The long awaited day is finally here and we are very pleased to announce the release of our new product mLite™ – an easy-to-use, cost effective and budget-friendly application that will allow you to make the most out of the mobile web or will at least let you determine whether the hype is worth the column inches. Having been involved in a number of ‘hi-tech’ product launches in the past it has always been difficult from a customer’s viewpoint to determine what is real and what is brochure-ware without actually using the product. When once a humble photo copier salesman my employer launched a new personal colour copier – which only became so once you had personally removed the toner cartridge and replaced it with either a red, blue or brown one at the added risk and probable result of getting the stuff all over you.

In later years I sold a new and much heralded suite of software products for a large RDBMS vendor to an equally large financial institution. Once the customer had burned through the first £2,000,000 of installation consulting it soon became apparent that the product did not actually exist and was merely a figment of the marketing department’s imagination. The moral of this story being if you are launching a product with the user friendliness of a cornered rat or if it has not made the journey from your marketeer’s PowerPoint – don’t do it – it’s just too hard. So how do you know if new products work as sold, particularly when nobody is using them – a long test drive is essential (btw – you can use mLite™ without obligation for as long as you like).
These days the job of marketing and selling a new software product is a hard one – the cynically hard bitten prospective customer never believes the marketing message and the salesman is left to fill an ever expanding quota by generating numbers from untried merchandise. Thank goodness for SaaS!

Everyone loves ’software as a service’ – once you have got used to the fact that as well as providing software you are now a service provider! Customers like it because they can commit the budget to monthly OPEX amounts as opposed to large annual CAPEX amounts, providers like it because it’s good for cash flow, forecasting and business planning and potential investors like the predictability of the monthly subscription model. So what can possibly go wrong – well for a start it will not make a bad product into a good one. If like us you are now providing your software as a service it’s critical to understand that the culture of the company needs to change. The ongoing operational burden of the application is now your responsibility. You’ll find out that you need to win the same business month over month and that your customers become ongoing relationships instead of one-time revenue streams. So here are my golden rules:

1. Keep pace with change: the days of tearing the behind out of a popular product are over. In an emerging market like mobile our customers expect Mobestar’s software to be updated frequently and to stay on top of current trends as well as with general environmental events (is there anyone who doesn’t integrate with Twitter now?). In addition to staying on top of current trends, we have realized that geography no longer isolates us from competition. We cannot ignore any competitive pressures, whether from local companies or international ones.

2. Engender rapid adoption: we make it easy for our customers to start using our software. Auxiliary systems like delivery, billing, and hosting are just as important as the application itself. If we cannot automate delivery or have flexible pricing schemes, or grant no-obligation trials to our application, then we are setting ourselves up for failure from the beginning. It’s critical that as a supplier of software for the mobile we focus on winning customers every month. We do this by making sure that our customers want to stay with us and not that they have to stay with us because they are bound to a long-term contract and financial commitment.

3. Focus on margins: SaaS is a game of numbers and the way to win the game is to focus on improving the revenue numbers.

4. Reliability is key: an unreliable service makes it impossible to maintain customer loyalty every month. Architecture, infrastructure, support mechanisms, and service providers all play a critical role in our reliability and therefore our success – so pay close attention to all of these.

Anyway, enough of the lecture. We have been delighted with the initial response to mLite™ so if you want to use and start testing the mobile web for your business just visit www.mlite.co.uk and make a start.


Posted by Peter Richards 5th November