[cyberferret]

I brought in outside help (partner). Business is still ticking along nearly 3 decades later (though original partner has since left), so I guess it sort of worked. Hardest times though, was one of us forgot to wear one of the hats for an extended period, and just got comfortable or focused on wearing it.

[oaxacaoaxaca]

Wow, congrats on your success. Very impressive. The Blaze site looks great BTW. Would you be willing to share some of the secret sauce of running a successful software shop for nearly 30 years?

[cyberferret]

Thank you! Full disclosure, Blaze is my second software business, and has been going for 22 years now. My previous one ran for about 8 years.

In short, it is really about providing great customer service. I am lucky enough to work in a small town where word of mouth referrals are critical, and doing a good job and genuinely caring about your customers gets you noticed and gets people to stick to you loyally.

Plus I have a genuine love of learning about how other businesses operate, and get a kick out of improving how they can run using my software.

But as I get older, I find that my energy levels aren't suited to one on one development and constant support, hence my second all cloud based SaaS startup in my sig - really it is phase 2 while I scale back my personalised face to face customer support and explore a more distributed way of doing things on a global scale, rather than local.

[oaxacaoaxaca]

Thank you for your reply. Much appreciated.

I'm just getting started on this path, and I'm really starting to see that like you said, excellent customer service--not beautiful code or elegantly applied computer science principles, etc.--is the most important thing.

Now I just need to figure out how to establish that network and reputation. Thanks again!