| > Unless you have a revolutionary product, the bigger competition will likely stomp over you unless you have resources to grow your team and product and marketing. Or if you are comfortable with a small market share but a profitable one. Case in point, me. I started FreeRADIUS in 1999. Started making money in 2007. Incorporated in 2008. I now have multiple offices, multiple employees, and good growth. No investment. No debt. The "bigger competition" in my case are AMdocs (previously Bridgewater), Cisco, Juniper, Alcatel. I compete by offering a technically superior product, at a lower price point. I do zero marketing. Zero sales people. Pretty much zero RFPs. My customers call me, and ask to buy my product. I have a small market share by revenue, but a huge market share by installations. My guess is that the total number of FreeRADIUS installs is 10x that of all corporate installs combined. > More often than not when startups receive funding they move away from satisfying the customers to making investors happy. Exactly. My pitch is simple: We make you happy. You need customization? We do customization. You need to integrate with a 10 year-old system? No problem, we do that. We're about expertise, and keeping the money in our pockets, instead of doing gimmicky "enterprise" stuff. A counterpoint is one of our competitors. Their product relies on an "enterprise grade" DB. Which means that for every dollar they make on a sale, the DB company makes ten. Uh... if that money is available, why leave it on the table? Drop an open source database in (yes, it would have worked. They need the marketing label, not the technical capabilities). Give the customer a 50% discount. Your cut goes from $1 to $6, and the customers price goes from $11 to $6. Everyone is happy. Nope. They couldn't make it big, so they got bought. And the new owner flogs the crap out of the product, "end of life" the product every 2 years, and forcing expensive upgrades. Which means that their customers call me. It's all good. |