

Revenue in 2011 was split approximately 1/3rd annual renewable (such as support and hosting, etc.), 1/3rd new business from existing clients and 1/3rd new business from new clients – a total of 21 new corporate clients during 2011. I believe that this is a healthy balance and am always particularly pleased with the new business from existing clients as it shows that PleaseReview delivers the benefits it promised!

The trend of Life Sciences being our largest sector continues with 66% of 2011 sales in that sector. Defense comes in a strong second position accounting for 24% of sales. Once again North America is our largest market accounting for 79% of all 2011 sales.

From a sales perspective, the main difference between 2011 and 2010 was that the sales were much more evenly spread out. In my Q2 blog post last year I note that “Talking of the sales side of the equation, I’ve given up trying to forecast the flow of sales ....To the end of Q2 this year our sales were 60% ahead of June 2010.” This spread of sales was continued throughout the year and by the time December came around, we had already met and exceeded our targets – happy days!

The other good news for 2011 was that we expanded our development team with excellent calibre people. As a result, development surged ahead and we were able to finally release PleaseReview 4.2 in mid-October. Only a couple of weeks later than planned. Version 4.2 includes the review of Excel spread sheets, ReviewZones, Flexible EditZones, Review templates and many other enhancements.

So I think we can conclude that 2011 was a very good year for us!

What does 2012 hold?

Once again we go into the year with the economic outlook dire although there are glimpses of hope in the American economic figures. The year holds two very large and very interesting ‘situations’.

The first is the problems in the Eurozone and whether the Euro will survive in its current form. The second is the US presidential election.

With regard to the Eurozone: My only comment, other than finding the whole thing absolutely fascinating and believing that we are truly living in momentous times, is that, clearly, the economic uncertainty is not good for anyone. As we deal with multinational companies most for which do business in the Eurozone, it will be interesting to see whether the uncertainty affects their investment plans. No-one could blame them for proceeding with caution.

The good news is that I have even less to say on the second issue – that of the US presidential elections. I do however hope that it provides plenty of material for our new document review cartoons website – more of that later.

So, back to our prospects for 2012. We are approaching 2012 as we have approached every recent year – with caution. However, we are planning to expand and are currently recruiting and have plans for further recruitment later in the year. We go into the year with a strong prospect list and great plans.

Over the next few weeks there will be a significant new product announcement. In fact we have already started development and are hoping to get this announcement out in January – watch this space! We also have a minor new product announcement, new partnerships and revitalized existing partnerships to look forward to. In addition we are recruiting for a business development manager to concentrate on the UK market.

Focus on the UK market is not a hard strategy to come up with. We want to do ‘more in Europe’ so do we (i) concentrate on our home market, or (ii) concentrate on, say, the German market which is not on our doorstep and where we don’t speak the language? We choose (i). That’s not to say we are ignoring other markets. We will happily work directly with clients and with partners. It’s just a question of proactive focus.

In terms of marketing it’s ‘same old’ with the exception that we have embarked on a social media marketing program. To that end you can expect more blogging from me and blogging on document review, document co-authoring and other relevant topics – rather than solely my quarterly update on business, which I have practiced thus far.

Furthermore I am now officially ‘tweeting’. You can follow me on @CornwellDavid – rather than what I had for breakfast or lunch, my aim is to tweet around the same subjects as I’ll be blogging about. I’m still trying to get a handle on the whole twitter thing – I think I understand the benefits, it’s just that it does seem to consume an awful lot of valuable time! Another key concern for the company is that my spelling is notoriously bad. Let loose on Twitter there is no telling what may happen. As a result Clare Beazley, our CFO, and Sarah Holden, our Marketing Manager, are both following me (closely) ready to undertake damage limitation!

One of our initiatives in the whole social media/marketing program is the new document review cartoon website. The objective is to post a new cartoon on average every two weeks. I just hope that there will be something other than the US presidential election and the Eurozone crisis to provide us with material, otherwise it will become very tedious. The other problem is, of course, that the cartoon has a global audience and therefore the subject matter must be broadly understood. Let’s see how it goes.

From the more traditional marketing perspective, we are already signed up to exhibit/attend 12 conferences this year and I’d expect to add another 3 – 4 conferences to that tally. All except one are in the USA. We are largely taking a break from European conferences this year.

And in other news ………

I’d like to congratulate Sue O’Connell on having been selected as an Olympic Torch carrier. Clients will know Sue as a key person in our client services, namely in training and support.

Sue has been and continues to be involved in multiple charitable works. She has completed many of the Playtex Moonwalks in London, Edinburgh and Bristol, raising thousands of pounds for Breakthrough Breast Cancer and has taken part in the London Marathon twice. She has also started working with SMASH youth project charity, which offers mentoring to disadvantaged teenagers in Swindon.

Sue will get to carry the Olympic Torch for about 300m – hardly long enough to break into a sweat. We are already coaching her on how to take small steps and suggesting that she doesn’t ‘race to the finish line’. And on the subject of finishing line Sue also won a place in the ballot for the Olympic Park Run where she gets to run around the perimeter of the Olympic Park, finishing across the actual finish line in the Olympic Stadium! I hope to post some photos in due course.

So, as we head into 2012 the one certainty we have is that nothing will go to plan. There will be ‘left field’ opportunities and threats and we will react to these as and when they appear. The economic outlook is dire but it has been for the last three years and we have continued to expand. We have a good set of prospects going into 2012 so I’m as confident as I dare be that the year will work out well for us.

Document Review Cartoons

2011-11-24T16:30:00.001Z

We get great feedback on our cartoons - everyone loves them. They have now taken on a life of their own and we have just launched a new website which takes a humorous view on events and stories that appear in the world media. We believe that if only the right document review tool had been used, then things may have turned out quite differently! Launched on Thanksgiving day with a Thanksgiving 1st cartoon! Enjoy!

http://www.documentreviewcartoons.com/

If only they had used PleaseReview ....

2011-10-12T12:24:00.000+01:00

(Click on the image to enlarge)

I'm a sad Englishman :-(

As I live in Wales I guess I'll have to support Wales now ;-).

For my American readers - this refers to England's weekend loss to France in the rugby world cup being held in New Zealand!

Q2 - marketing challenges and technical progress

2011-08-04T16:29:00.002+01:00

Once again I’m running behind on my blog entry. The yellow sticky note on my laptop has been saying ‘blog’ at me for the last 3 weeks. In my defence, the 1st two weeks of July were at the end of an intensive travel period during which, in 6 weeks, I was in Denver twice, Chicago, Malaysia and the Netherlands. So a week to recover and catch-up and that means I’m only running a week behind really!

So what has happened in Q2, 2011?

One of the key ‘learnings’ is that our opinion on exhibiting at European events has, unfortunately, been reinforced. A colleague attended an event recently where, despite there being plenty of delegates and the organizer adopting ‘best practice’ in having all the food and drinks in the exhibition area, not one – yes, I repeat - not one person showed any interest. As my colleague commented: “I’ve never known so many delegates and so little interest”. This certainly was not a case of inappropriate product fit as the same conference in the USA and the UK works for us.

I've personally have the same experience. It was the DIA European conference in Barcelona in 2008. There were about 2,500 delegates and as I note in my April 2008 blog entry “the booth traffic was simply non-existent. From talking with other vendors we were not the only ones suffering. I had one, yes, a single meaningful conversation (ie one which may ultimately move forward into an opportunity) over the full three days. So, it was a complete waste of money, time and just about everything.” It is mind-numbingly boring to be a vendor on a booth without traffic – so please remember that booth staff have feelings too ;-)

This continues to be a difficult topic – how to market effectively in Europe? Despite our previous experience, we are giving it one more shot. We will be attending the European SharePoint Conference in Berlin in October. If that is a miss then it’s going to be very, very difficult to persuade me that money in European non-UK conferences is money well spent.

We continue to try different conferences and European marketing strategies but I’m not sure we are yet seeing light at the end of the tunnel. Having said that, our European business is growing slowly but America continues to be the primary market.

Other events attended in Q2 were the APMP (Association of Proposal Management Professionals) in Denver and the DIA Annual Conference this year held in Chicago.

We have had some good traction in the proposals market and the APMP conference was a good learning experience. It just about washed its face in terms of opportunities but we learnt a lot about the market and will need to change some of our messaging. However, I remain hopeful that we will continue to gain customers in this sector.

The DIA conference was excellent (as always) and it’s a great opportunity to catch-up with partners (and meet up with new ones), clients, prospective clients and even garner a few new opportunities!

While we continue to market into the Life Sciences sector we are looking to address other sectors in a more direct manner. We currently have clients in multiple sectors including Defense, Utilities, Government, IT, Manufacturing, Financial Services, and others.

Other aspects of the marketing mix are going well. The new website has been well received and we have started collating customer case studies which give some excellent real life scenarios where PleaseReview has dramatically improved customers' business processes. The LinkedIn user group is gaining momentum and working well.

Likewise, at the moment sales are doing well and we are surging ahead but clearly, to maintain the momentum, we need an ever increasing number of opportunities. Ideally some in Europe!

Talking of the sales side of the equation, I’ve given up trying to forecast the flow of sales – I’m not sure it’s possible. If you read my blog entry in January, you’ll note that last year we benefitted from a Q4 last minute surge of orders which delivered 24% revenue growth for 2010. To the end of Q2 this year our sales were 60% ahead of June 2010. So, if the pattern repeats this could be a very, very good year.

So, conventional wisdom suggests that we invest in expansion. However, the economic outlook is unstable and the so called recovery appears to be stalling. At the time of writing the US has just secured the ‘debt deal’ and avoided default. No-one seems to know what effect this whole saga will have on the economy and companies’ investment plans. So, rather than invest heavily in growth, we are remaining cautious and seeing what the rest of the year brings.

From a technology perspective we are still trying to get the next PleaseReview release out and still targeting the end of Q3 2011. We have now doubled the technical team in Malaysia (a surge of excellent candidates when we changed the advertisement to include the remuneration figures – a lesson in that) and they are all fully trained, inducted and working on PleaseReview v4.2. It will be tight but, unless we hit unforeseen issues, I think we will make it. Most stuff is more-or-less working and we are working steadily to iron out the bugs. I’ve begun a series of v4.2 webinars for our clients and watched the demos become more solid on a week by week basis. So, no promises, but we are focused and stand a fighting chance.

One of the things we have been fighting is a new PDF plug-in. After a massive investment in both development and testing I have had to accept a cut back in the scope because we can’t get it stable. It will still add value but it’s disappointing that we can’t achieve the initial vision. This was to have been our last ever PDF plug-in development as I believe that Acrobat on the desktop is going to go away. Historically it has been a standard desktop application for our core market of Life Sciences. But, with the ability to save Microsoft Office documents as PDF built-in to the Office products and multiple free tools emerging for things such as signatures and form filling and the latest version of the free Adobe Reader supporting basic mark-up, I can’t see that companies are going to be able to justify the expense of ‘paid for’ Acrobat. Therefore I believe that ‘paid for’ Acrobat will become a specialist high-end tool. That makes it time for us to invest our PDF development dollars on other means of reviewing PDF documents.

However, a simple client requirement which we hadn’t come across/thought of previously has got us specifying an extension to the, as yet, unreleased new plug-in. So, whether we like it or not, the PDF plug-in is going to be around for a while yet!

Finally, an article in May caught my eye. A Gartner survey (reported on Silicon.com) has identified that the amount of time people are spending reading on a digital screen is now almost equal to time spent consuming printed paper text. Other pertinent findings are that tablet users have a better electronic reading experience than laptop users and that younger people are happier reading on screen than older people. I think I could have told them that last fact for free and we are certainly seeing more tablet use in the client base - but it’s nice to have it all confirmed.

What does this all mean? Well, two things really. Firstly, tablets are going to become important for document review and we are addressing that in v4.2; and secondly, it confirms that the future is electronic and as we lead the market in electronic document review that can only be good!

If it was easy everyone would do it

2011-04-05T12:28:00.004+01:00

Well, first the good news! The new PleaseTech website went live on 2nd April. We are very pleased with it. When compared with the old site I begin to wonder how we survived with the old site for so long. Please do let us know what you think. We are not 100% happy and there will be a few more tweaks over the next few of weeks but these will be minor subtle changes. I think we have achieved our objective of making the site modern but still a derivative in terms of branding. I wanted to avoid a complete rebranding exercise.

Now for the ‘less good’ news. Looking back a year, my Q2 blog post for 2010 was titled “Release fights back – no surprise there!” and I’m afraid not much has changed. We had initially hoped to have the v4.2 release out at the end of Q1 this year and then, having reset expectations, aimed to finalize coding by the end of the quarter. Unfortunately, this has not happened. In fact we are way behind with the release and will be struggling to get it out by the end of Q3 this year and, in fact, it will probably have to reduce the scope from that initially planned.

We are struggling for two reasons. The first reason is that it was always an ambitious plan which involved some significant ‘under the hood’ rework which was never going to be trivial and the second reason is that we simply haven’t had the development capacity available.

There is not a lot we can do about the first issue. If it was easy then everyone would do it. It’s not easy and no-one else is doing it. No-one else doing it is good on one hand, but on the other it does mean that it’s a challenge. We have to accept that doing advanced stuff can lead us into problems – some of which we may not be able to solve.

With respect to the development capacity, it follows that doing non-trivial stuff means you need really good people. Unfortunately, despite having spent the last 6 months trying to recruit developers to increase the size of our technical team in our Malaysian development center, we have failed to find staff of sufficient calibre. We have a very simple view – we would rather not recruit than recruit the wrong people. In my experience the old adage ‘recruit in haste and repent at leisure’ is certainly true so, no matter how keen we are to recruit people (and, trust me, we are keen), we are maintaining our standards. This has meant that we haven’t been able to recruit the extra staff we need and had planned for.

So the upshot is that we are struggling on the development front. Other than keep trying to recruit I’m not sure there is anything else we can do. We do not wish to source staff in other geographies as this would lead to significant overheads in terms of admin and it’s not ideal to have one’s development staff scattered across the globe. Sub-contracting simply isn’t going to work because we have to go back to the fact that this is difficult stuff and therefore it’s unlikely to be simple to subcontract. So our options are limited.

I should stress that this is not a crisis and we are still delivering other software as planned. This quarter we have delivered a ‘2nd generation’ integration for Open Text, a greatly enhanced integration with CSC’s FirstDoc and are on the point of releasing our 2nd generation SharePoint integration (beta was released in February).

Our software works in complex corporate conditions, so we have conduct our testing in multiple environments. This includes 32 bit, 64 bit and various combinations of older releases. Simply testing on a basic test system and hoping that when deployed in more complex environments everything will be fine, just isn’t good enough. As they say: ‘Hope is not a strategy’.

This neatly brings me onto Michael Sampson’s book ‘User Adoption Strategies’ (in which he notes that hope is not a strategy for user adoption) which I have now read. It certainly provides a thorough understanding of user adoption and the options and technologies available and I’d recommend it to anyone who needs to roll out a system. However, it seems to be aimed at the IT departments of the world and is writtem from an IT perspective. One of the issues we come across is that the IT department refuses to listen to the users and is busy trying to get them to adopt the wrong thing. I guess they haven't read the book.

It’s not pleasant being caught in a battle of wills between IT and end users and I would stress that this is not the case with every prospective client. In the majority of cases the end users and IT departments work very well together and, from our perspective, these companies are a pleasure to deal with.

Personally it has been a busy quarter with three trips to the USA, two trips to Malaysia and a brief vacation in Spain. We attended the Qumas user conference in Miami, SharePoint TechCon conference in San Francisco and the DIA EDM conference in National Harbor. The Qumas conference was fun as always, the SharePoint TechCon disappointing (I think we just misjudged the audience which appeared to be looking for developer tools rather than SharePoint enhancements) and the DIA EDM conference was very worthwhile – as always.

This coming quarter we are attending three European conferences/shows and it will be interesting to see how we get on. We still find attracting business in Europe a struggle and I think it comes back to a cultural issue. It always seems to me that a lot of UK (and for that matter, European countries) prefer to ‘struggle on’ with their existing system rather than consider and adopt new technologies.

Here is a recent example of this. We were talking to a UK business who contacted us because they were struggling with document review. We met their six key requirements perfectly. However, having established that we did indeed meet their requirements, we then ran into the short term view: ‘it costs too much’. Our budgetary estimate for them was ~$375 per Active user in year one and then less than $50 per Active user in the second and subsequent years. For that we could revolutionize their document review process, saving them a huge amount of time and hassle. Their document review process was causing them pain. They had gone to the trouble to spend time researching the options, reading our website and then contacting us! But, no, it was going to be too much and they didn’t even want a demo. What were they expecting? The answer to a critical business issue for tuppence ha’penny (in American ‘two cents worth’)? Talk about frustrating!

I like to think we sell sensible software which works well at a sensible price and the ROI is fantastic. Luckily there are lots of companies out there which ‘get it’.

So on a file note I thought I’d drop in a couple of photos of the abseiling I did at the end of March. Here is my wife & I five hundred feet up the side of the tallest hospital building in Europe and about to descend. People have commented that I look more nervous than her. My response is quite simple: I went first and there's less of a safety margin in the rope on me than her!

Happily another successful year

2011-01-17T11:00:00.002Z

In many ways the January blog is getting quite repetitive. The same refrain of “yet another successful year”. Not that I’m complaining as the alternative holds no attractions whatsoever.

So the headline figure is 2010 exhibited 24% revenue growth over 2009. We are happy with that.

This included over 20 new corporate clients from different geographies and multiple industries. Life Sciences accounted for 59% of sales and defense 25% with the remaining percentage split fairly evenly across several market sectors. Overall (2007 – 2010 inclusive) 75% of our clients are from North America which has accounted for 79% of our sales. So 2010 merely reflected the trends we have seen over the last few years.

One trend which was different this year was the amount of our annual sales which fell in December. Normally, we expect to a significant volume of sales in Q4 but rarely are they all so concentrated around December. This concentration is not good for my heart.

In my October blog post I wrote: “The good news is that we are flourishing despite the environment but, if we are honest, this is proving to be a tougher year than we anticipated. In January I explained that we had ‘battened down the hatches’ at the end of 2008 expecting a rocky 2009 and anticipating the “loosening of corporate purse strings” in 2010. My mistake.”

This reflected my genuine concern that, whilst we had a lot of activity, the potential deals weren’t as strong as I would normally expect and I was far from convinced that we would see revenue growth in 2010.

As we went into Q4 I was setting internal expectations that we would be having a ‘standstill’ year with the potential of single figure growth depending on which sales closed. In fact, we benefited hugely from a last minute rush of ‘end of year’ budget spending from a number of existing clients. Incremental client purchases accounted for 35% of our revenue. It is, of course, gratifying that existing clients choose to spend their budgets with us. This validates not only PleaseReview itself and the benefit they gain from using it, but also the hard work we do in striving always to provide an excellent level of support. I just wish they wouldn’t leave it until December to act!

Of course, not all is smooth. Occasionally we do get clients who stop using PleaseReview and don't renew their support – typically 1 or 2 clients per year. We always try and learn from them and understand exactly what the issue is. Usually it is a result of factors totally outside our control. This brings me back to the theme of user adoption which I mentioned in the October blog.

Unfortunately, I still haven’t managed to finish Michael Sampson’s book 'User Adoption Strategies' (I’ve just been too busy Michael – honest), but the importance of user adoption was brought home in December when one client failed to renew support and, in response to our queries, said:

“PleaseReview is a fine product and under different circumstances would be something that client could benefit greatly from. Our discontinuing using PleaseReview is not a reflection of your product it is a reflection of how it was rolled out at client. The Organizational Change Management aspects of this implementation are what led us to the point of decommissioning the system.

As you are aware, there are no silver bullets out there. All solution based implementations require three things: People, Processes, and Technology. Unfortunately, the People and Processes components of the equation had been missing from this implementation. The technology is fantastic and under the right circumstances I think things might have worked out differently, but we just weren’t poised to take advantage of PleaseReview and all it has to offer.”

So here we have a situation where a company has made the investment in a product which is bringing great benefit to other similar companies (judging by the increased investment they are making with us) but has failed to make that investment work. As Michael says in his book “hope is not a strategy” and uses this statement to note that there is little point in making technology available and hoping that it will be used.

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that we should have been in touch with the client, understanding that PleaseReview wasn’t being adopted successfully and offering to assist. In an ideal world I would agree. However, in our defence, the deal was sold through a reseller so our direct client contact was less than normal.

That being said, we do tend to operate on a ‘no news is good news’ principle. I suspect that those of you with kids off at college will understand this principle very well. You only get a phone call when there is a problem and that problem generally revolves around cash!

There are two arguments regarding client contact. On one hand it’s useful and sensible to be in touch with clients on a regular basis. On the other hand, clients are generally busy people and the last thing they want is to constantly re-assure you that life is good and everything is fine. They’ll call you if they need you. They know that an email to request support will bring instant action.

So, in 2011 we are going to take a look at how we can touch base with our clients regularly without bugging them.

Moving on to our plans for 2011, there is no let up for us.

In the first quarter of the year we will see the release of 2nd generation integrations for Microsoft SharePoint, Open Text Content Server (formerly Livelink) and CSC’s FirstDoc.

In Q2 we will release PleaseReview v4.2 which will include, amongst other enhancements, the detailed review of Microsoft Excel and the introduction of ‘review zones’ so you can control who can comment on, and even who can see, different zones in the document.

We shall also be releasing a PleaseReview consultancy package which will include a project based licencing model and branding options suited to small and medium sized consultancies. This will be of immense benefit to, for example, medical writing consultancies servicing the Life Sciences market.

You can also expect to see the launch of a revamped PleaseTech website. If we are honest the existing site, which has been in service since 2002, is beginning to look a little (or is that a lot?) dated. The new design will modernise the appearance without requiring a major re-branding exercise. Evolution not revolution is the brief.

Personally I expect to be flying all over the place. I’ve already spent a couple of days at our development center in Malaysia and will be in Miami at the end of January. So it’s a busy Q1.

On a slightly different topic, someone pointed me at this video entitled “The Vendor Client relationship - in real world situations”. So true! I’m glad to say that most of our clients act responsibly and ethically – but occasionally their purchasing departments do try it on!

In terms of personal stuff, following the 2010 Kilimanjaro climb, my wife and I have now signed up for a slightly different challenge in 2011. On 27th March we will be abseiling down the 30+ stories of Guy’s Tower in London - all 469 feet of it. Neither of us have abseiled previously (although I have vague recollections of abseiling down a couple of storeys when I was 16 at school – but I don’t think that counts) so it’s a challenge albeit a different type of challenge to the Kilimanjaro trip. Needless to say, it’s raising money for charity and this is in support of Retrak a well worthwhile charity supporting African street children.

Assuming I survive you’ll hear from me again in April.

Q4 – the race to the end of the year

2010-10-18T11:42:00.005+01:00

Before you know it another quarter is over and the race to Christmas and year end has begun.

After a fairly quiet summer, we are back into the swing of it and busy in ‘sales mode’.

From a sales perspective this is the busiest time of year with most people’s objective to get everything settled (and therefore budgets spent) before the end of the year. It’s also a busy period on the conference circuit.

The major trade show travel starts at the end of October with RAPS and the DIA eSubmissions in the same week at opposite ends of California. This year some shows have moved from their regular slot (for example last year RAPS was in September) which has resulted in some overlaps. While we can accommodate attending more than one show simultaneously, attending more than two at the same time is simply not possible so we have had to make some decisions. The main casualty has been the American Medical Writers Association annual conference which we have unfortunately had to drop.

We have also considered the question of whether to attend the LegalTech conference again next year and have decided against it. Our research into the legal market has concluded that, at the moment, it is simply not sensible for us to address it in a proactive manner. We are, however, investing in attending some of the SharePoint events and other such generic shows.

An exciting development on this front is the fridge magnets! Yes folks, we will have fridge magnets featuring our cartoons available from our booths. So please do drop by and pick one up!

Marketing is all about expense and major expense we are going to have to address in the near future is the cost of our Google AdWords campaigns. They have gone through the roof for no discernable incremental benefit to us. We are investigating the reasons, but at first glance it comes down to two factors.

Firstly, Google AdWords is driving more traffic to the site. For the same period in 2009, traffic from Google AdWords has just over doubled. The second factor is that people are bidding key words up. For the extra traffic the cost has gone up by just under six times – so each click is, broadly speaking, costing us three times as much this year as it did last year. People seem to be paying stupid money for clicks. I’ve never been a fan of the ‘let’s just throw lots of money at the problem’ school of marketing. So we will be reviewing the campaigns to ensure value for money.

What I do find interesting is that, even in this day with the age of search marketing and all the associated statistics, the old adage “I know that half my marketing is wasted, I just don’t know which half” is not that far off. Our bounce rate this year to date has been 58% which implies that just over 50% of this type of marketing is wasted! Our bounce rate for the same period last year was almost identical (within half a percentage point) yet our visits are up by 50%, our page views up by 47% whilst average time on the site is slightly down – which I guess is more-or-less what you would expect with many more visitors.

Some will argue that a bounce rate of 58% is too high. There are experts who say that a normal bounce rate is around 35% and anything over a 50% is worrying. However, the information available is very varied and largely appears to be opinion. Clearly, the experts who make their living by search engine optimisation and so forth have much to gain by making you worried about your bounce rates.

The one exception to the generality of information on the web is this blog post by Anil Batra. Anil’s statistics show that the bounce rate is highly dependent on the type of site and that the bounce rate from paid search traffic is higher than organic search traffic. On the basis that our site is somewhere between a lead generation site (bounces rates 5% to 81%) and a product information site (bounces rates 3.2% to 80%), we are in the middle of the range but could probably do better with more judicious use of the AdWords campaigns.

The bottom line is that, last year the cost of AdWords was so small as to not be an issue. This year it has grown to the point where we can no longer ignore it. No wonder Google’s profits are up 32% in Q3 this year!

I do wonder whether Google will start to see a flattening off or even drop in revenue as the high costs of AdWords start to make more traditional marketing methods (such as direct mail) look much better value for money. I suspect we won’t be the only ones looking closely at AdWords value for money!

As an invitation to a seminar from Strategy Partners put it: “How do you survive the quadruple whammy of the UK’s deep recession, Government cutbacks, Commodities of Component software, SAAS and Cloud Computing, the expectation of users set by iPhone Apps and the reality that some IT departments are increasingly becoming part of the problem not the solution for business managers who need to extract cost from their budgets”? How indeed.

The good news is that we are flourishing despite the environment but, if we are honest, this is proving to be a tougher year than we anticipated. In January I explained that we had ‘battened down the hatches’ at the end of 2008 expecting a rocky 2009 and anticipating the “loosening of corporate purse strings” in 2010. My mistake.

If anything, 2010 has seen a tightening of budgets in our key markets with market consolidation and significant reductions in staff and staff turnover all having an adverse effect. Several projects, some of which had been a couple of years in the pipeline, have ‘gone away’ due to personnel changes and revised priorities. Others have restricted budgets and are therefore purchasing less than they (and we) would like. There are no easy wins in this market.

Another market disruption influence (which we correctly predicted) is the advent of SharePoint 2010. This again has delayed purchases as it takes people time to work through the marketing hype and work out what SharePoint 2010 actually does.

I’ve spent a happy (?) few hours playing with SharePoint and can confidently say that, for collaborative document review and co-authoring, it leaves a lot to be desired. Let us be clear that, SharePoint 2010, when combined with Office 2010 (and it must be Office 2010), does take a significant step forward in providing a document co-authoring environment when compared with previous versions of SharePoint. However, the offering is essentially a set of tools and technologies which result in a complex user interface, multiple drawbacks and requires that users not only be highly trained but also act in a rational and courteous manner.

In my opinion, any organization preparing and reviewing formal documentation is unlikely to find the uncontrolled, ‘anything goes’ environment (as offered by both Web Apps and the SharePoint/Office co-authoring environment) suitable or practical. Ultimately, regardless of the number of contributors and reviewers of a document, there has to be a single document owner responsible for the document’s content and for moving it forward. The document owner must therefore maintain control over the process and the content at all times.

Therefore, whilst SharePoint and Office may be usable by a small team of confident and advanced users, it is not, in my view, suitable as a general corporate-wide document review and co-authoring solution.

Clearly, user adoption is critical to the success of any new application. There is little point in rolling out something and expecting users simply to adopt it because ‘it’s cool’. Any brief search of the web regarding SharePoint will rapidly identify that the historic problem with SharePoint is not deployment but one of user acceptance. ‘How do you get users to adopt SharePoint’ is the common cry.

I’d suggest that a complex user interface which requires users not only to be highly trained but also to act in a rational and courteous manner is not the ideal starting point.

Naturally we would argue that PleaseReview has a very high user satisfaction and adoption record and, if used in conjunction with SharePoint, will drive user acceptance of SharePoint. This can then be leveraged to further encourage user adoption of other SharePoint capabilities.

On the subject of user adoption, I’ve just started Michael Sampson’s book entitled "User Adoption Strategies". I haven’t got to the point where PleaseReview is mentioned (complete with screenshot) but as I have several long flights ahead over the next few weeks I suspect it won’t be long before I complete the book. I’ll review it in another blog post.

We are constantly looking at the user experience in PleaseReview and trying to optimise it. I’ve been involved in a series user adoption workshops which bring home how little time busy people have to learn new stuff and therefore it’s mandatory to keep it simple. The experience of this will be fed into our next version 4.2.

From a technical perspective, the v4.2 spec is more-or-less finalized so it’s now just a question of the development team focusing and ‘churning out’ the code – if it were only that simple.

Finally, I’d draw you attention to the new PleaseReview user group on LinkedIn. It’s being going for a short period and has already proved very valuable. We set this group up specifically to increase regular & ad hoc communication with PleaseReview users. It's proving useful for quickly asking and responding to questions or comments, getting feedback and receiving suggestions on product enhancements or ideas. If you haven't already joined the PleaseReview User group and are a PleaseReview user please join us. Check out the LinkedIn Groups Directory and search for PleaseReview.

Release finally out, Kilimanjaro done – it’s all been happening

2010-08-02T10:58:00.004+01:00

Well we finally got the v4.1 release out the door on the 1st July. This makes it exactly a quarter late. I’m not going to dwell on all the reasons (I covered a few of them in the Q1 post) but, suffice it to say, that if we were able to drop support for Internet Explorer the release could have been out about a month earlier.

We have also got the Active Directory and LDAP system connectors released so are now concentrating on getting the various integrations tested and released and undertaking research for v4.2.

In respect of v4.2, customer feedback is of vital importance to us. Customers can tell us what is annoying, what they would change and what new features they would like to see so we can then incorporate it in our thinking and plans. We have had some good feedback recently and a lot of that will find its way into version 4.2. As always, there is a longer list of enhancements than it is possible to include. However, unless it’s very strategic, customer requested enhancements are way up the pecking order.

The timing of the v4.2 release is an interesting one. We always have to be mindful of holiday periods when deciding on a release date and this time we need to avoid Christmas and the Chinese New Year in February. No decision has yet been made, but we may well be targeting a January release.

From a personal travel perspective since the last blog I’ve been in Malaysia, California, Washington DC and, of course, Tanzania for the (successful) attempt to climb Kilimanjaro. For more information on the Kilimanjaro jaunt visit www.shirenewtonchurch.com.

The Washington DC visit was for the DIA Annual Conference at which we had a booth. Once again this was a successful conference for us. It’s such a big show I think the booth location is of key importance and the earlier you book, the better the booth location. Bearing this in mind, we have already re-booked for next year!

We are obviously doing something right as we continue to grow in revenue terms. At the end of Q2 we were some 11% ahead of where we were at the same time last year. This is, of course, good but we must not forget that historically a large portion of our revenue comes in towards the end of the year. There is zero complacency on this front and we continue to work hard to win new business.
We have spent the last six months cautiously expanding and recruiting. In Q2 we added additional staff to both our development/test and customer facing teams. There will now be a period of assimilation before we consider the next moves in recruitment.

In terms of ‘interesting stuff I’ve read’ recently, there was an article in Computing Magazine questioning whether “…the business case for SaaS is really all it’s cracked up to be”? The article noted that “problems are emerging around licensing payments and ROI on the user side, not to mention profit issues for the SaaS vendors themselves.

The article quotes a keynote talk at Forrester’s IT Forum EMEA in which it was noted that over half “of the 11 big SaaS software vendors questioned felt that SaaS in its current form is not sustainable, with most vendors barely making a profit.”

This certainly tallies with my experience. A few years ago, we dropped the PleaseReview pay-as-you-go public subscription service as we simply couldn’t make money at it. In addition to the poor revenue stream it delivered it seemed that the people who paid the least required the most support – an unsustainable model. Consequently, we still offer a SaaS service but it’s not something we heavily promote and is aimed at companies rather than individuals with a correspondingly higher price point. I’d say it’s still marginal as to whether it pays its way.

So, following SaaS, the next big excitement is the “Cloud”. Here is my prediction: in about 2 years the analysts will be saying “…the Cloud in its current form is not sustainable, with most vendors barely making a profit”. Wikipedia’s entry for Cloud Computing includes an Economics section which starts “Cloud computing users can [avoid] capital expenditure (CapEx) on hardware, software, and services when they pay a provider only for what they use.”

Isn’t that exactly the same as a SaaS model which is not sustainable in its present form?

It’s not only the economics I question. I just can’t see companies being prepared to trust their very valuable data to an undefined ‘cloud’ without very careful examination of the credentials of the vendor and without very tight contracts. The contracts would surely be similar to those required by outsourcing – in fact, the question of where outsourcing starts and cloud ends or vice versa is a pertinent one. I remain a sceptic.

Anyway, we are now in the middle of the ‘slow’ period in the summer. There is a constant trickle of opportunities and presentations/demos but at nothing like the intensity of the peak periods during February - June and September - Thanksgiving. This is a time to update documentation and create the new stuff you’ve been meaning to do for a while.

We are looking at re-vamping our website and will have to take a decision, among other things, as to whether this blog continues to serve a purpose and is maintained - if you have any thoughts, let me know!

Release fights back - no surprise there!

2010-05-14T18:46:00.002+01:00

I’ve been delaying writing my ‘end of Q1’ blog entry in the hope that I could announce the release of PleaseReview v4.1 which was nominally due out at the end of Q1 and then rescheduled to mid May. However, our target date of today has slipped and we are now looking at the end of May.

I would always rather have quality software and a slipped release date than deliver software that is full of bugs. Normally am happy to drop functionality in returning for bringing forward the release date. However, this time, there isn’t anything obvious to drop – although, of course, not everything we had listed for the release made it. We’ve been delayed by three key reasons:

We simply under estimated how difficult and complex the technology going into the release would be. We were slightly late into test and then it’s been difficult to sort out the bugs – they have been fighting back.
We have had some last minute changes in how things work. Stuff which looks great on paper turns out in reality not to work very well. Sure – it’s functionally correct and meets the spec but it hasn’t got the correct feel and doesn’t sit comfortably in the application.

It’s this ‘soft’ side of a product which makes a huge difference and it’s the type of issue which causes custom software projects to fail. The supplier of the custom software can deliver something which meets the spec but, in reality doesn’t meet the real requirement or is unusable.

I was at a conference recently chatting to a consultant who, having seen PleaseReview, mentioned that his government client had just spent many $$$ on a customised workflow to review documents which was all but unusable. PleaseReview would have met the requirement at a fraction of the price! It’s probably too late but I’m sure everyone in the industry knows about cases like this and projects which have failed.
The third reason for the delay is the standard commercial/human issues encountered by every business every day. For example, we have had to make commercial decisions to divert people to work on other projects and patches which have been very important for individual clients.

It’s a difficult decision. There is a balance between putting pressure on people to deliver and having realistic release dates. If we announce one date to clients and have a separate internal date, everyone knows that people will simply ignore the artificial internal date. The old maxim that “work expands to fit the time available” is broadly applicable. Thus, if we don’t specify a tight release date, people won’t feel a sense of urgency and we will never get anything released. Of course, our release dates are only ever targets, and we make it clear to our clients that any forthcoming release date is only ever an aspiration and not a commitment.

The only time it is a commitment is when we enter into a contractual commitment to release certain functionality by a certain date. We try and avoid making such commitments simply because of the disruption it causes because we do everything it takes to meet the commitment and have never missed a release for a contractual commitment.

The good news is that we are expanding both the development and test capability in the business. Does this mean we will suddenly start meeting our aspirational release dates? No - we will continue to accept slipped release dates to ensure product quality.

Moving onto other stuff in the company. Marketing and lead generation is also exercising our brains. In the past I’ve explained that we have historically proactively marketed to the life sciences market and reactively marketed (via Google Adwords, etc) to other markets. Recently we have been experimenting with how to proactively market to other sectors in which we have been successful. We have had some big wins outside life sciences and so the questions is ‘how do we replicate those?’. Whilst considering this we’ve had an interesting quarter on the marketing front.

The first interesting item was attending the massive LegalTech conference in New York in early February. New York was very, very cold. Minus 10 deg C which, with wind chill, was down to minus 18 deg C. I attended with Clare Beazley, PleaseTech’s CFO, who immediately showed her navigational skills by marching us out of the hotel in the precisely wrong direction for central park! I’m not sure I’ve ever been colder. I had to pop into a shop and buy a hat to survive!

The legal market is a market many people have assumed that we would be very successful in. But I have always had my doubts – mainly from past experience of selling into the legal market and understanding how conservative it is. Anyway, LegalTech was both brilliant and disappointing at the same time. We more-or-less sold a system from the booth. The conference ended on the Thursday, the PO arrived the following Monday and the system was installed on the Tuesday. Brilliant! However, that was it. No other really interesting leads and the other half leads have all come to nought. So the jury is still out (so to speak).

The second factor is the apparently diminishing returns we are getting from attending the various life sciences shows. In Q1 we attended the DIA EDM conference (held for the 1st time in National Harbour – a BIG mistake) and the RAPS Horizons event. The DIA conference was just about fine and we met existing clients and existing prospective clients but didn’t really get any new opportunities. The RAPS Horizons event (normally held on the West Coast and which we attended for the 1st time) simply didn’t work for us. So, at the end of Q1, I was re-evaluating how we generate new opportunities.

I’m glad to say that we pulled back a bit and have had a couple of successful shows in April and May. ShareFest (a new SharePoint conference organized by Next Docs) was excellent and the recent Open Text Content Day in the UK also provided some exciting opportunities. But, in keeping with our strategy to proactively market in other markets, we tried the AiiM Info360 conference in Philadelphia and that has been chalked up on the ‘do not repeat under any circumstances’ list.

On a personal note I’m delighted to say that I was trapped at home by the volcanic ash cloud and the associated flight disruption. This meant I couldn’t make it to the AiiM conference personally. However, our US based staff Janice & Betty did a great job. So it was a win all round.

One of the ‘slightly’ disappointing aspects of AiiM show was that we had arranged a on-booth ‘document review practices’ survey. It seemed like an ideal opportunity to survey the broad range of people representing the many industries who we were assured would be attending AiiM. The idea was that, for every survey completed, we would be donating $5 to the American Red Cross. The target was to raise $1,000 (200 replies) for the charity. This would raise money for a worthy cause and give us a statistically meaningful result. Despite pre-show publicity and the booth team pushing the survey, less than 20 people could find the 5 minutes time required to complete the survey. I’m told that the view was ‘if it isn’t a draw for an iPad, I can’t be bothered’. A sad reflection of the times in which we live and another great reason never, ever to have an on-booth drawing as the quality of the card drops must be highly suspect.

Finally, the other marketing issue exercising our brains has been the cost of Google Adwords which seems to have gone through the roof.

In mid April Google reported a 38% rise in first quarter profits when compared with the same period in 2009! Net profits of a mere $1.96 billion!

I think I understand why. The cost of Google Adwords is going up and up. I suspect that this is not Google’s fault – they are simply the beneficiaries of people competing in the market. I have previously written in this blog (a few years back) what a wonderful thing Adwords is. The bidding on key words model which Google provides can provide great value for money if you are bidding on little known or niche words. However, the opposite effect is true. If you are bidding on anything vaguely popular and/or fashionable the bidding gets crazy.

We got to the point where the cost of Adwords had increased five fold over a year and would have been more but for the fact we had put a budget cap on the account. All this and no appreciable increase in the leads generated.

This additional cost was mainly due to the need to increase our bids on key words to obtain a 1st page listing. So we have had to go back and review the Adwords campaign and examine it in detail to try and work out what is working and what isn’t.

So, it’s fair to say that there are marketing challenges. The discussion of the marketing strategy is an ongoing one and we are increasingly concentrating on the way forward.

Finally, onto a personal note. On July 4th my wife and I will be off to do a charity climb of Kilimanjaro as part of a seven person team. Kilimanjaro is the largest highest free-standing mountain in the World with Uhuru Peak being 5,895 metres (19,341 feet) - this is 515 metres (1,640ft) higher than Everest Base Camp. We are raising money for my local church and other charities. I'd appreciate any donation. Read about it (and feel free to support me) here.

Growth in the ‘recession’ year – good result!

2010-01-11T10:11:00.003Z

In Q4 2008 we ‘battened down the hatches’ anticipating a tough 2009. As it happens, we not only survived 2009 but, indeed prospered! No-one is pretending it wasn’t hard work – it was. I think the whole team was exhausted by Christmas. I certainly was and writing a blog was about the last thing on my mind.

So, as the dust settles on 2009, we can reflect on a ‘moderately successful’ year for PleaseTech. We released and ‘bedded down’ PleaseReview v4.0, succeeded in growing our revenue and recruiting more excellent people to join the team!

2009 was always going to be the year of v4 – the culmination of a major development project. I had always considered that, strategically, it was more important to the company to get v4 released and ‘right’ than grow the business in terms of revenue. Given the environment, the strategy was to survive financially but deliver a great product. This way we would be in a strong position at the start of 2010 and, hopefully, the loosening of corporate purse strings.

However, not only did we deliver technically, in the end we did more than survive financially. We were able to grow the business and increase our revenue by about 17%. This included 26 new corporate clients. Not a bad result.

We now have around 60 corporate clients, 75% of which are from the life sciences market. Approximately 80% of our revenue is derived from the USA. Globally, our revenue is split more-or-less 50/50 between the life sciences market and all other markets.

Examining the 2009 revenue profile and comparing it with the revenue over the past couple of years is an interesting exercise. As the business grows and matures the relative percentage of new business (on the total revenue) is falling. This is because the cumulative support revenues and existing clients undertaking further purchases increase as a percentage of the overall revenue. This is to be expected. Our new business percentage of overall revenue was 45% in 2009 compared with 70% in 2008 – a much healthier balance.

The good news is that in Q4 last year we had several clients and prospective clients enquiring about budgetary estimates for the inclusion of PleaseReview in their 2010 budgets. This says two things to me: (i) corporates are expecting to have budgets in 2010, and (ii) PleaseReview is part of those budgets. All good news.

As previously mentioned, from a technology perspective v4 is bedded down and working well. We are in the process of developing PleaseReview v4.1 which we are aiming to deliver towards the end of this quarter.

One of the never ending sources of wonder to me (you would have thought I’d have learned by now) is the amount of effort involved in the ancillary aspects of a major release. So we are only just finishing off the v4 training movies and still fighting some of the integrations. The delays are due to limited resources, illness, technical ‘challenges’ and the ongoing need to provide support. The good news is that the enhancements planned for v4.1 will have little impact on the integrations so the impact of v4.1 should be negligible – famous last words!

2010 will see the increasing focus on marketing to multiple industries. As an experiment, we are attending the massive LegalTech conference in New York. Everyone tells us that PleaseReview has great applicability to law yet we currently only have one law firm as a client. So it will be interesting to see the reaction at LegalTech.

So, in addition to the ‘standard’ life sciences conferences we are actively seeking other conferences outside life sciences at which we can exhibit.

One of the challenges (and opportunities) we perceive in 2010 will be the introduction of SharePoint 2010. There is no doubt in my mind that 2010 will be the year of SharePoint and SharePoint will be a disruptive influence on the market in which we operate.

There is already a significant amount of confusion over SharePoint’s capabilities and the introduction of 2010 will simply make it worse. I have no doubt that SharePoint 2010 will be a significant upgrade and will provide benefit to many. However, there is many a misunderstanding of SharePoint’s current and future capabilities – not least in its capability with respect to document collaboration.

PleaseReview is integrated with SharePoint and enhances its collaboration capabilities, thereby driving its adoption. However, getting that message heard through the ‘noise’ which will be generated is going to be a challenge. This is not helped by the people from Microsoft themselves not necessarily understanding the capabilities of SharePoint. At a conference last year a Microsoft employee (who had just delivered a presentation) came by the booth, looked at the literature and said “SharePoint will do all this”. I beg to differ. It won’t.

Microsoft’s own marketing material says “SharePoint 2010 facilitates business collaboration in its broadest sense and helps colleagues, partners, and customers to work together in new and effective ways.” The devil is, of course, in the detail. The simple fact is that even SharePoint 2010 has only very basic document co-authoring and collaborative review capabilities which simply will not meet the requirements of a great majority of users.

So that is our marketing challenge – convincing the world that SharePoint collaboration needs PleaseReview to be truly useful.

Moving on, briefly, to the endless investment debate. The following article in ‘The Chilli’ caught my eye. It is titled “VC contribution and role vastly exaggerated”. Specifically it notes that “Only one in five of the fastest growing and most successful companies in the United States had venture investors” and that “Less than one percent of new businesses rely on VC source”. The articles goes onto to explain that the dotcom era expanded the VC industry which must now shrink substantially. Interesting stuff and it certainly struck a cord with me!

So, as we move into 2010, we need to re-focus on revenue growth knowing that we have a great product to support us. I’ll try and keep you posted.

PleaseReview 4.0 released only 9 days late – a fantastic performance

2009-08-27T16:33:00.003+01:00

Well we did it! PleaseReview v4 was released only 9 days late on 9th July. V4 is the commutation of an 8 month project which has delivered, in my opinion, the most technically sophisticated document collaboration solution in the world. The collaborative authoring (aka co-authoring) functionality is light years ahead of the market and, to cement our British reputation as the masters of understatement, it is ‘decidedly non-trivial’ technically.

Releasing a major version of a software product is a massive undertaking. There is the development, the testing, the documentation, the review of said documentation for technical accuracy and typos (using PleaseReview, of course), the help files, the upgrade notes, the releases notes, the upgrade movies, etc. It’s been a huge team effort. Our website and the promotion is lagging behind and that is the next thing to fix.

Many software companies announce and brag about the functionality of their forthcoming releases months before the release actually hits the street. We tend to do it the other way around. I prefer to sell what is released and deliverable and refer to forthcoming functionality only when relevant. Obviously, as the release date is imminent, so the messaging around it increases. The problem really becomes when you have a solid beta. What do you demo? The existing software or the ‘shinny new’ software with more functionality which you know the client can’t have for at least 3 months while the testing, bug fixing and documentation is completed?

The new collaborative authoring functionality is a considerable achievement but brings with it its own set of new challenges. We have to now start an education program to explain to the market what is possible. In the same way, in the early days of PleaseReview, we had to explain the paradigm shift in how to set about reviewing documents in PleaseReview (and, in fact, still are having to explain it in many cases), we now have to explain the possibilities which EditZones and co-authoring bring to the preparation of Word documents with multiple contributors.

We also have to work out how to get across the technology and possibilities it delivers in a standard 1 hour pitch. Whilst some prospective clients seem happy to have a 1.5 hour slot, 1 hour is still the norm. Clearly it should be possible to get the key benefits and possibilities across in 1 hour and get people excited. But having had 4 years to perfect the PleaseReview demo without co-authoring, we now have to adjust to a new approach.

So why, you ask, am I so late with my blog? Well, immediately after PleaseReview v4 was released I flew to New Orleans for the Microsoft World Partner conference where we had a booth. I then flew from New Orleans (via Atlanta and London) to Malaysia to catch-up with my family for a vacation. This knocked July on the head. Then, with other people on vacation, the workload in August hasn’t been light and it just seems to have vanished somewhere. So here we are towards the end of August still writing Q2’s blog entry.

As I write we are apparently starting to see some of the major European economies emerge from recession (allegedly). The USA or Britain is not among them, but the news in respect of IT spending continues to be pessimistic.

Forrester is now saying that global IT spending for hardware, software, and services by companies and governments will drop by 10.6 percent this year. Their 2008 prediction suggested that, while it would be bad, it would not be as bad as the drop in the early 2000s, when IT spending fell 6 per cent in both 2001 & 2002. This puts the prediction of the 10.6% fall well and truly into perspective.

Despite this, from a sales perspective we are not having a bad year at all (please see above reference to the British being masters of understatement). We have doubled in revenue for the last two years and this year, to the end of Q2, is running at 55% ahead of last year. So, while undoubtedly we have lost some deals to budgetary issues and we know that some clients have purchased fewer users than they would have liked, we are still making progress. In fact this year so far has been typified by more, smaller deals. As the saying goes “we aren’t proud. We will take it anyway it comes”.

From a marketing perspective, we have attended Bio-IT World in Boston, Better Software in Las Vegas and the DIA annual conference in San Diego. The overwhelming impression is how much smaller the conferences are this year. Around 30% down seems to be the standard. Companies are cutting back and conferences are certainly taking their share of the pain. The DIA annual conference is always worth doing but we won’t be back to Bio-IT World (nothing to do with the conference itself - simply not our target audience) and Better Software remains marginal. We are not in a rush to sign-up again and will see what next year brings.

While I’m happy with the marketing strategy in Life Sciences (which accounts for about 65% of our client base), we are still struggling to work out how to address the large opportunity outside this sector. We know that there is major opportunity outside our main market (our two largest clients are outside Life Sciences), so it’s a question of how to approach it consistently so we can get the message across. We are not without ideas on this topic and continue to try new approaches and monitor the results.

One new project, the results of which were placed on the website in early August (so it’s cheating to mounting it in the Q2 blog but I will anyway) is the ‘cartoon’ project. We took a page of the website which had a lot of verbiage (relating to current review practices) and converted it into cartoon strips. The idea is that people are much more likely to read the cartoons (which get the message across in a humorous way) than a long page of tedious text. You can see the result here: http://www.pleasetech.com/business_process.htm.

So far the feedback has been very positive and we will continue to experiment with this approach.

From a business perspective, the £/$ ratio continues to do its level best to confound every prediction but seems to have stabilized at around $1.65 to the £. We can live with that. What we don’t want is a return to the $2.00 to the £ which really hurts. However, there is nothing we can do to influence it and so simply have to work with whatever the market throws at us.

The key challenge for the business is whether now is the time to start investing in additional people. Having placed all recruitment on hold in Q4 last year in anticipation of a downturn, we find ourselves doing ‘OK’ this year. Thus there is an opportunity to start considering whether it’s time to add staff. If we do, the question is ‘in which area’? There is an argument for more people in all areas of the business. It is difficult balancing act. We will be looking closely at the figures over the next couple of months and making decisions. Any investment in more people will be cautious - and I suspect we will be considering those willing to work part time.

So, as we emerge from the ‘silly season’ of summer into the busiest time of the year we await to see what will happen over the next 4 months.

2009 – So far so good!

2009-04-23T14:37:00.002+01:00

Q1 2009 is done and dusted. Despite the misgivings and the general economic environment we had a good Q1, posting an increase in sales over Q1 ’08 of just over 50%. As we account in GBP the weaker pound helped (we get more pounds for the same amount of dollars) but the story of the quarter is basically one of continued growth.

In terms of marketing and conferences we had a busy February attending the DIA EDM conference (which as always is a very good conference for us) and the Qumas User Conference – always a lot of fun! So in many ways it's just more of the same. Whilst the conferences do generate new leads for us we are also benefiting from having been in the market for so long – PleaseReview was launched in January 2005. We have started getting opportunities from existing users moving companies and introducing PleaseReview to their new companies. This is wonderful as they come with their own in-built references.

We are continually examining our marketing mix for efficiency and, for example we have adjusted our Google Adword mix as we found that certain generic key words were costing a considerable amount of cash (ie generating lots of clicks) but not generating any ‘stickiness’ on the website. We are also experimenting with other on-line advertising. Dilbert.com is a site that almost all of us view for our morning ‘fix’ and therefore it seemed sensible :~)

On the product front, are busy working on version 4 and, theoretically, we went code complete on 31st March. What we actually mean by that is we went code complete for the major ‘high risk’ stuff and are continuing development of peripheral enhancements whilst the main testing is started. Obviously at this stage there is a certain amount of bug fixing ongoing but, we are sufficiently advanced that, we can be confident of releasing v4 at the end of June as planned. What will be released is still open to debate as the scope of the peripheral enhancements we are able to include is wide open and will depend on the level of bug fixing required. There is a fine balance between enhancements, testing and documentation to ensure that we maximise our development team’s time whilst delivering full tested and documented software to the quality our clients expect.

One of the key aspects of v4 is a re-worked look & feel. We wanted to maintain the pedigree whilst at the same time addressing some of the user interface issues and the slightly dated look we were beginning to acquire. We did consider briefly commissioning UI consultants but soon discounted that idea for an internal led approach. One of the reasons I wasn’t keen on the consultant led approach wasn’t so much the cash (although conserving cash is always a good thing) but the fact that when I was invited to participate in the Beta trial of a software product last year, the user interface was, in my opinion, over complex and not at all intuitive. UI design is definitely an art form. Not only is some of it a matter for personal preference but it's amazing how little effects can make big differences. What is also amazing and somewhat frustrating is how much time UI design can suck out of the team.

One of the books all those involved in UI input have read is Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug. The title says it all really and that has been our aim. There is no ‘right’ way to do something. The key is simplicity and consistency. It will be interesting to get the feedback when we let the new UI loose on our users.

This quarter, I’ve picked up on a couple of interesting articles related to IT start-ups and company building.

The first article is “The Web Startup Surgeons” by Micah Elliott. This was picked up by a member of the team and circulated for comment. I think we are all agreed that the thinking behind the article is correct – there are a lot of hats which need to be filled. However, we (I and the team here) don’t really agree with the combinations Micah put forward and could spot an obvious gap. Admittedly, it does depend on where a company is in the cycle but as soon as it starts generating revenue, a financial person is mandatory. Someone needs to look after the cash, issue invoices, and generally chase clients for payment – not all clients pay on time! Some even lose invoices! Shock horror!

Also, I think lumping marketing together with customer support is less than ideal. The primary purpose of a commercial business must be to get and keep customers. The term ‘customer support’ implies the existence of customers. So how do you get them? You do not simply publish a ‘better mousetrap’. Sales and marketing is a critical part of the business. The bottom line is that multiple hats must be worn but the key is to have a good team of people whose combined strengths not only form a winning team but also address the critical three elements of any business, namely Sales and marketing, building and delivering the product, and the finances.

This brings me onto the next article which is entitled “Words of advice for hard times”.

The subject of the article is Ben Goss is the co-founder and chief executive of Distribution Technology, which is apparently "a fast-growing developer of financial advice software for financial institutions" and his second start-up. The interesting bit is at the bottom of the article with the subtitle “A veteran reveals his do's and don'ts for software entrepreneurs”. The dos and don’t are:

*Do your research. Understand the market and understand your customer's needs. Know how you are going to make some money.

*Do try to fund as much as you can yourself - particularly at this time. Go as far as you can on your own means, but if you think you are going to need capital, get it before you really need it - you will receive a much better price.

*Do locate where you can benefit from talent and facilities - clustering is very important.

*Don't be tempted to make money any which way - avoid being distracted by revenue opportunities that take you off course.

*Don't hire just anybody. It is a big temptation when you need people, but do not lower the bar on recruitment. If you are serious about expanding a business, you must seek out the right talent.

I have to agree whole heartedly with 4 of his 5 points. The only one I’d change is the location point which I’d adjust to place the emphasis on locating somewhere you can benefit from your connections. For example, we are based in the South West of the UK and everyone in the UK office has worked together or for the same company at some stage in the past. We are all either ex-colleagues or connections of ex-colleagues. When we set-up the Malaysian office we were able to benefit from my connections in Malaysia to source legal advice and premises. Once we had our team leader we were able to benefit from his connections to recruit.

However, the key bit of advice Ben gives is his last point. It is fundamental - don’t hire just anybody! At CDC (my previous start up) we went through a period of rapid expansion and there was considerable pressure to get ‘bums on seats’. This led to hiring mistakes and, as I have mentioned in earlier posts, they cost time, money and emotional stress. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Better not to hire than have a weak link.

So as we move into Q2 I’m pleased to say that sales are continuing at a steady pace and there is great interest in version 4. It going to be an exciting quarter.

What does 2009 hold for us?

2009-01-05T15:13:00.003Z

Well, as I read November’s blog posting I struggle to know what to add! The financial news remains all doom and gloom and the predictions are that the recession will be long and deep. Yet our position remains the same.

We had a very good 2008 with revenue almost exactly doubling year on year. We had worked hard to keep overheads down which means profitability was good. So we enter 2009 with a good recurring revenue stream, a decent cash balance and a good prospect list. Another key aspect is a complete lack of debt. This is extremely important in the ‘credit crunch’. It seems that a lot of perfectly viable companies may go to the wall simply because they can not get credit to ease cash flow.

So, our financial position is good, the hatches are battened firmly down and we will be keeping a very tight control of our overheads.

The last couple of months of 2008 held few surprises. We exhibited at the DIA eCTD conference in San Diego and then at the Open Text user conference in Orlando. Both shows were good for us and produced new opportunities.

Just before the eCTD conference we experimented with a ‘breakfast seminar’ at a local hotel. The idea was that we would attract local San Diego biotech companies to come along and learn about PleaseReview. It was always going to be something of an experiment. Whilst, pre-internet days, the breakfast seminar approach was, in general, a very successful activity, I wasn’t sure how it would pan out in 2008. The answer was, as a means of meeting prospects, ‘not brilliantly’. As a means of connecting with existing clients, ‘very well’!

It could of course be the way we marketed it but, whatever the reason, we ended up with approximately 50% of our target number of attendees and had more clients than prospects in the room. Thus it turned into more of a mini user conference than anything else.

So, the lesson I take away is that as a means of interfacing with prospects the seminar idea needs more work. As a means of meeting and gaining customer feedback, it appears to work well.

From a product perspective, we released v3.6 as anticipated and started work on v4.0. At the time of writing, the main area of v4.0 functionality, namely the greatly enhanced collaborative authoring functionality, is looking good. It will be on the internal test server by the end of the week. I’m looking forward to playing with it.

The feedback from the v4.0 webinars was overwhelmingly positive and I have no doubt that if we deliver what we have said we will deliver, we will continue to prosper.

Keeping half an eye on the venture capital scene (as we are prone to do) shows that it's just as well VC funding is not in our plans. This article in the Financial Times suggests that all is not well in VC land. No surprises there I guess as all is not well in many places – especially those to do with finance.

So we sail into 2009 with the prediction that it going to be tough for the sale of computers, software and outsourcing services. Tell me something I don't know.

There is little point in repeating the November 2008 blog posting which includes a still valid analysis of my thoughts on what will happen in 2009 so our plan remains simple. We will keep our heads down, we will continue to work hard, make great software which people want to buy and be very well positioned for the eventual upturn.

Another very good year – but what happens next?

2008-11-06T12:22:00.002Z

Only a month late in posting what I aim to be the quarterly blog! And what a few weeks it has been – we appear to have been watching the western world’s financial system implode. This, of course, has had an impact on business and makes planning for next year very difficult – if not simply impossible.

I echo the sentiments of John Chambers, CEO of Cisco who is quoted in the Financial Times as remarking it was “difficult to provide a forecast given the dramatic variability”.

What makes it more bizarre from our perspective is that we are in the process of having a very, very good year and had been planning a modest expansion for next year. We will have more than doubled our revenue (again – 2nd year running) and were in the process of recruiting when it became blindingly obvious that caution was advisable and cash would be king. So, with expansion plans on hold we prepare to close out this year and wonder what will happen next year.

However, before we look ahead lets look back. Personally it been a frantic summer with a long family holiday in Africa followed by a short one in Spain (yes, we Europeans like our vacations) which gave way to the ‘standard’ September through to Thanksgiving rush. This period is ‘conference season’ and, for me, that means travel.

In the nine weeks of September and October I have been on five trips including one to Malaysia and three to the USA. Basically I have been on the road every other week and have the same schedule to Thanksgiving – another two trips to the USA in November and then, in early December one trip to Barcelona for the DIA EDM conference - then I’m done. Phew. I’m finalising this text at the departure gate in Terminal 5 at Heathrow. Next blog I promise to rant about Terminal 5 – but that is another story.

The three US trips have been for exhibiting and speaking at conferences, namely: RAPS in Boston, the Master Control user conference in Salt Lake City, the EMC CMA in Philadelphia and AMWA in Louisville. On the whole these have been positive experiences and will result in business. We have yet to come the DIA eCTD conference in San Diego, the Open Text user conference in Orlando and the DIA EDM conference in Barcelona.

Attending the conferences is not only good for business, its ‘mandatory’ if you want to be in the loop and find out what is happening to whom and how – ie good old fashioned gossip. It useful to know who is winning, who isn’t and the general word on the street. Its also a great opportunity to put faces to names and we love having existing clients and users (most of whom we have never met) drop by the booth to say ‘hi’.

So to those who take the time to drop by - thank you for taking the time to tell us how much you enjoy working with PleaseReview or, in the very small minority of cases, where you have an issue, thank you for giving us the opportunity to discuss it and put it right.

So this time of year is a long slog on and off planes with a fleeting visit home every other week. However, motivation is easy if things are going well and life is good at the moment. Revenue is high, confidence is high and we working on the much anticipated but much delayed v4 of PleaseReview.

A little bit of competition for PleaseReview is beginning to emerge – mainly based around SharePoint which has too many disadvantages to mention here – but competition is healthy. We feel very well positioned. We have well proven market leading technology, an established mature user base, an established mature product and no shortage of new ideas going forward.

In terms of product management, we are on the point of releasing PleaseReview v3.6. This release will tidy up and finalise some issues left over from v3.5 and includes a major slug of new functionality which permits even tighter integration with 3rd party systems. This functionality has been built for a specific client but, as with everything we do, is fundamentally generic and available as part of the standard product. There will be a v3.7 release before Christmas to cover a release of the SharePoint integration but, from a PleaseReview perspective, it will be functionally identical to v3.6.

We have announced a series of confidential client and prospect briefings to ensure that everyone is well prepared for v4.0 when it hits the streets in Q2 2009. Once again I think we will be taking the lead in the whole area of document authoring collaboration and will be setting the pace.

When we formally released PleaseReview v1.0 back in January 2005 (it was in beta in 2004) I reckoned we had an 18 months lead on the market. I was wrong. It was more like 3½ years and I see no sign of this lead diminishing – famous last words!

There is, of course, the thought at the back of our minds that, with the lead we have, we should raise a load of venture capital and throw a significant amount of marketing resource at consolidating our lead. This is a refrain I keep returning to for the simple reason it’s a subject we need to keep re-evaluating. Regardless of whether ‘now is the time’ in terms of the business cycle, it’s a philosophical debate. Both Clare Beazley (our CFO) & I have been through the VC route previously and know what to expect. On the few occasions that we have spoken with VCs we do get the feeling that they would like it if we were ‘less experienced’. I think it’s an attitude issue. VCs like to think they are bringing something to the table other than cash, but generally they aren’t. So, if we wished to do anything, it’s a question of finding someone who is comfortable with our view which is quite simply ‘we know what we are doing – you are simply the cash source – so divvy up and let us get on with it’. Someone recently pointed me at the sorry tale of ArsDigita by Philip Greenspun as to what can (and regularly does) go wrong with the input of venture capitalists.

So currently we are happy and not planning any external investors. We are cash rich (yes, its been a good year) and have a significant percentage of next years’ overheads covered by recurring revenue. Thus, even if we lose some of these revenues, we enter the uncertainty of next year with the hatches battened down expecting to survive and even thrive in the storm.

So that leads us to ‘what happens next year’. Great question! I don’t think anyone knows. We obviously are very dependent on the USA market and, I guess, that will depend on what happens economically over the next 12 months. I return the Mr Chambers’ comments: “it is difficult to provide a forecast given the dramatic variability”.

We know that we are in the budgets of several companies for next year so we assume and hope that they will get to spend their budgets. Time will tell.

The Life Sciences business is generally long term and considered, by some, relatively recession proof. However, now, about 50% of our revenue comes from outside life sciences and we suspect that these markets will suffer. As a counter to that the £/$ has been moving our way of late making every $ of revenue worth more in £. However the fall in the value of the £ means that the cost of the Malaysian operation has risen. As our $ revenue is higher than our Malaysian Ringit expenses, ultimately, a weak £ suits us well. Oh, and by the way, please do not expect our US$ prices to fall next year as a result. We price the software in US$ and then convert to other currencies. Also, over the last couple of years, we have taken the pain (the £ was at $2.10 at one point) so we look forward to the gain.

So, our plan is simple. We will keep our heads down, we will continue to work hard, make great great software which people want to buy and be very well positioned for the upturn.

Steady as she goes …..

2008-07-17T16:56:00.003+01:00

Q2 – done! And, the good news is, done successfully! Sales growth year-on-year is currently running at about 10%. This may initially seem disappointing but there is plenty of upside and we have several really excellent prospects. With a few projects cancelled for budgetary reasons (see my last post) we are benefiting from the strength and depth of the prospect list.

However, we are not satisfied with 10% year-on-year growth and expect the growth over the whole year to be much higher. The reality is that, despite what people would have you believe, sales do not come in with a perfect linear progression showing the ‘ideal’ quarter on quarter growth. Sales are more like buses. Just when you are wondering whether any will turn up several all come along at once.

I believe that almost every deal has its own symmetry and will come in ‘when it’s ready’. I almost never try and ‘rush’ sales through an organisation. Once it’s in progress its in progress – it will pop out of the process eventually. Sometimes sooner than expected, sometimes later than expected.

We have a couple of orders ‘stuck in the pipeline’. The sale is ‘made’ in so far as the purchase process has been started by the client side. However, the order has got stuck/become lost/whatever in the purchasing/legal/IT/whatever department in the client company. But we have no control over the process and can do little but gently prod and wait it out.

In fact, one of the main benefits of being a private business with no investors is that we are not beholden to a Board of Directors and constantly having to justify ourselves. When you take venture capital investment you gain Board Directors and it from that point you can do no right. If you meet the targets the Board considers them to have been insufficiently ambitious and simply raises them. If you fail to meet the target because it was overly ambitious then you have failed – no excuses! It’s that simple.

Being beholden to no-one other than ourselves we can take a longer term view and ‘go with the flow’. There is no point in trying to ‘bring sales forward’ to meet some spurious end of quarter or end of year target. We can judge each sales situation on its own specific circumstances and make decision on that basis. I treat the end of quarter sales figures as an interesting historical report.

From the business perspective, cash flow is the one to watch. We simply need to be able to meet our commitments. As such, we closely monitor cash cover. In other words, if we sold nothing more, how long before the cash runs out? In fact, we monitor two forms of cash cover. One position is actual cash in the bank and the other cash in the bank and monies owed to us. As a conservatively run business we like to see 6 months cash cover at any given time. This gives you time to react to events if need be.

Talking of reacting to events, I recently read an interview in the Sunday Times with Nassim Nicholas Taleb the author of “THE BLACK SWAN, The Impact of the Highly Improbable” (read the interview here). This was my first introduction to Taleb’s thinking and it immediately struck a cord. His basic message is ‘expect the unexpected’. He claims to have correctly predicted the credit crunch by noting in his book published in May 2007 that, according to the above reference interview, “most economists, and almost all bankers, are subhuman and very, very dangerous. They live in a fantasy world in which the future can be controlled by sophisticated mathematical models and elaborate risk-management systems”. His point was, of course, that reality is not like that and stuff comes in from ‘left field’.

I believe the same about business and business planning. In my December 2007 posting I mention that one of my ‘certainties in life’ is “No plan survives the first encounter with the enemy”. This is the same philosophy – expect the unexpected.

This quarter ‘the enemy’ came in the form of the v3.5 release. It fought back. Despite being ‘code complete’ at the end of March, the release didn’t happen until mid-June. In order to achieve that we had to cut some of the functionality as we simply couldn’t get it to work reliably. We also have more published ‘known issues’ that we would like in the release code. However, life is like that. You have to draw a line in the sand, make tough decisions and get the release out. If you don’t it continues to suck resources and you simply don’t move forward.

Reliability is, of course, the reason why we test the software. We actually test it comprehensively. Many of our users are ‘power users’ with some very complicated Word documents. There is no point in putting out something that works with simple documents and falls over with something more advanced. It’s a simple equation. If we can’t get it working reliably on ‘complicated’ (aka horrible) documents then we will not release it. This is not purely altruistic! A quality product reduces support costs and provides a stable long term platform for growth.

So v3.5 was three months late. In our defence, Tim Robinson, our CTO, reckons the v3.5 release was probably the most complex development we have undertaken since the initial development of the product. I think we are all surprised and a little disappointed at the outcome.

The question is “if we had investors, would be have (i) released it earlier when we weren’t happy with the quality, or (ii) released it at the same time and taken the punishment from the Board”? Either way would have been painful.

Interesting – I hadn’t set out to discuss investors in this blog entry. In fact, I hadn’t set out with a plan at all. I just wrote. The investment or no investment debate must be playing on my mind :~).

So where does that leave us? Well obviously v4.0 is delayed or is reduced in scope – or both. In addition, it’s looking like we are going to have to have a v3.6 release for commercial reasons. One significant prospective client wants some specific enhancements and that will require a release in the October timeframe. However, I don’t want all the development effort averted to the v3.6 release and want to keep part of the development team focused on v4.0. No question, it’s going to be balancing act.

From a marketing perspective, we have been to three conferences since early April. The ACRP conference in Boston in late April was extremely disappointing. A good conference with lots of people – just no-one interested in what we had to offer - a simple case of the wrong conference. Never mind – it’s another one on the ‘we won’t do that conference again’ list.

We then attended The Better Software conference in early June in Las Vegas. This was our first pro-active foray into the non Life Sciences market. We have received considerable interest in PleaseReview from the software development community and, at one client’s behest, have added support for source code review into v3.5. So this was our chance to get out and be pro-active. It went well and we have already booked out place for next year!

The other conference we attended in June was the main DIA conference in Boston - an excellent conference. A great mix of clients, prospects and new leads and we were almost constantly busy. Another one we have already re-booked.

It was at this conference that it came home to us how, over the last year, the client base and especially the number of users has expanded considerably. For the 1st time we had users turning up at our booth and telling us how wonderful PleaseReview is and how it has transformed the way they work. It’s great news, not only because the best marketing is still ‘word of mouth’ but also because it validates our approach and what we are doing. It also makes us smile.

From a longer term perspective we have begun raising our ‘heads over the parapet’ and started talking with and presenting to the analysts. I suspect this will bring some interesting times and we have already had one or two venture capital companies wanting to chat. At this stage we are politely declining the opportunity to open a dialogue.

Finally, I can’t believe that I’ve written a couple of blog entries without mentioning our new office (opened in January) in the historic market town of Malmesbury. There is something quite reassuring about being at the forefront of information technology development in the shadow of an abbey which is about 900 years old. I think it gives a sense of perspective and provides a constant reminder that some things operate on a completely different time line. Which, I guess, takes us back to the fact that every deal has its own time line.

A good start to 2008

2008-04-04T15:39:00.006+01:00

Well Q1 ’08 has been and gone. It wasn’t a bad quarter for us. Revenue was well ahead of the same period last year despite the indications of belt tightening. To date, to the best of our knowledge, we’ve had three expected orders cancelled due to budget cuts. So that is basically three lots of 6-9 months sales effort gone up in smoke. But I guess that is business.

When I posted my last blog entry I was on my way back from the US for a brief visit home prior to heading out to the Annual Euro DIA conference. My last post recalled the fact that I was in two minds as to whether we should do it (see 30th March 2007 entry). Well I decided we should and we went. What a mistake!

On first glance the whole thing stacked up. There were about 3,250 registered delegates. Allowing 750 of those for vendor booths (~250 companies exhibited) gives about 2,500 ‘real people’. So why was the exhibit hall empty? The DIA appear to have done everything right. Refreshments were in the exhibit hall and delegates had to walk past the booths to get to the refreshments. But the booth traffic was simply non-existent. From talking with other vendors we were not the only ones suffering. I had one, yes, a single meaningful conversation (ie one which may ultimately move forward into an opportunity) over the full three days. So, it was a complete waste of money, time and just about everything. Another one on the ‘we won’t do that again list’.

This leaves the whole question of how we market in Europe up in the air. Clearly exhibiting at shows is not going to do it. I have a theory about this. It’s a cultural thing. Europeans simply don’t have the same attitude to the booths, conference vendors, etc as Americans. Certainly, there is the language barrier but it goes deeper than that. The British, as an example, find the whole concept of talking to someone who may be selling to them somewhat distasteful and scary. Their image of a sales person is not a professional who knows their stuff but is more associated with the “2nd hard car salesman” or “double-glazing” salesman approach.

So that is it. I’m finally cured. No more European shows except the annual European DIA EDM conference. Even that is marginal but at least it’s relevant!

Back to European marketing …..

Speaking with several contacts there is a commonly held belief that ‘you can’t do Europe from a single country’. You need ‘feet on the street’ and, presumably, language skills, in each country. This is, of course, expensive and requires significant investment. It’s certainly nothing we can afford at present.

Then there is the re-seller/partner approach. That is attractive but we are a niche product and therefore will probably be difficult to find good re-sellers. However, it is certainly an avenue we need to explore.

There is, of course, the argument which says ‘ignore Europe’. Lots of Europeans visit the US conferences and shows. In fact, some would argue that those Europeans genuinely interested in innovative solutions and looking to solve specific business issues seek the answers in the USA rather than Europe. We have certainly seen some evidence of this and I believe that it is a partially valid argument.

So, we are currently thinking about it. You will see us continuing to concentrate on marketing in the USA and maybe try to add some firepower in the UK – our backyard. How we address the UK is yet to be determined!

There have been a couple of interesting articles about start-up and growth companies in the press recently.
This article in the FT “Founders take aim at a bigger target” (click here) discusses the fact that companies rarely make a success of the thing they first start out with and it’s the next phase product/service/offering which is successful. One example they give is PayPal starting life as a way of transmitting payments securely between Palm Pilots. Another, Flickr, the photo website, grew out of a multiplayer online game. The article goes on to discuss the novel approach of one entrepreneur/angel investor who is putting in place multiple two-man teams to develop ideas in parallel. The goal is to churn out as many promising ideas in as short a time as possible.

The concept that companies don’t make money on their initial offering is certainly true in my experience. CDC, my previous business, started out re-selling a US document management product and developed publishing technology to help itself compete and give itself an edge. It soon became apparent that our publishing technology was unique and much sought after. Therefore the obvious way forward was to port the publishing technology onto other DMS offerings. We caught the Documentum wave and ‘on a rising tide all boats go up’. We certainly did.

PleaseTech started out doing something different (XML publishing) and, through that, found itself in document review. Personally, I’m not convinced it is possible to get it ‘right first time’. However, you have to be out there demonstrating and listening - in the game, to put it another way. Demonstrating because people can’t visualise stuff from documents and listening because what they’ve seen acts as a catalyst for them to discuss what really is causing them pain. Pain = pain solution = revenue.

Another article of interest “Sequoia’s Gospel of Startups More True Than Ever” (click here) discusses the key drivers of success for any start-up looking for venture capital to drive growth. The first point, interestingly, is ‘clarity of purpose’. Not for them, presumably, the concept of a change in direction if the first idea doesn’t take off!

The article is broadly reasonable – although it does seem a little ‘motherhood and apple pie’ – and I agree with most of the points. However, there is no substitute for ‘being in the game’ and listening to feedback. I like to think that is how we are where we are. We were in the game, listened to prospective clients, and developed a solution. Yes, by-the-by we meet most of the points in the article: we now have a clear purpose, collaborative document review is a large market, it has potentially rich customers feeling pain for which we have created a novel solution which challenged conventional wisdom. We are a self-funded, organically grown company which certainly forces discipline and focus. Not having a large marketing budget, our limited marketing dollars have gone into securing clients and not raising our profile so we operate ‘below the radar’. The key point is that we didn’t set out to meet the check list – I think a successful company evolves into it.

So talking of success ……….

We are finally ‘code complete’ on our version 3.5. Obviously the code is not locked away as there are bugs to fix, etc. However the software is currently in the formal testing process. We have a revised target date for the end of the month to ship but I suspect that will slip if the testing turns up issues. This is our most technically demanding release yet and its hard stuff. But we are moving forward and Tim (our CTO) and I are flying out to Malaysia next week to discuss the next major release (v4.0) with the development team. So that is progress.

On a final note, I am of course able to fly out to Malaysia because I managed to avoid doing myself any serious damage whilst attempting to snowboard in February (see previous blog entry). It was shortly after I’d written my blog and mentioned one of the reasons for giving up learning to snowboard was the fact that I was concerned that I would do myself a serious injury, that my attention was drawn to an article at the Times Online website regarding the cheerful subject of “Ski Breaks – the X-ray stories.” (click here) There are some interesting facts and great pictures in the article, but the one which leapt out at me was the statement that “snowboarders trying the sport for the first time are almost three times as likely to injure themselves as anyone else out on the mountain.” It seems I have an instinct for self preservation!

Perhaps that is what CEOs need. The flexibility to change direction when required, the clarity of purpose to move forward (when not changing direction obviously) but, most importantly, a well developed sense of self preservation!

A slow start to the year – but its business as usual now

2008-03-10T09:02:00.002Z

Well I’m sitting in Miami International Airport as I type this on my way back home after the Qumas User Conference. I last visited Miami for the 1st ever Momentum (Documentum user conference) back in the mid 1990s. Back then there was a tropical storm. This time the temperature is a very pleasant mid 80s oF (~29 oC) and it’s only the end of February. I think I’ll avoid it in the summer!

The Qumas conference was, as always, a great deal of fun and I am suffering from a severe lack of sleep. The social side is just as important as the business side as it cements personal relationships which make for better business relationships. Well that’s my excuse for never knowingly ducking an opportunity to party and staggering into bed at 3:00am last night – it was 2:00am the night before! Luckily I have an 8 hour flight on which to sleep on my way home.

I’m then back in the UK for 2 days before heading off to Barcelona for the Annual Euro DIA conference. Readers of my blog will remember I was in two minds as to whether we should do it (see 30th March 2007 entry). Well I decided we should and we will go and take our chances. This comes back to my belief that we should be doing more in Europe whilst at the same time struggling to cope with the cost of doing business in Europe. This is one of my recurrent themes. I really don’t know the answer and this explains my vacillation.

With the US dollar losing value by the day (or so it seems) and the Euro gaining value, Euro income would be nice as all our costs are in UK pounds and Malaysian Ringit. However, it’s the USA where we are making most of our sales. This is why I was surprised to read in the FT that “American companies are falling behind in technology”. The article starts:

“There has been a lot of talk about technology companies facing a squeeze. But a more worrying international trend has emerged. US companies, once viewed as early adopters in corporate computing and the internet, are now falling behind global competitors in driving productivity and earnings growth because of technology shortfalls.”

There is a link to the article here but you may need to register to read it (I believe that registration is free): http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ee07c4c6-d980-11dc-bd4d-0000779fd2ac.html). This is certainly not my personal experience and it was only a last year the press were reporting that UK companies were 18% less productive than US companies due to the adoption of information technology. A brief Google search has found the following:

“In line with this hypothesis, Bloom, Sadun and Van Reenen (2007) find that US multinationals operating in the UK have much higher productivity than other multinationals in the UK and that this is explained by US companies’ better use of IT. Furthermore, they find that establishments that are taken over by US multinationals increase the productivity of their IT, whereas establishments taken over by non-US multinationals do not. They argue that these patterns are consistent with the idea that USfirms are organised in a way that allows them to use new technologies more efficiently than other UK firms and non-US multinationals.”

A link to the article: http://cep.lse.ac.uk/briefings/pa_uk_productivity.pdf
I remember thinking at the time that this would explain our success in the USA and the comparative lack of success in the UK – our ‘backyard’. Who is to know?

We have however, started to see some ‘tightening of the belts’ in the USA and its looking like a couple of income opportunities (one a roll-out and one new business) will at best be delayed. So I suspect it could turn into a tough year. The commentators are saying that the USA can not avoid recession which will affect the budgets and, thus, our revenue. So depressed US$ earnings with a depressed US$ ……………..

However, I’m a great believer in ‘whatever will be, will be’ and the year will be what it will be. We’ve done our sums, looked at the downside and concluded that we would have to have a disaster not to at least break even. The ultimate effect will be to suppress our growth and we are certainly playing our hand cautiously. So, enough navel gazing …...

The year seemed to start very slowly. Most of January was like a giant hang-over on 2007. We did have a rush of ‘fall over’ orders but personally I just couldn’t seem to get going. Reality hit early February with the DIA Electronic Document Management (EDM) conference held every year in the 1st week of February in Philadelphia. This is always a good show for us and it was again this year.

As previously discussed, our lead profile at shows has changed. It’s no longer all new business but a chance to meet with prospective clients, clients and partners and gain the odd lead along the way. The valuable thing about shows is the face-to-face time you get with people. This may be just simply picking up the latest industry news (aka gossip) or having people walk past who have heard of you and have some misconception on your product and what it does. You also are able to get a hands-on feeling for your own status. The good news is that we certainly appear to have entered the mindset of people and are definitely on the agenda. One can ask no more.

I got back from Philadelphia on the Friday morning and immediately flew out on a family vacation to Spain for a skiing at Bacqueria Beret. This is Spain’s best resort. It was a bit of a last minute compromise on our part but met the requirement. It’s a pleasant resort but was suffering a lack of snow and, frankly, not at all challenging. We hadn’t skied for almost two years and thought that it would take some time to get back on game. However, most of us had skied the mountain by the end of day 2 and everyone had skied everything a day or so later. It was at the end of day 2 that I made my big mistake! I allowed my eldest son to persuade me to try snow boarding. He had spent a week snow boarding in the USA a few years ago. So three of us (eldest & middle sons & I) swapped our skis for snowboards and arrange a morning of lessons. The plan was to spend the next three days on the snowboards and have, at least, come down the mountain by the end of the week.

I think the only word is ouch! Suffice it to say that I do not recommend one’s late forties as the ideal time to try and learn snow boarding. There was a point during the afternoon when I thought I’d cracked several ribs. By the end of the day I hurt everywhere, had a splitting headache from smacking my head hard on the piste during one of my many wipe outs and was not looking forward to the next day. Moreover, as I hadn’t even left the enclosed nursery slope, I suspected that I could do myself serious damage if I were ever to take the snowboard on the mountain itself! In fact, after a mid-afternoon pause to lick our wounds, number 2 son & I decided to beat a strategic retreat and return back to skis – with considerable relief all round.

I’ve been trying to think of the business lessons on this little episode. Several vaguely interesting thoughts cross my mind. Firstly, it’s interesting to be in a position when you are starting something entirely new. Kids face that experience all the time but as adults we rarely enter a state where we know absolutely nothing about the situation and have no experience to fall back upon. All I can say is that, whilst I made progress and was able to control the snow board, it was not a pleasant experience – perhaps you really can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Secondly, its clear to me that if it becomes obvious that a plan isn’t going to work or is causing disproportionate pain, it makes sense to kill it immediately rather than throw good money after bad. It was clear that I was never going to be able to safely get down the mountain on a snowboard by the end of the week, it would have made for a miserable remainder of holiday and there was a good chance I would do myself some serious damage in the attempt. Therefore the sensible thing to do was realise this, accept it and change the plan – even at considerable loss of face within the immediate family!! As they say, ‘the best decision is the correct decision, the next best decision is the wrong decision and worst is no decision at all’.

Moving on ……….

From a product perspective we are still struggling to put v3.5 ‘to bed’. It’s in preliminary testing but is a complex challenge and is fighting back. I have previously discussed the fact that, as software developers, we do not have control of our environment. We have control of our product but not the environment in which it is expected to operate and the associated dependencies. It’s like trying to hit a constantly moving target. At each stage you need to pause, access the impact and then make a decision as to whether to accommodate the change or leave it until next release. Ultimately you have to draw a line, test against it and release otherwise nothing would ever be released.

In this respect I’m a great fan of the concept of ‘defendability’. Basically, can I defend our position when faced with reasonable questioning from a knowledgeable person? So whenever we have to make assumptions, consider hard-coding something into the software and/or ignore a ‘latest’ development for the immediate future, the question we ask is ‘is it defendable’?

We have been fighting on multiple fronts on the development/testing/release side of things. The integrations we offer make for a complex environment with multi inter-dependencies. For example, we finally got our Open Text Livelink v9.5 sp1 integration released. From a user perspective the Livelink 9.7 and 9.5 integrations look identical but they are fundamentally different ‘underneath the hood’. This is one of the problems in making estimates. It was reasonable to assume that, in back porting PleaseReview from Livelink 9.7 to Livelink 9.5, the code changes would be minor – not so! But as I have previously pointed out – if it was easy everyone would do it!

So the plan is to pin down PleaseReview v3.5 get it tested and released and then start work on a bigger 4.0 release. There are several integrations running in parallel. However, in theory, v3.5 will not affect the apis and be able to slot directly into the integrations with no further changes. I’ll let you know how it goes.

The good news is that, once v3.5 is release I’ll be relatively relaxed as, finally, I’ll be happy with the product. It will be where I would have liked it to be back in 2005 when we first released it.

Reflections on 2007 and looking forward to 2008

2007-12-27T11:12:00.000Z

Well it’s the morning of the 24th December 2007 as I type this. The Clement Clarke Moore poem “Twas the Night before Christmas” springs to mind. Not much is stirring. A half hearted amount of spam ‘graces’ the email and very little else. With some music playing gently in the background, it’s a time to reflect on 2007 and look forward to 2008.

PleaseTech has had a ‘cracking’ year. I do, of course, mean cracking in the sense of very good. WordNet tells me that the adjective ‘cracking’ is also ‘bang-up’, ‘bully’, ‘corking’, ‘dandy’, ‘great’, ‘groovy’, ‘keen’, ‘neat’, ‘nifty’, ‘not bad’, ‘peachy’, ‘slap-up’, ‘swell’, ‘smashing’ all of which mean ‘very good’. I’m not sure I’d claim that we had a neat or nifty year. To my mind those adjectives both imply some degree of tidiness which I'm not sure we can claim. I think I can say with certainty that it wasn’t a particularly groovy, swell or dandy year. I’m not sure what those adjectives imply but saying we had a groovy year would impart all sorts of messages I’d rather avoid.

Of course, if I was communicating solely to a British audience I’d run with ‘not bad’. Although I can’t immediately find a reference to it on Google, I’ve always understood that ‘not bad’ is the highest form of compliment one Englishman can give another without embarrassing the recipient. Other classics of British understatement are “I say old man, well done” and “The boy done good”. Not for us the exuberant adjectives of ‘awesome’, ‘fantastic’, spectacular’ and so on. George Bernard Shaw made a very pertinent observation when he noted that "England and America are two countries separated by a common language”.

Anyway enough rambling – lets have a brief catch-up and then look forward to 2008.

When I last blogged I was in the middle of a mad trip around the USA and Canada in late October. In fact, I was on my way to the DIA Canada conference in Ottawa. Well I think I can safely say that we won’t be going back to that one again. It was a complete waste of time from our perspective.

Of course, the good news is that since John Wanaker (1838-1922) uttered his now famous line “Half my advertising is wasted, I just don't know which half", things have moved on. We can track the performance of our Google adwords and we can tell not only which pages an individual visited on our website but also how long they spent reading them. However, with shows it’s not an exact science and sometimes you just have to take a punt and attend. So that’s one more on our ‘lets not do that again’ list.

In November, I was at the DIA’s eCTD conference in San Diego, then at the Gilbane conference in Boston followed swiftly but the DIA EDM conference in Prague. That completed an eight conference marathon in twelve weeks. It involved twenty flights including ten transatlantic flights!

Shortly after returning from Prague I had rashly agreed to give a presentation on “Establishing an Entrepreneurial Culture” to the management team of a large insurance company. The off-site location of the meeting would normally be a swift one and a half hour journey. As luck would have it I was listening to the radio which reported an accident on the Motorway so I set off across country. Arriving ½ hour late (but 40 minutes prior to my scheduled presentation time of 9:45am), I was greeted, mic’d up and, almost before I could utter a word, was led into the morning kick-off session just in time to be asked to give the person to my left a shoulder massage!

Yes it was a corporate “lets get the morning off to an active start” session. This involved shoulder massages (giving and receiving) and a Boomwacker symphony (which was actually quite fun) all led by a guy who was far too hyped up for that time of the morning. As I commented during my presentation which followed: “It never fails to amaze me how many ways there are to make a living in the world. Who would have thought that there was a market for someone to get top insurance industry executives playing music with what essentially are highly coloured plastic tubes at 9:00am on a Thursday morning. I’d love to have seen the business plan and, more importantly the look on his bank manager’s face when he explained it!”.

Being ‘landed in it’ like that did, however, rather neatly emphasise one of the key criteria of an entrepreneurial culture which is flexibility. With that firmly in mind let us consider 2008.

PleaseReview v3.4 is not more or less completely released. We are still testing (and finding issues with) running some of the client components on Vista but we will work our way through and eventually succeed. We have started v3.5 and are internally testing the alpha of the key functionality so progress is good.

2007 delivered over 20 new corporate clients (the largest a 1,000 user license) and saw our year-on-year revenue jump by over 400%. Clients came predominantly from Life Sciences but also from Law, Defence, IT and Financial Services. As exciting as that is, perhaps most gratifying is the existing clients purchasing more licenses and rolling out PleaseReview. As the old proverb states “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”. We like it when clients come back and say “more please”!

2007 has also seen new partnerships, integrations and OEM clients. These are vital to extend our reach and allow us to cover the bases. I’m very hopeful that these new relationships will start delivering significant volumes of business in 2008.

So, 2008 is essentially ‘more of the same’. Our aim is to continue the growth curve and make PleaseReview the de facto way to review documents. We will continue to proactively market into the Life Sciences industry but will also start to explore other industries on a more proactive basis.

From a product perspective PleaseReview v4.0 is earmarked for a release towards the end of the year. However, we would also like to get around to completing PleaseApprove. PleaseApprove has been sitting in an early Beta state for about 18 months. We just have to get it finished. That is easier said than done as we it diverts resource from PleaseReview. So we will have to take some tough priority decisions.

Taking, as we were, about priorities and flexibility, we have taken a decision to stop the PleaseReview subscription service. It is just not paying its bills. So, while the subscription service will no longer be available, we will keep it going for existing clients and will look at re-launching it is as a SaaS (Software as a Service) offering.

With the economic outlook not great and talk of a recession in the air, the only two things two things we know for certain going into 2008 are “the only constant is change” (Heraclitus of Ephesus, Greek philosopher) and “no plan survives the first encounter with the enemy” (Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke, Prussian General). Having said that we believe that we are well positioned to go on and have a ‘not bad’ 2008.

Yet more of the same …………..

2007-11-01T14:28:00.000Z

Well, they say that “time flies when you are having fun” and I can’t believe that I last blogged in early June. At that time we were anticipating the opening of the Malaysian development center and were excited by the year to date sales and the prospect list. Well not much changes!

So what is the news?

June saw the annual DIA conference, this year in Atlanta. It was an average show for us even though we had a good booth location. The basic problem is the sheer size of the conference. It is easy to get lost. We have signed up again for next year but I can’t help but feel that it would help everyone if there was some kind of ‘zoning’ employed. So, for example, software companies in a single zone, recruitment companies in another, CROs in a third and so on. Currently it’s pretty random for both us vendors and the delegates as to whether they ‘happen’ upon a booth or not. Some delegates do undertake pre visit planning and work out which companies they wish to visit. However, I’d wager a majority don’t have the time for that and simply try to cover the floor in a logical manner. So they walk up and down the aisles trying to spot something of interest. Covering the entire floor is itself a non-trivial exercise. I managed it over the course of the three days but it took a lot of walking. Zoning would help delegates decide where to concentrate their attention.

July saw a visit to Malaysia for some further interviewing of additional development and test staff. This was not without its amusing interludes. It’s the first time in my career I’ve interviewed a Software Engineer who had a sales target! An interesting concept which I suspect wouldn’t catch on in PleaseTech. I was also ‘hoisted by my own petard’ during one interview by an interviewee who had obviously read this blog in some depth. When I suggested that the next stage may be a telephone interview with Tim Robinson our CTO, my blog entry which stated that “telephone interviewing is actually quite hard” was quoted back at me! Full marks for having read the blog.

The Malaysian development center is up and running and delivering code and testing the forthcoming v3.4 release. A majority of our forthcoming v3.4 release has been developed in Malaysia and the team is fitting in seamlessly with the UK team. I love it when a plan works!

The 3.4 release is currently in final testing and, among other things includes additional functionality to enable the recording and reporting of review metrics. This is emerging as an increasingly important feature for a number of clients and prospective clients. We will then start work on a v3.5 release prior to the longer term 4.0 development. This is a change of strategy since earlier in the year when we had envisaged v3.3 being followed by a v4.0 release at Christmas this year. However, ‘the only constant is change’ and, to meet client requirements and contractual commitments, we had to revise the plan. The v3.5 release will contain some functionality which would have been in the v4.0 release but which we don’t feel that we can leave until Q3/Q4 next year.

So the current plan to release the v3.4 in the next couple of weeks (we are code complete on this now), then v3.5 towards the end of the year or in January followed by a major development and the release of v4.0.

One of the real issues with a product such as PleaseReview is the ongoing change of other products. Adobe Acrobat 8, Word 2007, Vista all need to be supported just to stand still! The work is never ending.

The September & October conference season kicked off in mid September with the Lorenz User conference. This year held in Nice, S. France. What a wonderful place. I can highly recommend it. As always the conference was well organised and well worth attending. The Lorenz conference was followed rapidly by RAPS (Regulatory Affairs Professional Society) conference, this year in Boston. We manage to combine the conference with some visits to clients, prospects and partners in the Cambridge, MA area so it was a good visit.

The problem with this time of year is that the conferences come thick and fast. So, back to the UK for a week before turning around and flying back across the pond to Atlanta (again!) for the AMWA (American Medical Writers Association) conference. I think this year the conference was marginal. We will have to see whether we do it again next year – the jury is out. Then back home for a week before a 9 day trip which I am in the middle of as I write. The schedule for this trip is crazy. Fly into Philadelphia on the Monday arriving late evening. 1st thing the next morning fly down to Florida for LiveLinkUp the Open Text User Conference. Then Tuesday evening, Wednesday and Thursday flat out at the user conference, fly up to Philly 1st thing Friday morning, leap into a car for some visits. Saturday off to catch up on the email (and write this blog entry), then fly up to Ottawa on Sunday for the DIA Canada conference, fly back Tuesday evening to Philly, make some visits on the Wednesday before flying home on the Wednesday evening – you have to be fit to tale the pace!

The Open Text User Meeting in Orlando was an excellent conference for us. The size and focus of the conference was good and the booths were reasonable value for money. It reminded me of the Documentum Momentum user conferences of a few years ago before EMC entered the equation. Once EMC took over Momentum lost its focus and the booth prices went up but the number of delegates appeared to remain fairly stable. So consequently the value for money went down and we are no longer able to justify attending Momentum. Hopefully LiveLinkUp will not go that way.

On a slightly different note, those of you questioning my ‘carbon footprint’ will be please to learn that, as a company, we are corporate members of The Woodland Trust. Whilst not a formal carbon offset scheme, The Woodland Trust invests in and maintains native woodlands throughout the UK and is a very worthwhile cause – it also provides a carbon offset opportunity for us as a business. I have an inherent distrust of the dedicated carbon offset schemes but have always supported The Woodland Trust as a private individual. So it works well for us. Whilst we are on the subject, we also recycle all old print cartridges and used paper. So we are not all bad!

Some people question the wisdom of doing all these conferences. With a schedule like mine I sometimes wonder as well. However, all I can say is that it works for us. Our prospects list is strong, our client base growing and, most gratifyingly, existing clients are rolling out and placing orders for additional users. It looks like we will make the ambitious revenue target we set ourselves this year and may even exceed it.

The conferences are not the only marketing we undertake – but it is the only proactive marketing. The reactive marketing is the use of Google & Yahoo sponsored searches. As previously, mentioned these programs also deliver a good stream of prospects and clients.

The real question we are going to be facing over the next year is ‘how fast do we want to expand the business’? The options are to continue to pursue the organic growth model where every $ spent is earned via revenue and expansion comes out of profit. Or so we seek external investors and give up some control of the business. Having been through the venture capital route with CDC Solutions (where over three years we took £11 million / US$22 million) in investment, I’m keen to grow the business as much as possible without VC support. However, we have to continually monitor the progress and take rational decisions. It’s a tough one. Obviously we want to expand and address the undoubted market opportunity we have but we also want to retain control, concentrate on the task in hand and not spend hours on investor management. We will see.

Well I’ll try and get the next blog entry out in December. Between now and then I’ll be home for about 10 days and then over in the USA for a week and then back to the UK and then back to Boston and then off to Prague. I’m looking forward to a Christmas break already.

Sales, sales and more sales – happy days

2007-06-07T13:49:00.000+01:00

So - a little yellow sticky has been sitting on my monitor since early May screaming ‘BLOG’ at me. The good old fall back of ‘diversion therapy’ kept raising tasks which just had to be done. Alas, I can ignore the blog no more ……….

So what has been happening in April and May? Answer – everything!

Firstly, we have now sold more in this year to date than we did in the whole of last year. So, I think we can confidently say: “We are pleased with sales”! What is more, the prospect list is long and therefore life is good. That doesn’t mean to say we are complacent – just full of the joys of spring!

Of course, success provides challenges of its own. The most obvious is the rapid ramp up in support requirements for the customers. Suddenly you have a new level of support enquiries and a whole raft of new customers trying to get up to speed.

There is also a need to manage the business, guard cash flow, not over expand, still keep customer service levels high, keep the momentum up, etc. It’s always a balancing act. I’m already looking at what we need to do this year to keep the momentum up next year.

In my last business (CDC Solutions), having grown slowly to around 15 people, we shot up to around 70 in the space of three years. That may not be massive growth compared with the likes of Google, etc - but it is certainly an uncomfortable rate. The key is getting people up to speed and ensuring that they understand what the company does, its direction and what we want to do. Its easy when its ‘admin’ stuff such as accountancy, etc. It harder when its product knowledge which is the key requirement.

There is, of course, the need to bring in new skills. However, most of the time it would be ideal if we could just clone the people we have. There are not enough hours in the day (especially if you want to stay married) to do everything. Life would be so much easier with a cloning machine. The last thing you want is a load of new people all desperate to do a good job but not really understanding the business, running around doing ‘stuff’. Mainly because it then takes ‘un-doing’ or ‘re-doing’!

I’ve seen it in partner companies when the expansion has been rapid. Suddenly you are talking to a load of people who know less about their company, its history, products, clients and partners than you do. They don’t understand you or what you do and find comfort in stuff (such as people/technologies/application areas) which they do understand. So there is a subtle change in direction which is not a result of any strategy nor is it intentional. Its just a direct result of new people find their own comfort zones. Lord preserve us!

Moving on ……

In the meantime we have been working to get our Malaysian development and test center established. When I last reported, I noted that we were to fly out to Malaysia for final interviews for the Malaysia Development Team Leader. Well those went well and we have our Malaysia Development Team Leader joining the company on the 25th June. He will be in the UK for a week’s induction/training. We also have recruited a senior developer and are actively recruiting additional developers. The Malaysia office opens on 1st July.

There will be challenges. But with modern collaborative and communications technology (PleaseReview, Instant Messaging, VOIP, email, and the internet) we believe that a seamless working environment is achievable. It’s our intention to have the Malaysians very much as ‘part of the team’ rather than a separate organisation to which we ‘throw projects over the wall’. Watch this space.

Another aspect of the business on which we have been working (or more accurately, fighting the good fight) has been a support system. The requirement started out quite simply. With the rapidly growing customer base, we were constantly providing the same information and knowledge in emails to customers and prospects. The obvious solution is to capture it in a knowledge base so we didn’t have to re-work it every time.

Having taken a look at what was available, we decided that we would look at solutions which provided an integrated knowledge base with support ticket management. Our requirements were simple. We had a few basic functional requirements and needed a system which could expand with us. A brief market search identified what was, apparently, a suitable system so we installed a test copy, gave it a brief test and purchased a license. A month later we threw it out! Lesson learned. This time we approached with caution, refined our requirements (and dropped a couple of the complex ones) undertook more market research. After a couple of trails we finally settled on the open source OTRS.

So far OTRS is working well, we are populating the knowledge base and are introducing customers to the system on an ‘as needed’ basis.

From a product perspective, having released PleaseReview 3.2 in March, we will be releasing v3.3 in mid June. Version 3.3 is known internally as the ‘integration release’ as its primary role is to enhance the integration capabilities of PleaseReview. Whilst we have always had comprehensive APIs, it’s not until people start trying to embed PleaseReview functionality in 3rd party applications that you really spot the holes. The holes have been spotted and duly filled.

We have also undertaken preliminary testing with .NET 2.0. The initial indications are that the port is well worthwhile as the performance can improve as much as 10 fold. Thus the current plan is to have the ‘.NET release’ (v3.4) out towards the Autumn (aka Fall).

On the travel front it’s been a quiet May. However, I’ll next be at the DIA annual Meeting in Atlanta. Perhaps I’ll see you there?

Finally, let me give you an idea of the sort of stuff a company like us faces on a day-to-day basis. We logged a determined hack attack on one of our web facing servers recently. I understand that it was a dictionary attack (probably from a zombie pc). The attack was trying to guess the password at a rate of about five attempts per second. Tim Robinson (our CTO) calmly pointed out to me that “it would still take more than the lifetime of the universe to guess any of our passwords at that rate – an estimated 271,363,820,339,984,102 years”. What he didn’t mention until further questioning was that the attack was on the standard ‘Guest’ account on a Windows server. The Guest account is, of course, disabled.

When I asked the team if posting this information would compromise us in anyway I got two answers. Answer #1 from Jason, who takes the lead in managing the infrastructure, was “nah - perfectly normal stuff” and answer #2 was from Tim who mentioned that the timescale estimate might give away the length of the password – but I think he was joking. Strange sense of humour these techies have :~).

Fun in Las Vegas, Barcelona is tempting, ISP hell and project ‘Malaysia’ is full steam ahead

2007-03-30T16:18:00.000+01:00

It the end of March and once more I’ve slipped on my ‘monthly’ blog posting. There is just so much happening.

My February blog didn’t mention the DIA EDM conference in Philadelphia which at which we had a booth. Once again a very good conference for us and we very busy meeting existing customers, existing prospects, partners and even finding time to find a few new prospects. We’ve currently stopped going to the European DIA meetings as we weren’t finding them value for money. As I write this the DIA 2007 EuroMeeting is ongoing in Vienna. However, the invitation to have a booth at next year’s EuroMeeting in Barcelona has just crossed my desk. Now, I am tempted. I’ve previously mentioned that I love Barcelona.

This gets me to wondering just how much the choice of venue affects the attendance figures. We have previously discussed how the 2006 DIA Annual Meeting was held in Philadelphia and there was a theory doing the rounds that that had surpressed attendees. Still Barcelona ….. everybody wants to go to Barcelona – right? So I’m thinking the conference will be well attended. But, on the other hand, its expensive compared to the US shows and I know it just won’t be as productive. I am torn – watch this space.

February also involved supporting Qumas by exhibiting at QumasConnect – their annual user conference. This was held in Las Vegas – party central. Things didn’t get off to a great start. I arrived at the airport on Saturday afternoon after a transatlantic flight only to find that the hotel booking I had made at Bally’s (through an internet hotel booking agency) didn’t exist. There were two major events in town and consequently a severe shortage of hotel rooms. I end up in the Howard Johnson Downtown (though it claims to be on the strip) for $289 for the night – oh dear. From there things got better and I worked my way back towards Bally’s via the Westin. Five nights and three separate hotels.

The Qumas conference was a huge amount of fun. Not only do they know how to party it seems that a lot of the clients do as well! The final night I staggered away from the bar at 4:00am leaving a couple of them to it. Unfortunately, the phone went at 7:00am the next morning with a prospect looking for a proposal. Life is tough on the road!

March has been quiet on the travel front as we have been getting the rest of the v3.2 out of the door and trying to update our literature. We finally also got around to having our delayed company ‘Christmas bash’ in mid-March. The run up to Christmas was simply too busy and, as for January, it seems that some of our staff are compete social butterflies – mid March was the first Friday night they had available.

Early March also saw one of our ISP’s completely crash our main www.pleasetech.com website for several days. They then sent us a very nice email apologising, and I quote exactly:

-- starts --
“We would like to apologise for the recent loss of service to your website pleasetech.com. This was caused by an unfortunate series of failures to the hardware supplied to us.
Fortunately, due to our back-up systems, we were able to capture and restore your data. To maintain accurate data consistency, we decided to use an older restore.
This means that if you have uploaded any files in the last 2-3 weeks, you may find some data missing from your website. You will therefore need to re-upload your website, using the files you have backed up in line with our terms and conditions.
We know this is not an acceptable level of service …………...
-- ends --

Not acceptable – you are telling me. I think the really interesting thing is the tacit admission that the best back-up they have is 2-3 weeks old. As Tim Robinson, our CTO, put it: “what a bunch of losers” – well he may have used slightly different words. Next time you find me at a conference don’t hesitate to ask which company it is – I’ll be pleased to tell you.

March has also seen hard work on the ‘lets set up a software development and test center in Malaysia’ plan. We have identified offices and all the boring things like lawyers, accountants but, infinitely more interestingly, we have a short list of candidates for the role of Malaysia Development Team Leader. We fly out to Malaysia on 16th April to conduct final interviews. There has been an interesting learning curve for us in the recruitment process. We have found that telephone interviewing is actually quite hard. We initially tried it around a speaker phone and found that just didn’t work. A better solution was conferencing everyone together. Of course, the one thing which doesn’t appear to change no matter which country you are in is people’s ability to add stuff to their resume/CV which close questioning doesn’t back up.

The main disadvantage of working with Malaysia is that we are now stretched at both ends of the day. 5:00pm in Malaysia is 9:00am here in the UK. Whilst 5:00pm here in the UK is 9:00am on the West Coast. They tell me that a long working day is good for the soul.

Returning briefly to the theme of articles which resonate. April sees the return to TV in the UK of The Apprentice with Alan Sugar. In the UK we have the Dragon’s Den and The Apprentice. In the Dragon’s Den, entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to a bunch of business angels hoping to secure investment. Whilst in The Apprentice which originated in the USA is, apparently, billed as the ultimate job interview.

I have to confess to watching neither on a regular basis. However, I have a passing interest and I have done some judging of the business plans and presentations associated with the entrepreneurship part of the University of Bath MBA course. This cast me into a role not dissimilar to the so called Dragons. I have also, in my time, raised £11 million (~$20million) in venture capital and I can tell you the whole process is nothing like the TV program. The point, of course, is that the TV program is designed to be entertaining and not to resemble reality.

The big problem is, of course, the average person doesn’t necessarily appreciate this and thinks that all entrepreneurs are the aggressive ‘dragons’ depicted on TV.

This is why I was delighted to read a recent article in the Times newspaper Saturday magazine entitled “The Antipreneurs” which purported to introduce the new “caring, sharing entrepreneurs”. In the interview with Robert Calcraft and Antony Buck of REN Cosmetics, Antony says “Everyone assumes entrepreneurs are like Alan Sugar or the dragons in the Dragon’s Den. They think you have to be suit-wearing, self-obsessed, aggressive bastards; someone who wants other people to lose; sees business as confrontation and toughness as crucial. There’s a total lack of humanity – what about collaboration and enjoying what you do?”

Thank you Anthony – you took the words right out of my mouth.

China, year end and software as an art ...

2007-02-14T20:12:00.000Z

So it’s mid February and I haven’t written a blog entry since early December. I’ve simply been too busy. However, the kind comments from a number of people (clients, prospective clients and partners) whom have read the blog and mentioned that they enjoyed it, have convinced me its’ worth keeping it going. It is too easy to concentrate on working through the never ending ‘to do’ list rather than take an hour or so out and overcome that ‘writer’s block’. So, to those of you who have been waiting in eager anticipation for the next instalment (if only …), apologies for the delay and I’ll try and keep it to a monthly entry going forward.

The end of last year was frantic. With Christmas, December is a short month anyway. This is compounded by the fact that it’s the end of the year and therefore everyone is focused on closing deals/spending budget – depending on which side of the fence you sit. For me this included getting back from the DIA conference in Germany and then embarking on a 36 hour visit to the East Coast (fly out Tuesday evening arrive Tuesday evening, meet Wednesday and fly back Wednesday arriving back in the UK 6:00am Thursday morning). It was all go as, no sooner than I had got back to the UK, 48 hours later I was off on vacation with the family to China and Malaysia.

China, or actually Beijing – what can I say? The old Monty Python sketch comes to mind “and now for something completely different.” My immediate thoughts as I type are: It was cold; the Forbidden City was very impressive; the Great Wall looked just like the photos but what the photos don’t show is the ‘street vendors’. What I didn’t like (to say the least) was the fact that everyone in China seems to want to rip-off tourists. From the aggressive street vendors which approach foreigners everywhere (especially outside tourist venues) to the ever present ‘English Students’ looking ostensively to be wanting to practise their English but, as the guide book warned us, actually seeking to ‘encourage’ us into purchasing over priced goods. This forum posting explains the scam very well.

China will have to stop this attitude going forward. They can get away with it at the moment as it’s new and everyone wants to go. Few will want to go back once they have ‘done the sights’. We do plan to see other parts of China. As for Beijing - sorry but been there and done that! It’s not just the rip-offs, its simply not a city like, for example, Barcelona, which positively demands you return time after time – despite the high crime rate. After Beijing it was Malaysia. Malaysia is a ‘home away from home’ (my wife is Malaysian) and, as always, we had a huge amount of fun.

It was then back to the reality of the New Year and the office. So, how was our 2006 and the year end? Answer: Not bad - but could have been better. There were a couple of big deals which we had hoped to close prior to the year end which, for one reason and another, didn’t close. The good news is that they are still very much alive and that we had a number of smaller deals come good. The bad news is that every delay costs additional time, sales effort and the cash is in the client’s bank account – not yours. As any sales manual will tell you, there is nothing like a ‘compelling event’ and the end of year is a big one which comes by but once a year.

January is normally a quiet time of year in which to plan, write blogs and ‘gird one’s loins’ for the year ahead. However, we went straight into the year with an order and a huge number of new enquiries. I guess people over Christmas must have been lying around gently musing along the lines of: “what is it which is giving me the most pain at the moment? Ah - I know its document review, there must be an answer out there somewhere.”

We were also preparing for a release of v 3.2. The initial target was end of January, but as it became clear that we were not going to make that we changed plans to have ‘code complete’ at the end of January. So we are now, in mid Feb, in the final stages of testing and will release PleaseReview 3.2 by the end of the month – assuming the testing doesn’t uncover any significant issues.

So a software company slips delivery again I hear you say – how surprising. True we have slipped a bit but that doesn’t mean we can’t manage the business. What it means is that we constantly have to balance resource, functionality, contractual commitments, time and clients’ desire not to have too many releases. We could release on time if we went code complete two months before release, but the same level of functionality wouldn’t be there. As it is functionality which keeps us in our market leadership position and attracts new customers, we would have to release more frequently. It’s a complex equation with no simple answer.

On this subject, every now and then one reads something which resonates. I was reading the Financial Times review (written by Richard Waters) of Scott Rosenberg’s book “Dreaming in Code – A book about why software is hard” – and the following passage resonates - big time:

“True, many software projects take longer and cost more than expected, or they are abandoned outright. Also true, software development still sits uncomfortably between art and science, dependent on the creativity of individual programmers and remains frustratingly difficult to make as replicable and predictable as other branches of engineering.”

I have long agreed with the view that software creation is somewhere between and art and a science. Yes, it’s true that you need procedures and traceability and well commented code and all those other things which people audit. But it’s also true that for leading innovative software products you can not simply ‘follow a formula’. It’s about getting the balance right. As I have always said, “If it was easy everyone would do it.”

Seeing as we are having a bit of a catch up (it surprising – once you sit down to write and get started there is so much to tell), let’s address one of my pet issues, namely the cost of sales. As a direct result of a show booth visit, I got an email which said, and I paraphrase, “can you come along to our company (which incidentally is located miles from any other and the chances of you combining it with any other visit are so low as to be not worth considering) to give a demonstration of PleaseReview. I think it could be really useful for us”. My answer was, as always, “I’d love to come along to your company but, before I spend all that time and money, I’d like to present the software to you and your colleagues using GoToMeeting (like Webex). If that is successful and you are interested in moving forward let’s then arrange a meeting.”

The result? Nothing – not even the courtesy of a reply despite several follow-ups. Well, I’m afraid basic economics come into play and we can’t double the price of the software to cover sales visits to unqualified prospects. The basic problem is that businesses with the attitude which says ‘we won’t consider you if you don’t visit immediately’ will not get the best solution on the market. They will get an over priced solution from a company which has spare sales time and the resources to visit them.

I am giving serious consideration to listing sales visits to remote prospects as a price book item which requires a purchase order and the cost of which is credited against a final purchase. Any thoughts remote prospects? Would you pay for a sales visit?

Finally, following the success of the outsourced testing, which has now been going on for 6 weeks and has fitted seamlessly into our process and contributed greatly, we are looking at expanding development through ‘off shoring’. Watch this space.

Costs of sales, being seen and outsourcing

2006-12-07T20:36:00.000Z

I’m writing this entry in Berlin where we have a booth at the DIA’s 7th Electronic Document Management Conference. Its one of those typical conferences where everyone is tied up in the conference hall and only venture forth in the coffee breaks. So you are either bored or inundated. Well, as inundated as you can be with just over 100 real delegates (ie excluding the vendors). Those of you who read my views on European shows in July’s entry may be wondering why we are attending. Good question.

Once again, it makes an interesting comparison. The cost of doing the US equivalent of this conference is about the same if all costs including travel costs, etc are considered. Yet the US conference attracts over 500 delegates! So my previous observation that European shows typically attract only 20% the number of delegates of the US equivalent is validated yet again. So, why are we here? Is it, to quote Samuel Johnson, the triumph of hope over experience? Not entirely.

Keeping the cost of sales at a sensible level is always a battle. Its not just marketing decisions such as which conferences to attend – it’s also travel decisions and sales time which need to be considered. At what stage do you visit a prospective client? Do you ever visit a prospective client? Is it an entirely remote transaction? Some are. I’ve never met some of my clients.

The internet and the whole concept of online meetings have made a real impact on the economics of the sales cycle. We are currently giving up to three remote presentations/demos a week. This allows us to get ‘in front’ of prospective clients for a fraction of the cost of a standard onsite presentation/demo. However, the problem is, of course, that you are not actually ‘in front’ of the prospective client. You are just a voice down the phone line. Therefore it is important to get ‘face-to-face’ time and attending conferences is one way of achieving this. It provides the opportunity to meet people face-to-face. Existing clients, prospective clients and partners are all in the frame. So, even if the conference is not a success in terms of new leads, it is necessary to see and be seen.

Sales costs can typically be up to 60% of a software company’s cost base. Therefore containing sales cost is imperative. It is, of course, a false economy if the result is a significant loss of sales. Getting the balance right is crucial. Unless we are in the vicinity of a prospective client’s site, when the incremental cost of the visit is minimal, we will initially aim to promote ourselves through remote presentations/demos.

Part of the equation is, of course, the fact that the US dollar is extremely weak at the moment. The £ is the highest it has been against the US$ for over 14 years and it’s heading for $2 per pound. This makes the cost of exhibiting and marketing in the USA appear relatively cheap but the corollary is that it has nasty impact on our revenue which is primarily in US$ - every $ of revenue is bringing in less pounds. Our cost base is primarily in UK£. There is nothing we can do but grin and bear it, keep our cost base tight, and hope that the sunlit uplands of a return to the days of a strong $ are not too far away.

So when it comes to the need to increase our testing resource, keeping a lid on costs is a key consideration. Thus we decided to look at outsourcing the testing. It’s not a particularly onerous requirement. It simply needs someone to physically run our test scripts against the software which is on our test servers. The only real infrastructure requirements are a PC with a broadband connection. When outsourcing comes to the fore, India comes to mind. However, as I have personal connections in Malaysia it also seemed sensible to consider Malaysia.

So we followed the classic approach and developed a requirements document. We were certainly not planning to go ‘big bang’ and were interested in obtaining one or two additional testers for a month or so as we built up to our next release. Our view was that, if the initial trial worked out, we would then build upon the requirement.

Well, it’s been an experience. Our mistake, if we made one, was to post the requirement on a free offshore outsourcing buyer’s portal. Not only do we seem to have every sourcing company in the world interested, we have been subjected to every type of sales approach the world has to offer.

Now, let’s be clear here, some people/organizations have been highly professional and impressive. However, others have left a bit to be desired. Let us look at some of the examples which would probably feature in any ‘how not to sell’ course:

One email from a sales guy started with: “I had a detailed discussion with our Head - Testing Team, and to my surprise he's interested in pursuing this opportunity.” Well that inspires confidence doesn’t it?

Clearly, there are some who passionately believe that launching into a long winded sales pitch is the best way to get their message across - even when they have been told that ‘now is not a good time’. When I call prospective clients only to find they are in a meeting, I do not take it as the ideal opportunity to launch into my full sales spiel – not that I have a full sales spiel. So, here’s a hint chaps – when a prospective client says ‘now is not a good time’, it’s your cue to say ‘Sorry, I’ll get back to you’ and then send them an email. I really didn’t like being rude so apologies to the guy who was in full flow when I put the phone down. In my defense I had just said ‘I’m sorry I’m in a meeting and now is not a good time’. Conversely, of course, if a prospective client calls you it’s always a good time!

Having mentioned in this post the need to contain costs, I have some sympathy with those wanting to use Skype-out or equivalent VOIP services to contain the cost of phone calls. However, the quality is simply not good enough and, while we use Skype every day for internal use, I would never use it in a client contact situation due to the drop outs, delays and the times it goes ‘wobbly’. Trust me, a full flow sales spiel delivered down a bad VOIP connection is not the way to sell your services.

Others clearly wanted us to outsource our entire development effort - ignoring the fact that we had gone to the trouble of creating a statement of requirements. Yes, we know the requirement is small. Please don’t try and talk us up – just tell us that it’s too small for you and leave us in peace!

Others clearly believe that it’s not the quality of the response but the quantity. Oh dear! What is even sadder is that somewhere in the quantity may well be quality but it’s well hidden.

At the end of the day, there is nothing like a succinct email which addresses the requirement, states the ballpark cost and attaches basic back-up material. I’m pleased to say that it looks like we have found a testing resource with which to move forward and experiment with outsourcing some of our testing – watch this space!

Conferences, lost passports and undocumented Microsoft updates

2006-11-18T11:11:00.000Z

It’s mid-November and I’ve been meaning to do a blog entry for ages – well since the end of October snuck up and took us by surprise!. So, what has been happening over the last 6 weeks?

From a sales perspective it is, as previously mentioned, a very busy time of year with budgets needing to be spent and contracts being finalised. It’s also the ‘conference season’ and everyone is trying to cram everything in before Thanksgiving. My October can be summarised by: days in the UK = 15, days in the USA = 16.

There were two conferences that I attended in October. The first was RAPS (Regulatory Affairs Professional Society) held in Baltimore. I’d not been to Baltimore before. Well not stopped that is - I’m normally flying past on the I95 en route between Washington and Philadelphia. It is a nice city with a nicely re-developed harbour although I find it hard to believe the claim that the Inner Harbour now attracts more annual visitors than Disney World. Are they counting the people in the cars going past on the I95 in that statistic?

Having been in the US for 10 days for the RAPS conference and prospects/clients visits I managed to get home for 4 days (just to remind my family who I am) before flying out to Chicago en route to the AMWA (American Medical Writers Association) conference to be held in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

It was with a sinking feeling that I realized I couldn’t find my passport. I knew I had it when I left immigration at Chicago airport and now, 24 hours later, in the Chicago hotel it was no where to be found. Having stripped the hotel room and called everyone I could think of (and at this point let me put in a brief ‘thank you’ to the customer services agents at both United Airlines and National Car Rental who went beyond the call of duty to assist me) I accepted that it was lost and called the UK Embassy emergency help line. One slightly amusing aside to this, which made me feel a little bit better, was that National Car Rental did indeed have three lost passports (two Dutch and one German, seeing as you wondered).

Well the good news was it could have been so much worse. I happened to be in a city which had a British Consulate and which could issue me with an emergency passport. It helped that I had photo ID with me (UK Driving license) and was able to get a copy of the passport faxed to me from the UK. So, I had time to slip down to the Embassy 1st thing in the morning, get the passport and still make it back to O’Hare for my flight to Albuquerque. This is exactly what I did. The only damage done was to my pride and wallet. I also had to miss a presentation to a client but that was handled by others. All in all - a small price to pay.

I’ve been travelling independently since I was 11 years old (it’s a long time – trust me). I’ve travelled all over the world and never lost my passport. I am somewhat annoyed with myself and still have no idea where or when I lost it. I just can’t believe it wasn’t found and handed in somewhere – after all there are contact details on the back page.

But life is a learning experience and here are a couple of lessons: (i) Make sure you have a copy of your passport. Now I’ve actually got scans of the entire family’s passports stored in a password protected Zip file on my laptop. We also have copies on file and backed up in the house; (ii) make sure that you have some other form of photo ID on you when you travel; and finally (iii) If you are going to lose your passport try and do it in a city where there is a consulate which can issue you with another one

AMWA went fine and I suspect we will be back next year. However, I have to say that I wasn’t particularly taken by Albuquerque. Perhaps it was the whole passport thing. Perhaps, it was the fact that it wasn’t a particularly easy place to get to. Perhaps it was the taxi driver ripping us off on the way in from the airport. More likely however, it was the fact that, on the first night out, I couldn’t get a beer until I had gone back to the hotel to retrieve my photo ID. What kind of state makes a law which says that a ‘forty something’ year old man needs to show photo ID before he can buy a beer? I know it isn’t Albuquerque’s fault per se, but it does get tarred with that brush.

As a side issue, perhaps someone can tell me whether the New Mexico state law also says that a taxi driver can collect two entirely independent travellers (both Europeans incidentally – did he see us coming) from the airport, both of whom are going to separate downtown hotels, and then charge them both the full fare! He claimed it was state law. I call it a rip-off.

The journey had one more surprise! I was heading home via San Francisco which necessitate an over night stay. I arrived at my airport hotel in SF only to discover that the hotel was full of people attended the annual Exotic Erotic Ball. Some very ‘interesting’ costumes were on display – who says business travel doesn’t have its side benefits!

If we force ourselves back to business for a moment. From a development/testing perspective, the technologists among you know that Microsoft had announced in July that it would release IE7 as a high-priority update via Automatic Updates in Q4. We didn’t see this impacting our corporate clients but did see it potentially impacting our subscription clients whom are typically smaller organizations and individuals – the very people who would have automatic updates turned on. This meant that we had to prioritize testing with IE7. Whilst we didn’t expect any issues we had to be sure.

And yes there was a ‘gotcha’. Windows XP supports 2 types of font smoothing ("antialising "), standard and ClearType. This is controlled under ‘appearance/effects’ in display control panel. The default is ‘standard’. In it's infinite wisdom, IE7 has it's own setting that overrides the XP setting and it is set to ClearType by default. So what? Well this means that the same font, when displayed in, for example MS Word and IE7 will appear differently. For many people/applications this is not an issue. It is however, somewhat more important when reviewing documents! It’s a simple fix (make sure the settings in both Windows and IE7 are either standard or ClearType) but it takes time to identify.

We also had another ‘left field’ Microsoft event in October. An Office update managed to break one ‘modus operandi’ and fix another which, incidentally, had been broken a year earlier - all undocumented, of course. I won’t bore you with the detail, but it’s this constant making and breaking of functions which consume our most valuable resource - time. The first thing we know is when something goes wrong and then we have to experiment and work out what has failed, how we can work around it. In doing this we sometimes discover that a previously broken feature has been fixed. It’s part of life and I only mention it because sometimes clients wonder what we do for the annual support and maintenance fee.

I’m heading out to the Far East over Christmas (China and Malaysia) and before that will be in Berlin for the European DIA EDM (Electronic Document Management) conference and there is a quick visit to the East Coast (just to test out my new passport!) shaping up.

Travels, Releases, Audits and Sales – reflections on September

2006-10-05T11:34:00.000+01:00

So suddenly its October. I’m sure a number of us will be wondering where September went. As mentioned in my last post, September is traditionally when business gets back into full swing and its ‘pedal to the metal’.

The month got off to a flying start with a visit to Berlin and the annual Lorenz User Conference UserBridge ’06. I’d only ever visited Berlin once before was looking forward to the experience. Unfortunately, the trip didn’t start well as the plane was delayed by two hours and I eventually got to my hotel well after midnight. Equally unfortunately I ended up seeing rather more of Berlin than originally planned. The next morning Marianne Fricke and I set out for the conference. We ended up traveling across Berlin (via the underground) only to end up in the wrong hotel. We found ourselves at the hotel in which the DIA EDM conference will be held in December. So a rapid retreat to a cab and an expensive ride to the correct hotel resulted. By then, not only were we late but we were also a mere 150 yards up the road from the hotel at which we were staying! Preparation is everything.

The rest of the conference was excellent, well organised and, mostly importantly for us, attended by people interested in document review. I can also strongly recommend a visit to the German Bundestag which was the conference evening activity.

Working with Lorenz always brings to mind the old saying “be nice to people on the way up as you will meet them on the way down”! For years, whilst I was running CDC, we were in competition with Lorenz and their docuBridge product. However, if we at CDC were the ‘good guys’ and other competitors were the ‘bad guys’, we always saw Lorenz as the ‘nice, if only we could find a way to work with them instead of competing, guys’. Discussions did take place, but we kept going back to the fundamental fact that we were competitors. However, I’d always had a respect for them and viewed them as an honest company who could be relied upon to keep their word (not always the case with all companies I’m afraid).

Now we find ourselves with entirely complementary technologies targeting the same market and thus some common clients. So, while neither of us are ‘on the way down’ relationships established in the past have come back to use in the present. The simple fact is that, in this business, you will come across the same people (both clients and partners) more than once and creating enemies is therefore to be avoided.

This time it was an easy discussion and we have had a formal partnership relationship with Lorenz for over a year. As a result of that an integration with docuBridge was delivered in April this year.

Last year, I gave a presentation at userBridge on document review which ultimately led to a German Biotech becoming a client. This year the client gave a case study. A nice case of ‘last year we had made a submission and decided we needed a better document review process. We saw PleaseReview at userBridge last year, purchased it and, to date, our experience is largely good’. I’m a great fan of telling it like it is and, in the case study, the client had several suggestions for improvements. I’m pleased to say that a majority of them are incorporated in v3.1 which is now released.

So where are we with v3.1? Last month I said that we would be implementing the old project management technique of ‘incremental delivery’. This we did and we announced the release and made available the upgrade guide to our clients so they could prepare. However, circumstances conspired against us and, despite our best intentions, we were only able to release PleaseReview v3.1 server and offline client at the end of September. The big hold up was the testing required. Its not the basic testing which is the issue but the need to test combinations of items which takes the time. The new server with the old plug-in, the new plug-in with the old server, etc, etc, etc. However, “better late than of poor quality” and we will have to factor in additional testing time for future releases. We will be upgrading the subscription server next week once we have completed the additional testing required.

The other excitement the month held was a ‘vendor quality audit’ from a major Life Sciences company. These audits, which will be familiar to vendors and clients in the Life Sciences space, are comprehensive and designed to determine our adherence to good practices. The audit covered Validation Methodology, Change Control, Quality Assurance, Quality Control, Back-up & Disaster recovery, Security, Testing & Verification, Documentation standards, Training, 21 CFR Part 11 (Electronic Records/ Electronic Signatures), Client Relations including Customer Support, and general operations. Basically everything except sales and marketing – no-one could ever audit that!

So how did we do? We did good! Observations were of an administrative nature and the only major (a technicality relating to a training issue) is easily rectified. So, onwards and upwards.

The sales flow over the year in the software industry can be thought of as a sine wave with the low point being the summer months. I’ve spent years trying to get an even deal flow throughout the year and have admitted defeat. Most deals have their own naturally progression and you end up with a lot less grey hair if you just accept that fact - rather than trying to control the timing of something which is not yours to control. So we are on the up and the sales flow is increasing. We are looking forward to a good end of year.

Product release, testing and holidays

2006-08-31T15:13:00.000+01:00

So here we are back from our holidays and I’m thinking about the run into Christmas. I say ‘run’ but I guess the word ‘sprint’ is a better description. In the UK we have had our ‘end of summer’ fling with the long weekend extended by the August Bank Holiday (public holiday) on Monday 28th August. America has the equivalent a week later with Labor Day on the first Monday in September – this year September 4th. After that its ‘pedal to the metal’ as the kids go back to school, business gets back into full swing, everyone is available for meetings and presentations and everyone has an eye on the budget being spent by Christmas.

One thing the Americans usually struggle to understand is how completely business in Europe shuts down over August. Although, not all Europeans go off and sit on a beach in August, it certainly seems like that – especially if you happen to be sitting on a beach in Southern Europe in August! The bottom line is that not much is achieved over the month of August in Europe. There is a slight down turn in people’s available in the USA but its no where nearly as marked.

If Americans struggle to understand certain aspects of European business culture the corollary is also true. Europeans certainly struggle to understand how Americans survive on so few vacation days. The average American company provides 2-3 weeks paid vacation per year. The average in the UK is about 5 weeks paid vacation.

However, CEOs are never fully on vacation. Personally I usually check my email twice daily and always have my mobile phone with me. I am not, however, a Blackberry slave and email is kept where, in my opinion, it belongs – namely, on the laptop. My reason for staying in touch is quite simple – if I know everything is going well and, if there are problems, that people can get in touch (and indeed are expected to get in touch) - then I can relax for the remainder of the time.

Did anything go wrong this summer? Well not really, but I did forget an important lesson which, you would have thought that over the years, I should have learnt! Learnt, that is, not to schedule a product release around the holiday period.

The result? Well, here we are at the end of August trying to get our release of PleaseReview 3.1 out of the door. It was scheduled for 1st September but it is going to be a couple of weeks late. Why? There is a backlog in testing. Let’s face it, testing folk deserve their holiday as well and, in retrospect, scheduling a release for 1st September was pure stupidity on my part.

So we will be a few days late. But do we have a plan ‘B’? You bet we do.

Throughout history project managers have fallen back on ‘incremental delivery’. So we will practise the art of incremental delivery. We know what functionality we will have in the software, we have it in beta, certain clients and partners have had the opportunity to play with it. In short, it holds no surprises and the delay is simply due to the formal testing and release process. Therefore the marketing and announcements associated with the release can all go ahead on the basis that no customers will even start to think about downloading it for several days - especially as many will be away for Labor Day! That gives us the window to be seen to meet our self imposed deadline without actually doing so.

Make no mistake, this is a complex release and we have a considerable amount happening behind the scenes which we are not yet in a position to announce. Thus, in respect of PleaseReview, we have the PleaseTech client (a new client based optional tool which allows the initiation of a review from a Word menu option and from a RH mouse client on any document in Windows). There are some great enhancements to the core PleaseReview application, there are some enhancements to the PDF review plug-in and to the Offline Review Client (both these are only available with the Corporate version) and, in the background, some changes to the system connector architecture. All this must be backwards and forwards compatible. So, as the product grows and additional dimensions are added, the permutations grow exponentially. But, hey, if it was easy everyone would do it!

Exhibiting Decisions

2006-07-24T23:32:00.000+01:00

Shortly after I posted my last post an email from EMC arrived in my inbox. Its title screamed: “Momentum 2006 - Sponsorships Going Fast!”.

We have already taken the decision not to exhibit at Momentum this year and I’m not even going to attend as a delegate. This was an emotionally tough decision but a no-brainer from a business perspective.

Emotionally tough as I’ve been attending Momentums since its inception in Miami in the mid ‘90s (can’t recall when - it was probably around ’96). Since then I have only ever missed one of the USA Momentums which was 2003 in New Orleans. I simply couldn’t think of a decent excuse to go!

Momentum USA has always been a good show and one heck of a party! The first Miami conference took place during a tropical storm in the area and the big party (always the last evening of the conference), which was to be held on a cruise ship plying its way up and down the coast, ended up taking place with the ship firmly lashed to the dock being severely rocked by the wind. It was difficult to stand up on the top deck and you certainly couldn’t put a beer down as it was blown away instantly. Another memorable Momentum was San Diego in 1997(?). The party night included the band ‘Big Bad Voodoo Daddy’ which led me to buy a couple of their CDs. I wonder how many Brits have Big Bad Voodoo Daddy CDs in their collection! Documentum always threw a good party and there are several memorable Momentums – some for the right reasons, one for all the wrong reasons (Las Vegas 2000 - but that’s another story) but mainly for the parties!

In 2004 Montreal was the venue and we launched PleaseReview at the conference. As I mentioned in my initial posting this was a challenge as (i) PleaseReview wasn’t released and (ii) it wasn’t integrated with Documentum at the time. Despite these challenges, we still obtained opportunities and, as a direct result of the conference, we are currently waiting for a purchase order for 150 user license to work its way through the procurement system of a large US organization. A sales cycle of some 20+ months - the wheels of corporate America can turn slowly!

So having been such an important show for so long what has changed? Why have we taken a decision not to exhibit?

Well, last year in Las Vegas wasn’t a great show for us (it was, of course, lots of fun) and didn’t directly lead to sales opportunities. My analysis concluded that it was as a result of the EMC effect. Documentum as a company was no more and the focus was very much (as, I guess, it should be) on the entire EMC suite of software products. However, what this meant to us, as specialist vendors within the document management umbrella, is that the focus was lost. Do the maths yourself. Momentum USA has always been around the 1,500 - 1,800 delegates. Previously that meant 1,500-1,800 people living, eating and breathing document management for three days – it was focused. Now the focus of the conference reflects the focus of EMC’s offering and this has significantly diluted the influence of the document management element. Last year there were delegates passing by the booth who didn’t know the 1st thing about document management.

Momentum also beautifully illustrates my point of the value of European conferences compared to those in the USA. Consider the facts: Momentum Europe is forecast to have one third the number of delegates of Momentum USA, yet the cost of having a booth at Momentum Europe is 32% higher! Go figure!

This doesn’t mean that we aren’t a dedicated Documentum Partner, it simply means that Momentum is no longer value for money for us!

So we are investing elsewhere. The RAPS annual conference is costing us just 13.5% of the cost Momentum Europe (& 18% the cost of Momentum USA) and is anticipated to have around 1,500 – 1,800 delegates – that’s the sort of maths I like!

Guerrilla marketing and the recent DIA and CTC conferences.

2006-07-12T16:32:00.000+01:00

Obviously a critical aspect of a software business is marketing. How do you get attention in, what is increasingly, a very busy world? It's beginning to seem more and more that people are so maxed out and under so much pressure that they don’t have time to investigate new options and solutions. I’m sure that we all have the same problem.

Unfortunately (or should that be fortunately?), we are not in a position to simply throw money at the problem (unlike, it would appear, some large companies – I’ll address this later), so with our limited resources we have to adopt guerrilla marketing tactics. Note: that is ‘guerrilla’ not ‘gorilla’. Guerrilla marketing is covered by Wikipedia here, but I prefer the definition from Marketingterms.com, which summaries it as “Unconventional marketing intended to get maximum results from minimal resources” and then expands “Coined by Jay Conrad Levinson, guerrilla marketing is more about matching wits than matching budgets. Guerrilla marketing can be as different from traditional marketing as guerrilla warfare is from traditional warfare. Rather than marching their marketing dollars forth like infantry divisions, guerrilla marketers snipe away with their marketing resources for maximum impact.” In other words its marketing which doesn’t rely on blindly throwing money at the problem.

Of course, since Jay Conrad Levinson wrote his book in 1982 the Good Lord saw fit to invent the internet, Google and sponsored searches. For specialist companies with limited budgets the Google adwords system is the perfect marketing tool and, personally, I think Google’s founders deserve every one of the billions of dollars they now possess. One day Yahoo may be as good as Google (they have a new release scheduled for later in the year apparently) but currently they have a long way to go. This is not the time and place to rant about Yahoo search’s inadequacies but, suffice it to say, when I told one of their support staff earlier in the year that they should take a look at how Google does it and learn, he told me “lots of people say that”. Maybe they finally got the message.

Clearly, sponsored searches are an integral component in any business’ marketing campaign and we subscribe to both Google and Yahoo. Although these days using sponsored searches is ‘conventional’ (as opposed to unconventional), I believe that sponsored searches do meet the guerrilla marketing conditions in that they provide maximum results from minimal resources.

In our experience, Google and Yahoo searches do produce good opportunities in some very major companies. Firstly, by definition, the searcher is actively searching for a solution to their problem. In our case, that may be collaborative authoring or document review or some variant thereof. Secondly, again by definition, they have a problem otherwise (one assumes) that they would not be searching for a solution. And finally, they take the time and trouble to check out your website and then contact you. That is what we call in marketing a qualified prospect!

Paying cash to exhibit at conferences and other industry events doesn’t immediately fit in with the guerrilla marketing philosophy. However, for a software company such as PleaseTech I believe that it is critical part of not only marketing and lead generation, but also the feedback loop.

Where else can you sit down ‘one-to-one’ with expert users in your chosen field, show them your software in a ‘informal’ setting and gather their feedback and insights? Sue, who manages the ‘enhancement request list’ in PleaseTech, will confirm that every conference is followed by an email from me listing the ideas and potential enhancements that have resulted from conversations with people stopping by the booth. It’s a very valuable exercise in its own right. Not every brainwave and suggestion stands up to the follow through scrutiny but conferences certainly provide a fertile source of ideas. That is why you will find me on the booth at conferences talking to our clients and potential users.

So, conferences and events can provide good value for money and an attentive audience. They are a good chance to catch up with people who you probably wouldn’t have been able to access otherwise, they tend to deliver good leads and can be a huge amount of fun!

Of course, there are two ways to do conferences – the expensive, ‘lets throw money at the problem’ way and the guerrilla marketing way.

Firstly, conference selection is vital. Spending $2k on a booth at the correct conference can deliver better results than spending $10K - $20K on a booth at other conferences. We are currently concentrating on the Life Sciences sector and have attended (and will attend) conferences organised by the DIA (Drugs Information Association), AMWA (American Medical Writers Association), RAPS (Regulatory Affairs Professionals Society) and other similar organisations. However, these are USA only.

We simply don’t do conferences or trade shows in the UK and Europe. It’s a combination of factors. However the bottom line is that, in our experience, conferences in Europe simply don’t provide value for money. For example, take a particular conference we did last year on both sides of the Atlantic. The European one cost at least twice the US one and had 20% the number of delegates. Note: that’s not 20% fewer delegates, that’s one fifth the number of delegates! I rest my case, M’Lud!

I’ve recently returned from the annual DIA conference, held this year in Philadelphia. This is a large life sciences conference with a large exhibition. The sole focus is life sciences so the exhibitors range from software companies like ourselves through CROs (Clinical Research Organisations) to the ever present recruitment companies. There were allegedly over 7,000 delegates.

Historically, DIA has always been a good show for us. Last year we had over 400 contacts and just under 50 leads. This year was not so good. From conversations with other exhibiting companies, no one was having a good time. There were several theories being bandied around as to why this may be. The fact that a lot of the Life Sciences companies are local to Philadelphia was one. This ‘local’ theory is that people don’t attend conferences on their doorstep because they have limited opportunities to attend conferences and like to go somewhere further away. Another theory was the layout of the Philadelphia Conference venue itself. Apparently some of the rooms holding the sessions were a good 10 minute walk away from the exhibition area. I think another fact affecting us specifically, is that the nature of our audience is changing. Whereas last June everyone was a prospective client, this year some of the people who dropped by the booth were already either clients or prospective clients. Therefore, almost by definition, the number of leads is going to be smaller. No matter, we singed up for next year in Atlanta – let’s hope lots of people from companies we aren’t currently talking to want to go there!

However, the DIA conference is always a great opportunity to watch the ‘lets throw money at the problem’ brigade in action. The ‘give aways’ on booths always provide an interesting insight to marketing strategy. I do sometimes wonder what goes through the marketing manager’s head when I see what goes on. We are not talking about the odd pen or ‘knick knack’ here and there but reasonably expensive items. So, at DIA, the busy booths were the ones with the best freebies. I suppose that it gets the companies ‘attention’ - but is it quality attention? Not from what I saw! I’m not sure you can build a ‘buzz’ around a brand by having expensive give aways. However, the whole ‘give-away branding debate’ merits a future post all on its own!

Instead of heading straight home after DIA, I swung by the Collaborative Technologies Conference (CTC) in Boston. I had been invited to participate in a panel session entitled “Solving Document Chaos: Collaborative Document Construction the Productive Way” sharing the platform with IBM, Microsoft, SocialText and NextPage. Speaking slots are classic guerrilla marketing tactics!

The guy who invited me is a chap called Michael Sampson who, until joining Foldera in the last few weeks, ran a well respected collaboration blog called Shared-Spaces. Michael had been very complementary when he reviewed PleaseReview (see the review here).

The panellists had been asked to limit our individual talks to 5 minutes and then the idea was to have a Q&A session with the audience. I exhibited a little bit of naivety in following instructions and limiting my talk to 5 minutes whereas everyone else managed to overrun by at least another 5 minutes. No matter, the whole session emphasised another great benefit from attending events - ‘validation’ - validation that what you are investing in product wise is right.

I came away from the conference very happy that strategically, from a product functionality and positioning perspective, we are absolutely spot on!

A brief history of PleaseTech ....

2006-06-30T15:38:00.000+01:00

This first entry tries to set the scene and provides a bit of background on PleaseTech (formerly Kcentrix Software).

So where to begin? I guess we should start in 2002 when I'd just left CDC Solutions. CDC Solutions offered document publishing solutions in the Life Sciences industry. I started CDC in 1994 (in my spare bedroom) and by 2002 it was global with operations here in the UK, USA, Japan and in Germany and France. After leaving the company, I took a few months off to build cupboards and tackle projects around the house – they had been stacking up for a few years! I got very bored very quickly and decided that I needed to get back into the software business.

About the same time I was contacted by the receivers/liquidators of a software business (Knowhow Systems Ltd) which, as CEO of CDC Solutions, I had previously explored buying. The assets (ie intellectual property) of Knowhow were up for sale as the business had gone into voluntary liquidation. The main product was a XML publishing suite called 'Kcentrix' which was the basis of the BeProfessional.com portal. Anyway, to cut a long story short, in mid 2002 I ended up purchasing the assets which comprised 2 archive boxes (which contained the contracts and patent applications) and 8 CD-ROMs (which contained the source code). I then set up Kcentrix Software LLP as the company to market and further develop the software.

Not being a techie, I set about subcontracting a couple of ex-colleagues to investigate what I had bought and to get it up and running. With the Kcentrix suite installed on a laptop, I then spent Q4 2002 visiting various shows and conferences showing people the software and trying to work out how to sell it - it was very much a solution looking for a problem.

At the end of 2002, Tim Robinson joined the business and we set about trying to develop and market the Kcentrix Suite. I spent most of 2003 'bashing my head against a brick wall'. By the end of 2003 we had re-branded the Kcentrix suite as ActiveProcedures and ActiveFAQs and targeted it at the help desk market. We added to the offering with ActiveSiteMap. However, whilst the software demo'd well and looked the part, sales were not going well and it was hard going for little or no reward.

Then - a lucky break. In late 2003 one of our prospective clients expressed an interest in whether the XML publishing capabilities of ActiveProcedures could be used as part of a document review process. At last, familiar territory for both myself and Tim! Our interest in document review awakened, in early 2004 I took a look at the market, sounded out some of my previous Life Sciences clients and decided that there was an opportunity to build a collaborative document review solution.

So a 'skunk works' project was born! The PleaseReview product proposition was formalised and circulated confidentially to a number of key ex-clients and influential Life Sciences industry personnel and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. We set about building PleaseReview. After an analysis of the options we decided a ‘clean start’ was required and thus did not use any of the existing Kcentrix code.

PleaseReview was previewed in October at Momentum 2004 in Montréal (Momentum is the Documentum worldwide user conference). This was quite a challenge as (i) PleaseReview was in beta, and (ii) it wasn't actually integrated with Documentum at all at that stage! However, once again very positive feedback and we knew we had a winner on our hands!

We released PleaseReview v1.0 (corporate version) in early 2005. This was swiftly followed by the subscription version. At the same time we stopped actively prompting ActiveProcedures and ActiveFAQs but continued to support existing clients.

The key thing with a version 1 product is to get version 2 out as soon as possible as no-one ever buys version 1. So PleaseReview version 2.0 was released in June 2005 and at the same time we won our first Corporate client. In the meantime the subscription version of PleaseReview was proving reasonably popular but you need an awful lot of $270 subscriptions to run a software company!

In the summer 2005 T3 (a Austin, TX-based advertising agency) contacted us and we embarked on a custom development (which will be rolled back into the body of the main software) to meet their specific needs. Thanks to Tim and his team, not only did we deliver early but also delivered more than they were expecting – a good result!

As a parallel development activity we had been building a Documentum integration which was released in September ’05.

Our first West Coast client came along in November '05.

PleaseReview 3.0 supporting additional formats with the new offline review client and with lots of other new functionality was released in January 2006.

April ’06 saw the formal name change from Kcentrix Software LLP to PleaseTech Ltd. Kcentrix Software was an 'LLP' which is a Limited Liability Partnership. This is a fairly new and obscure UK company format (more common in the USA) which assisted us in respect of tax in the early days of the business. However, as we could see global expansion beckoning, it was clear that we needed to adopt a more standard form of incorporation. Therefore we decided to take the plunge and change to a 'Ltd'. We decided to take the opportunity and sort out the branding at the same time – so rather than be Kcentrix Software Ltd, it was PleaseTech Ltd.

We had included Word meta data cleaning as an option in PleaseReview 3.0 and, with a lot of publicity in respect of meta data hidden in Word, and the advantages to IT departments of a server based solution for cleaning Word documents, it was a no-brainer to do the small amount of extra work to release the Word document cleaning capability as PleaseErase. This we did in March ’06.

This brings us more or less up to date. The time of writing is late June ’06.

The customer base continues to grow and we now have clients in the USA (both coasts and in the middle!), Germany and Japan. None in the UK as yet – but we hope to break our UK duck soon!

We are busy finalising our new product launch, PleaseApprove – review and approval of email (you heard it here first!). There will be a minor release of PleaseReview in early September with PleaseReview 4.0 (a major release) released by Christmas. Our plans for the future of PleaseErase are finalised. We are not short of ideas!

So that’s the basic history! As this blog moves forward I intend to take a look at all aspects of the business and be as frank and open as I can without breaking any client confidences and without providing any ammunition for our enemies. Let’s see how it works out!