CREATING NEW PRODUCTS IS NOT FOR THE TIMID

By Steve Bowler

You've got a great idea. But that's not enough. Startup Product Management requires experience that only someone who's been there can understand. Your Co-founder or VP Products may be new to the profession, or may have minimal experience with a single product. That's where we come in.

With 30+ years in multiple industry verticals we know how to hit the ground running. We've outsourced and insourced, bootstrapped and raised millions, succeeded and failed, been acquired and partnered, founded, co-founded and consulted.

Lets look at some examples:

ProductFactory

As enterprise software technology shifted from thick clients and in house servers to Internet, some visionaries saw the potential for global product development. With a few false starts and little investment, the ProductFactory team set out to connect engineers, program managers, quality assurance specialists, and data managers across the digital supply chain.

pfDeliver, the flagship product would create a shareable program plan and assign login roles through a thin client, a browser, using a java front end and commercial SQL databases. Our role was to provide the specifications and priorities to development, primarily in India, and test the releases as they came through.

It was not exactly a straight line to success but eventually we acquired three reference-able customers and an interested development partner. Using their sales force and a more polished version we began to finally see commercial success, so much so that the company was acquired.

HotChalk

Being ahead of your time can work both ways. HotChalk was one of the first Freemium SaaS Cloud Learning Management Systems before any of those terms had come into popular use. Free to teachers, it relied on advertising to pay for it. The acquisition of The Lesson Plans Page added an early traffic boost. The idea of providing students and teachers with tablets or small laptops was tried and then abandoned as was providing districts with wireless networks. 

Early partnerships with NBC Universal and McGraw-Hill provided premium content for classroom use and professional development respectively. Videos from The Learning Channel, National Geographic, PBS, and NBC News as well as self produced videos call Off-Road Algebra added strong content value but little commercial success.

HotChalk would later morph into a Online Program Management (OPM) company with several university partnerships.21

Venalytica

We founded Venalytica because we didn't like the way you search for products on the Internet. I still believe we got the problem right and had a decent solution but timing and external factors kept me from being ultimately successful. 

The issue is that when you look for a TV, computer, cell phone, car and many other complex items, you don't get a true ranking like a search engine. Rather the websites use a process of elimination. After selecting and deselecting filters on the product page you end up with some number of equally valid results.

The Venalytica Method, which we called Consumer Preference Analytics was to use an Analytical Hierarchy to determine from the consumer which characteristics of the product were relatively more important than others. The resultant ranking would put the best choice at the top of the search result based on the underlying product data.

Unfortunately 2008 was the start of a disastrous cycle for online retailers.

ByProxie

There's no greater challenge for a startup than, well, getting started. You need the right combination of people, process and tools. ByProxie needed to get their product developed, add to their team, and build their processes for delivery, onboarding, and sales engagement.

We helped select the outsource development partner, set up the development process and reporting, create product management deliverables - product roadmap and specifications, and competitive analysis

Steve Bowler is a Co-Founder of HotChalk, Inc., Inc. an early pioneer in K12 EdTech and an Online Program Manager for Post Secondary Education. He also Co-Founded ProductFactory, Inc., a provider of enterprise Product Portfolio Management that was acquired and a Founder of Venalytica in Consumer Preference Analytics. Steve is an expert in Product Management, Program Management and Agile Development.