When I talk with friends, investors, and some customers, I am often asked “what about Salesforce.com?” And I smile.
Salesforce.com has 47,000 customers or so. It sells to very large companies and mid-sized companies,and then tries to shoehorn their package into something for small businesses. Our customers are small and very small businesses. There are 4.6 million QuickBooks customers, mostly small businesses. Salesforce is indeed an enterprise software company.
So no, these are not things we worry about. When you evaluate CircleDog, the first thing you’ll notice is how clean the interface is. We are very deliberate about leaving out unnecessary icons and a long row of drop-down menus that hide critical tasks.
Instead, everything is ordered according to what you need to get done–Sections are on the top, things you can do are on the left, and help is on the right and is context-sensitive: it appears for every screen so you don’t have to go looking for it.
With enterprise CRM (customer relationship management) software like Salesforce.com, NetSuite.com, and a host of others, the interfaces are filled with lots of features, the navigation is somewhat complicated, and they are designed for larger-scale operations. And these are web-based applications, which tend to perform more slowly and lock in your data.
This last point is important in some cases: if the service fails your data is held hostage until they get it running again. One of our possible competitors just shut down because of internal fraud–you can get your data out (someone will fix this for them, I’m hoping).
Add to that the cost for even the baseline packages and most small businesses have trouble with the total cost of ownership: annual or monthly fees, significant training, and reluctance of some staffers to learn complicated software just to get work done or make calls to customers.
We built CircleDog specifically for small businesses. It’s easy to learn, easy to use, where you need it to be. And we’re always looking to improve it–your feedback makes it a better product. We read all comments and consider all feature requests. The one thing we will always strive for is satisfying your needs for simple, powerful software that just works.
We hope you’ll participate in the forums and encourage your input. There aren’t a lot of companies serving the very small business market, and with CircleDog, you’ve got a product solely focused on you.
Charlie Crystle
October 11, 2008 at 8:29 pm
It’s not very fair to use scare tactics about SaaS. With Salesforce (which I’m not affiliated with but have used for many years) you can extract all of your data with a single click. In fact, my sales rep there even encouraged me to do so at any time, even though they make regular backups.
I am a consultant to a lot of businesses that are not prepared for the task of backing up their own computers/files/servers on a remotely regular basis. For them, an offline solution means their data could be lost for good.
October 12, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Thanks for the comment. This isn’t meant as a scare tactic. The reality is that–as you say–businesses need to back up their data, and we’ll offer a service for that sometime in 2009.
But it is true that Twitter, Delicious, Salesforce, and a host of other applications have had difficulty with uptime from time to time. Redundancy and multiple paths to access your data is very important; several years ago we were a customer ourselves of a hosted CRM system that went down for a full day–a day of lost sales. It hurts. So having the ability to export at any particular time isn’t ahelp when the service is down, unless you’re in the discipline of doing it every hour/day/relevant period.
I’ll try to be more comprehensive when I make posts like this. The primary point is that we specifically develop for very small businesses and not mid-sized and large-scale businesses, and that makes a difference in the end result.
As far as what platform to choose–hosted is good for some things, the desktop better at others, and hybrid between the two can offer the best of both worlds. That’s the direction we’re headed–the software runs where it makes sense for the customer.