Archives for posts with tag: Business Development

Kickstart business development for your webapp

January 18, 10 //
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We’re building a new webservice called Qloudwatch. It’s a webservice to monitor your cloud resource usage. For now it’s dedicated to Amazon Web Services. The objective is to give team members financial insight in their cloud usage.

Our approach to these projects is agile, basically we start building and model the service to the needs we have in our own company. For now that means:

  • Creating projects and easily add Amazon resources via the Amazon Web Services API
  • Add members to projects and track which instance is added by which member
  • Notifications for unknown instances (currently only for instances not added to projects)
  • Get insight in our non-billable and billable costs

We love work in progress. Meaning that we always will keep innovating our webservices. We think this also applies to the business model, in which we didn’t found that much innovation just jet.

In order to build and grow webservices, you need to test their profitability. But how does this work? You just can’t start with some premium versions of accounts and change them every month. So there applies a different strategy here.

A business model needs to be straight forward, prepared for growth and should scale with your webservice. One of the most important things to keep in mind is that your webservice and business model are connected, more than you think. So prototyping webservices is fun, but so is prototyping business models :-)

Here is how we work in order to bootstrap a webservice:

  1. Get your first users for the webservice and actively engage to research for new features and business oppertunities
  2. Introduce your first paying model, this should be the basis that probably never will be revised
  3. Reach break-even based on the monthly cost running the service (don’t calculate your time invested time and resources building the service)
  4. Turn your webservice into profit (this is where you take your past investments and envisioned future innovations into calculation)

We envision the following guidelines when we apply the steps above:

  • Quality of service is important, people are paying so there should always be a tested and stable version available
  • User feedback is guiding. Feedback leading to more paying customers is valued over gadgets, gizmo’s etc
  • Update often and fast, visible progress is valued over small tweaks. Paying customers that join early love to pay for the product, but love to see progress even more

This week I’ll write a post on how we envision the first business model of Qloudwatch.

Embrace change and start developing for point of sale, not plan

January 11, 10 //
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When developing new businesses or web services most of your time goes into planning. During the planning phase, people collaborate and take decisions based on the information available to them. Combined with their visions they decide what needs to be done and when it needs to be finished. Resulting in overcomplicated long documents and compromises so everybody stays happy developing the plan.

Described above is how I see traditional planning processes. Not particular bad of course, markets like the medical industry have compliance obligations and thus it’s hard to be agile (not impossible). This post is about one of the important aspects of running agile projects: decision making.

I’m taught to plan projects in advance. Describe what we’re going to do, what the goal of the project is and when it needs to be done. After some projects in school, I already learned that it’s just not the way to go. The plan changes all the time and time will never be on your side. The point here is, that when you change plans you need to update all your documents and re-run it through the complete team. Making it a complicated and dull task. Project managers should be working on stimulating collaboration in the team, not (re)writing documents.

The style above is based on developing to ‘point of plan‘. In other words, you work to create what is fully envisioned in the original plan according to schedule.

For every project success is determined by execution and results. You only reach good results with the right execution. Projects are successful when the end result is accepted by the people that have to work with it / use it. That’s why it’s important to stay in touch with the end user. They need to ‘buy’ what you’ve build. If they won’t ‘buy’ it, you’ve been building your beautiful plan but eventually end-up failing your project.

The economy is a turbulent place. So every piece of information available to you in order to create a plan, is probably old by the time you’re four weeks into execution. Methods that embrace change and promote to work independent are needed. Within the project team there needs to be a central understanding of what is build and what the project envisions. Plans should provide the minimum information that people need to make independent decisions.

The goal in these projects is reaching ‘point of sale‘, which means that a project aims to appeal an audience that accepts what is created and starts using, promoting or buying it.

Be agile, not rigid. Get the right people that know what they’re doing and trust them with making their own calls and decisions throughout execution.

Will cloud computing ‘fog’ your business?

November 14, 08 //
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On Thursday last week I’ve attended to the Amazon Startup Tour in Amsterdam. The day was about the services Amazon is providing to run webapplications and websites. Amazon Web Services (AWS) range from computing power, data storage to database services (and more). Two important reasons to use the services are scalability and uptime.

At the event a few dutch startups presented their great applications and how they use Amazon to run them. Afterwards there was time to ask questions to the starups and later on to Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon. One of the most interesting questions was about the data that startups store at Amazon. Martijn de Kuijper of Qash asked:

How do we tell our users that we don’t know where their data is, except that it is “in the cloud?.

The answer to the question is that all data from Europe on AWS is stored in Ireland, guaranteed. Therefore the data will be under the jurisdiction of Ireland. So another question came to mind. In essence, AWS is ‘controlling’ the data of our clients. For example what will happen when a client decides to delete his account. What will happen to his data? We asked this to Simon Brunozzi (European Envangelist of AWS). He told me that they always have been executing audits on the data of Amazon.com and also AWS. Recently a security whitepaper is published about this.

I think cloud computing is providing great advantages when you’re building a web application or starting an online business.

No let me rephrase that.

Using the cloud for your applications will remove a lot of constraints and will break some traditional rules of business development and IT management. Starting your online business will be cheap and above all will provide infinite resources at a click of a button. You can build web applications very agile, but the business wasn’t that agile yet. AWS and other cloud services make running your infrastructure and business very agile.

Martijn de Kuijper mentions this in a recent blogpost:

Again, I personally believe that Amazon offers a great service and I do trust them in such a way that I wouldn’t mind “sending” them personal data, but I think for a customer it’s a big step to know that I if they took the first step of uploading their data to  for example our server, their data is then stored on external servers.

First of all, I believe that a customer always is putting his data external. For example we’re running Tweetburner on our own server. For us it feels as an internal server (we can drive to Haarlem and put our hands on it!!). But for the users it is as much an external server as if we would use AWS.

Probably they would even prefer AWS above us running our own servers. Not only has AWS more security, more experience and more resources. They run their own multi-billion dollar webshop on there. If AWS fully breaks down, their webshop is down too. That probably is the biggest devotion a single hosting company is doing to it’s own services.

Cloud computing won’t ‘fog’ our business, it will strengthen by allowing to use external infrastructure and resources with a click on the button. Something I couldn’t wish for more as a business developer.