Birth & Evolution of a Web 2.0 Concept
I have always been interested in how ideas are developed and how products get to market. I’ve read lots of books and articles about the founding of companies and the bios of accomplished people in business, politics, and life in general. The birth of eXpresso has been the most interesting story yet, and I’ve had a front row seat!
The origins of eXpresso can be traced to the brilliant mind of a serial entrepreneur, Huy Nguyen. Huy knew that large manufacturing companies had problems communicating with suppliers/vendors scattered around the world. That spawned the thinking that the answer might be a collaboration platform built as a Web 2.0 service.
After two years investing in development, Huy found a large manufacturer with a huge inventory mitigation problem that could validate the concept. The first major sale was a success and we had our primary reference account. We thought we were off to the races.
It wasn’t long before an old marketing truism came back to bite us: “A customer does not a market make”. After multiple attempts at direct sales to large manufacturing accounts, we couldn’t get people to move, even though we were armed with a proven success story. Some prospects elected to just ignore the problem; some settled on another solution, and others just studied it to death.
Our learning journey continued as we dispelled the myth: “If you build it they will come”. Despite having a slick, robust platform resulting from (by now) three years of development, we knew the “they will come” phrase can only be true for imaginary baseball players.
We needed answers and a new direction. Maybe we weren’t listening as well as we should have been. So we pulled out a transcript of a customer feedback interview. Mixed in with all the techie talk was a business quote – the nugget we could use to guide our future: “You know, this platform really handles spreadsheets in a very unusual way. And let’s face it, the unspoken secret is we all run our businesses on stinking spreadsheets”.
Aha! We all convened to the conference room and agreed, “The answer is spreadsheets – collaborate on spreadsheets”. OK, great, but what now? It took a few weeks of thought and research, but we finally found our direction. We kept the collaboration platform and jettisoned the manufacturing technology. We put development on a fast track to add a lot of feature/functionality to Excel spreadsheets and we designed the capability for sharing Excel in real time. At last we had our prototype and eXpresso was officially born.
Very interesting!