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.

Posted by Richard Caetano on Thursday, January 24, 2008