Surgical Sales vs. Community Development ...

Recently, I had a very good discussion with a pretty successful Sales guy about ways which Jellingspot should be pitched (since the Windows version will be on the site shortly...) ... naturally, being a sales guy, he's of the opinion that starting with large organizations who can thus push the product down the chain is the way to start, whereas my vision is to build a much larger user base and pick of smaller sales as the community grows and once the user base is larger, then hit up larger franchises, etc...

Both have their goods and bads and I'm not blind to them. For starters, being an unfunded company, getting a few (but large) customers would really help with accelerating development since their initial investment goes toward building and improving the product. Consider it "seed money" from them ... you give them a competative advantage ... a change agent as it's called, they tend to invest into you (since you're doing them a favor, even if your technology isn't mainstream ... doesn't generally matter, since these types of customers are of the Innovator class anyway). The problem with this approach is that you can then become slaves to these few companies, and while making money, the product itself can become neglected, and eventually, some other similar product with more vigor might surplant you. Having only time and an extremly large amount of my personal time involved in our product (no investors to pay back...), I'm not in a hurry to be enslaved (however, a few big customers also help nab additional customers ... kinda a bowling pin approach -- hit the first head right, and other customers/pins begin to fall).

The second approach (which I favor) is the "community" approach, which is to build up the user base FIRST and worry about the money later. Obviously, Jellingspot works fine ... it's not a concept technology but something people are using everyday now ... the problem is, it still needs some polishing and some new features we have planned just haven't made it in yet (time/resources...) ... our goal (soon) is to simply make it available to the community to use it .... period. We'll make steady improvements, but while the community uses it, we'll get feedback, and can make necessary changes when needed. The more people that use it, the better ... if people are using it, there is more reason for locations to install it, etc.... the chicken vs. egg argument is always coming up, and the best way to really get to the chicken or the egg is to get users. This also quickly helps you dominate (from a user perspective) the market ... just imagine now: You go to some location, each "big customer" has their own point server solutions (Jellingspot, Bluepulse, Kameleon, etc...) .... that is essentially 3 different client applications you have to have on your phone ... even being a phone geek, I'm not sure I'd even install 3 different ones. Since Jellingspot is not tied to any specific hardware solution, it would be foolish for us to ignore the greatest distribution tool on the planet (the Internet) to spread Jellingspot around the planet. This is what we're gonna do. Unfortunately, this industry is still in its infancy ... there is not going to be any compatibility between solutions (mainly because they're all a bit different ... however, if something gets similar, we'd be willing to make our application cross-compatiable ...) anytime soon, so expect a lot of cools things from different people, but expect to have a few apps on your phone until the industry consolidates itself ...

It's gonna get exciting soon ... stay tuned!