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Falling in love with Interactive Tools
// TheWorldJournal.com
Whoever said falling in love with a tech company was irrational due to all the variety was seriously mistaken. One company that made its customers fall in love with it is on its way to the top of selling web-based software. Everything it needs is already there: respected employees, innovative solutions and impatient consumers. Add marketing comprehension, attention to details and excitement to the package and you get one company standing – InteractiveTools.com. One may say it is just an ordinary company producing software, which might just be true if it were not for one little fact – “technically”, it does so better than anybody else on the market.
InteractiveTools.com’s story of software-selling success did not commence from the day the company was founded by Dave Edis back in 1999 – an e-business innovator who successfully combined firm knowledge of marketing and technology, guiding his company through some impressive evolutionary steps. Interactive Tools was originally meant to do custom programming work. So it did. But one year later Edis decided to turn his booming business around. For two very good reasons: Initially, custom programming was expensive. For every single client who could afford them, there were fifty who wanted software but didn’t have the budget. Secondly, the company simply could not handle the demand. There were not enough programmers to service many requests from parties who could afford custom work.
The decision was made to produce web-based software. At the same time the company already had a positive reputation for creating functional and easy-to-use software. The chosen strategy, based on profitability, proved itself to be the right one.
When Interactive Tools got a client who wanted to manage real estate listings on his web site, Interactive Tools, having done the same in the past, developed a more “shrink-wrapped” version, according to the company. They called it Realty Manager 1.0. The release of their first software product was quietly done. Explains Fraser Cain, Interactive Tools’ head of marketing: “We’ve never been much for fanfare and growth for growth’s sake. We’d rather release software quietly and make sure it’s good and ready. Maybe you’ll hear more from us when Realty Manager 3 comes out.”
After the release of their first web-based program, the company released additional products, which brought in more revenue than custom programming. “Eventually, we stopped taking on custom programming work and just went with selling web-based software. We haven’t looked back since.”
One of the greatest advantages for the company is the fact that their new customers really like the software, so they practically momentarily accept the company as a whole, becoming their long-term partners. And they currently have thousands of such partners. Even though Interactive Tools clientele is limited by the number of people who have a web browser and who need to manage their web site, that’s still a lot of people. Says Cain: “We chose to make our software function in the web browsers, but we just as easily could have made them all Windows applications. As the browser technology improves so we can offer better functionality and more people want an inexpensive way to make a web site, our potential customer base will grow.”
Interactive Tools is also comfortable talking about competition. The company recognizes its competitors, companies like Vignette, Interwoven, Gossamer Threads or Open Source and other web-based software development companies. But, it says, the direct competition isn’t too organized yet. Most of the direct competition is individual programmers putting out medium quality “scripts”, which is most often hard to install, poorly documented and open to all kinds of security attacks. According to Cain, here Interactive Tools tries to lead through innovation, functionality and professional user interface.
“We also compete indirectly with the really expensive content management solutions (Vignette or Interwoven). We compete with them by offering feature rich content management solutions for about 1/100th of the price,” – he says. “Finally, we compete against Open Source content management solutions. These are a little harder to compete with, as they are free. But, many organizations don’t have the internal resources to deploy and maintain an Open Source solution. We offer free support, free upgrades and free installations, so it’s easy for many of our clients to justify the purchase price of the software.”
With thousands of customers and profitable-like-never-before times, Interactive Tools spends 50% of all investments on development. The other half goes to sales, support and administration. “We break up our development time fairly evenly between: adding new features to our existing products, releasing new products and upgrading our overall technology infrastructure to improve all our products,” – says Cain.
The company’s external strategy helped them make their own web site near the top of the field, from a pure traffic standpoint. Interactive Tools has built an impressive web development resource directory and partners with its participants with a simple link exchange, which drives them a lot of targeted potential buyers – web enthusiasts and professionals, web site managers and e-business owners.
In real life, Interactive Tools wants to be more than just a company that sells software products. Executives want to build a profitable company where the work is challenging and fun; where employees are respected (even at the expense of growth and profits), and where they are proud of the software they create.
In the meantime, Dave Edis and InteractiveTools.com is well on track to fulfill a goal he set when he turned his business around. The company has a huge to-do list that needs to be dealt with in the near future. They are not only working on several new technologies, where multilingual capabilities, enhanced security and the ability to co-brand their software is just the part of it, but Interactive Tools is also promising a brand new interface for everything, which should make the software easier and quicker to use.
We’re about to find out if that is enough to beat the future market.
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