Our CEO, Rob Carter, on all things SaaS
For me the web was always meant to level the playing field. Take the advantages away from the ‘have’s. Remove the throttle-hold big business had on everything and start to disintermediate it. It was to be democratic and arranged into niches.
I am not saying that this has happened in entirety, we have moved control to from some old big businesses to some new big new businesses but there have been gains made too.
It used to be that making software was expensive, hugely expensive. To make it work as a business you had to sell it for a lot of money. This meant that the little guy didn’t get a look in; simply unaffordable. Now sophisticated software built online can be made faster and at a lower cost than at any time in history.
If you’re selling something for a lot of money, you need a great sales force and that costs a lot of money too. That makes the software more expensive. Now you can sell globally from a bedroom, which in turn cuts the amount of money that the software needs to be sold for.
Then, software was delivered on discs, floppy first, then CDs, and that meant that the version that a customer had on their computer was decided at the point of delivery, that customer had that version until they were sent a ‘patch’ or a whole new version. Keeping track of and supporting every version of the software every made was not only impossible, trying to was, you guessed it, expensive. Now software delivered through web browsers are only every on one version. Everyone gets the same and supporting is so much easier.
This type of software delivery is called Cloud or SaaS (Software-as-a-Service). Winning in this space is hard, the power is with the customer not the manufacturer. Make a bad product and you fail as a business. With month to month contracts customers can vote with their feet. The best companies will listen intently to their customers and make them the product they want.
When Mark told me his plans to take his project “out of the bedroom” and turn it into a real business I leapt at the chance to join the company. We have a great opportunity to make farming easier, by making useful software that farmers just want.