Free business software seemed a good idea at the time. We had all these clever ideas about the cost of software dropping close to zero, and knew that would change the market for enterprise software. We wrote about our strategy and its experiment, finding out what the new business model would be for software.
At the heart of the strategy was an assumption. You would use our software (for free), and we would make money (not from you) because you were using it. We could make this work with an innovative approach to building and managing Front Office Box, keeping costs as close to zero as possible. You would want to use it because it does a great job, elegantly and simply. In fact you’d like it so much you’d tell all your friends about it, so we wouldn’t have any marketing costs either.
We were anticipating business software would follow the same path as social software (we’ll include Gmail in that bracket), and that’s where we made our mistake.
We managed to attract you from all over the world to our site, and persuade you to want a Front Office Box. We managed to get you to sign up for our free software.
But we didn’t manage to persuade you to use it.
Adoption was always going to be the problem – that’s been the case with software since the beginning of time. Every vendor has the same difficulty – thats why Microsoft software is so complicated. Its trying to do everything for everybody.
We have now definitively proved, to ourselves at least that the concept of free business software doesn’t work and never will. Social media marketing doesn’t work for business software, and never will.
Serious business people would rather pay for software (but not much of course). Tyre kickers sign up for free software, but they don’t have a need for it or the motivation to make the most of the opportunity.
Serious business people don’t hang out on Facebook, Twitter or Linked In all the time either, so they aren’t going to reached there. The people who do are looking for entertainment not ways to solve business problems.
So you didn’t take us seriously, because our business software was free. It seemed a good idea at the time but you just didn’t have a problem you needed to solve. That’s OK with us. We’ve learned a lot in the process. And from now on we’ll be charging for our services.
Front Office Box users will get:
- Multi user accounts they can administer themselves
- Great content offering our experience in sales, marketing, and small business management
- Our discoveries as we explore the business internet finding better ways to use it for business
- Access to our network of friends and other business associates
They’ll have to pay a modest fee for it of course, because you didn’t take us seriously when it was free.
Tweet
for Sales Management Insight, Strategies, Tactics, Processes and Tools
Check out our Tutorials at the top of this page and for Successful Sales Management implement these ideas with Front Office Box.
Comments on this entry are closed.
{ 2 trackbacks }