The Agile Micro ISV Blog

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Infrastructure costs can be one of the main drivers that prevent micro ISVs from bootstrapping instead of seeking venture capital. Although I’ve been dimly aware of the Amazon Web Services
for a while, it’s only in the last few days that I’ve taken a closer
look and seen what they can offer to businesses in general, and to
micro ISVs in particular.

So what do they offer? Well, in short, they allow cash strapped startups to punch above their weight.

I thought it might be useful to write a series of post briefly
outlining what the Amazon Web Services are, and what they could do for
your average micro ISV. So here’s a quick peek at what they will entail:

• Amazon Simple Storage Service: S3 – A secure, online storage space for any kind of data.
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud: EC2 (beta) – On demand virtual linux servers.
• Amazon Simple Queue Service: SQS – Delivers short messages between any computers or systems connected to the internet.
• Flexible Payments Service: FPS (Beta) – Back your payments onto Amazon’s payment infrastructure.
• Amazon SimpleDB (Beta) – Store small pieces of text in a simple database structure.

The post schedule will be as follows:

• S3 9th April
• EC2 10th April
• SQS 11th April
• FPS 14th April
• SimpleDB 15th April

Don’t you find it annoying when you’ve been patronising a company for ‘n’ years and instead of rewarding you the loyal customer, they give gimmicks, widgets and other incentives to the johnny-come-latelies? Me too. After reading a post in the Customer eXperience Blog,
I came to wondering about new customer incentives and how they apply in
our world of software. It seems clear that if you operate on a model of
software purchasing, then the natural pull is to dedicate more of your
time to chasing new customers than to serving and supporting your
existing ones.

I wonder if selling Software as a Service might help turn this on its head. How could we shift the balance to making existing customers our priority?
And would we want to? As opposed to customers being ‘in the bag’, a 1
year subscription means you have 1 year in which to convince your
customer to not leave in favour of the competition. A potential
customer is someone who might have a genuine interest in your product,
or they might have a fleeting interest in your product. An existing
customer is someone who definitely has an interest in your product, the
question is are they impressed enough to subscribe for another year?

New customers are important. No-one will last long without
recognising that fact. Focusing on your existing customers will turn
your customer base into a sales tool. Testimonials will flow, forums
will be buzzing with a positive support vibe. I’ve seen support forums
full of angry questions like “Where is the support?” Not a great sales
tool.