Iterate or Die – Part 5

Once we had a few sales under our belt, we began to notice a trend in the higher education vertical. It was the one industry in which we were able to generate the most leads using PPC ads. Additionally, we found that our application was uniquely suited to the types of challenges higher ed clients were looking to solve. It was an ideal match, and one we had never anticipated in our early days as a company.

Colleges and universities typically have a collection of independent websites with little or no consistency. As you might imagine, the development of these sites happened organically and in piecemeal fashion. Different technologies like PHP, Classic ASP, ASP.NET, and ColdFusion were used to power the dynamic portions, while plain HTML was used for more static sections. Our software can handle each of these situations by publishing files as well as content to remote databases. This flexibility has been a key differentiator for our product, especially for our higher ed clients.

Our product’s special sauce is its ability to manage multiple websites, all of which live on multiple servers and use different operating systems, from one single product instance (just think of all the independent websites at Georgia Tech). It’s a difficult problem, but our product offers the capabilities needed to solve it. In addition, we had a simple per-CPU pricing model with unlimited sites, users, groups, and content combined with a focus on XML (before XML really hit the mainstream).

I wish I could say we planned it that way, but we didn’t. The reason we could publish to different servers and support all the major programming languages was because of the goal we had set out with in our first (albeit unsuccessful) SaaS CMS: support all small business shared hosting accounts. With our SaaS CMS focused on small businesses, the only way to get content to their server was through FTP or SFTP. There weren’t any other options.

With our new mid-market CMS, we set out to provide all the benefits of a dynamic, database-driven website with the performance and flexibility of publishing flat files. It turned out, unbeknownst to us for some time, that this arrangement was perfect for higher education. We started signing more and more higher ed clients, allowing us to build a portfolio of reference customers in a specific vertical — an important step in laying the foundation for future growth. With these valuable customer references in place, it was time to grow a serious business around our product. At this point, I had been running the business on my own for over four years and was barely scraping by; but it wasn’t until then, at the start of 2005, that I was finally certain we were on to something special.

The new strategy was pretty simple — cold call all 4,160 two-year, four-year, public, and private colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada.  We focused on calling people with the following job titles:

• Webmaster
• Director/VP of IT
• Director of University Relations
• Web Manager
• Communications Director

I had three full-time sales people cold-calling and setting up web demos for me. My role was to be both the tech-savvy sales engineer and the passionate product manager that gave the demo. It worked beautifully. Sales tripled in 2005 and more than doubled in 2006. We had finally hit our stride.

Now, in 2009, we have over 120 colleges and universities as clients (including Emory, GA Tech’s Business School, Clemson, and Duke), making us one of the top higher education CMS vendors in the world. At the end of the day, achieving success came down to the following:

• Neverending determination to succeed
• Making decisions quickly and figuring out what works and doesn’t work
• Being passionate about the product and the market opportunity

Building a company is an amazing journey that is worth every minute. Even though you’ll frequently take many different turns and struggle, in hindsight these are a major factor in success. In addition, being able to iterate and learn quickly is one of the most important traits that a management team can have. Good luck!