A Precarious Balance

Over the past two months I've read several good articles and blog posts related to finding out what your customers need. At What's Your Brand Mantra, Jennifer Rice writes the following: My personal philosophy on customer involvement is this: Find out what they want. Then figure out how to deliver it. Customers should be involved in ''need ...

I'd venture to say that a slap in the face is rarely a surprise. You can see yourself getting into the situation and maybe you've said something to bring it on. So the slap mentioned in the previous post was really my final capitulation to what I knew all along: I stink at caring for people and being a businessman. What was the final ...

If you've read through some of my posts, you probaby get the idea that I'd like to be on my own, that I'd like to make a software product useful enough that some group of people (hopefully a large group) would buy it. And if you didn't get that idea, well there it is. Upon embarking on that course years ago, it became my goal to be the best at ...

About 7 or 8 years ago, while still calling St. Louis home, I worked at a small consulting company. I was in my early thirties and had been given the job as project lead for a large project. We were to write a back office system for an office supplies wholesaler named Distribution Management Incorporated. I was naive and inexperienced. Thought we ...

You'd think that if your company sold 20 products, you'd be doing pretty well even if it seems like you don't have enough cowboys to wrangle them. I'm not so sure. On occasion, we talked about TurboPower being a Walmart for software. Maybe not Walmart cheap, but Walmart-ish in the way that you could go to TurboPower and find whatever you need for ...

When a product dies, it dies. Sometimes you can extend its life by posting it to a service like SourceForge. But I've seen where that just delays the inevitable. In rare cases, a product can rise from the dead. But it doesn't do so on its own. Near the end of its life, TurboPower had decided to open source the bulk of its products. Geoff ...

Someone had the wisdom to create an advisory board for FlashFiler, TurboPower's client/server database engine for Borland Delphi. We received a lot of feedback from the public newsgroup, most of it positive. But we wanted to give the actively pro-FlashFiler developers the opportunity to more directly influence the product's direction. We'd ...

One of the reasons why customers were deeply involved with FlashFiler, as well as the other TurboPower products, is due to what they received when they purchased a license. Any person purchasing a license for a component library received the source code for that library. TurboPower's main means of communicating with the customers was via its ...

Have you ever realized you're dealing with a customer who knows a lot more than you? That they should be sitting in your seat, working on your product? When I first started working at TurboPower, I ran into that situation. TurboPower sold a client/server database engine called FlashFiler. I was brought into the company to create version 2 of ...

One of the things I've always valued most is hearing from a customer. They help reset your point of view so that it more closely matches reality. Well, this morning my reality is probably a little off. I had wanted to write about customer feedback on pricing, but I don't have any hard data points or evidence. It's never something that I ...