[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!