Actionrev was delivered as a product with a simplified palette of features. This allowed us to focus on delivering a design that was flexible, scalable, and robust enough to handle various business requirements. Through the process we scrapped three or four designs until we settled on what we thought would handle the future of the product.

With the core design in place we sought after early adopters to help us customize the features. As we worked with these users we got great feed back on how the product should work. We were in daily discussions with them producing many great features. Luckily the design we chose was able to elegantly handle the load.

This process gave us an idea of how to market our product. Remaining in the theme of applying simple software to process complex tasks we coined the term “Community Enhancements” and built our business model around it.

The premise is software plus service delivers great business value. We sell our core product, Actionrev, on a simple month-to-month lease. Included in that usage is support which we highly encourage. As we talk to our users we are able to enhance the core design or add features to support their needs. With a quick turnaround, usually on a few days, we release an update that’s immediately available to all users of the software.

This process makes our users very excited to talk to us. Our customers often call us to just talk or brainstorm because they want to be involved with this development process.

With this model as a customer focused software company, ModalSoftware expects to gain an edge over the competition.

For the new year we rolled out a new look for Actionrev. The biggest goal for the new visual design was to improve clarity and organization of information.

With the new color theme we used warmer colors to bring active information to the forefront and cooler colors to push passive information to the back. Using only a two color theme we used different shades to help organize the screen.

After the roll out of the application we immediately received phone calls from our users who were happy to see the change. That’s a more subtle goal that we aimed for. Most of our early adopters have been using the system for months. Most of the work and improvements have been deep within the product which cannot be “seen”. Delivering a new visual design help convey product “freshness” and the impression their product is actively being worked on.

Feel free to browser the demo yourself:

http://actionrev.com/demo

On December 27, 2006 the first line of source code for Zygote (now called Actionrev) was checked in. From that day the source code has been scrapped, twisted, tested, reworked, redesigned, polished, deployed, and above all used! We are on revision 889 with about 70 users logging in daily.

Our plans for 2008 is to ramp up sales and push Actionrev as much as we can. The segment of the transportation industry that we’re targeting is a very tight community. They work closely together to keep the wheels moving. To help connect these businesses we’re working hard to roll out our next generation of Zygote called the “Actionrev Network”. Through the network we will connect distributors, to dealers, to the service shops to speed up the flow of business.

The end of summer here in central California was blazing hot as well as the developers’ code here at Modal Software!

In August we launched our new product, Actionrev, into production with two clients going live. Our team was able to knock out the conversion process with very little disruption to their day to day business.

Even more exciting are the responses our sales team have been receiving from the prospects. The most common requests are for a modern user interface and seamless multi-location support. We’re proud to say our software delivers those best.

A lot of companies out there are still operating on expensive AS/400 servers and paying high maintenance fees. Because we can leverage the internet to deliver our software as a service we can drive the total software costs down. We offer affordable leases based on the number of users your company has.

Surrounding the launch of our application was a lot of busy work. We have been responding to and prioritizing feature requests, talking to lawyers for trademarks and copyrights, and lots of micro meetings to keep our little company of six employees on target. It’s lots of work but we’re looking forward to the big payoff…a profitable software house!