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 your project.
And you'd find customers who would buy one product and come back for more.
But if you looked at the revenue, you'd see something of interest. The bulk of the sales were centered around two or three products: Async Professional (a serial and winsock communications library), Sleuth QA Suite (a suite of tools for detecting memory leaks and measuring performance of your app), and Orpheus (a big UI library).
If you looked at the sales of the rest of the products, in some cases you'd question whether they were worth spending the resources on. For a company in TurboPower's position, the revenue from the top sellers could carry the other products for a while. But would profits have been better if we didn't have the extras?
During the last few months of the company's existence, we asked ourselves a number of questions. Could we increase revenue and help the company survive by focusing on the top two products? Could we open source the rest and turn the remaining two into diamonds? We didn't come to a decision other than continuing to do what we'd always done. Change was hard, especially in given the circumstances.
I haven't fully experienced this yet but I'll speak my mind. For a start up company, it seems like it's best to focus on one product and not worry so much about having a portfolio for your customers to choose from. It's better to make one really good thing that people want to buy. And improve it over time. And make it the best. Then when you've figured out how to make it profitable, make the next product. But don't forget what you've done and who has bought it. Put the people in place to take care of them and stay in first place.
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Sean Winstead
Tags: ISV, Software