the bloggard

I came across the presentation below at this blog (Marketing too Important to be left to the Marketing Department), and was really impressed with a lot of the points that were being made. The video is definitely worth watching for anyone, like myself, who ever has or is considering starting their own company and developing a product given the unique opportunities and technologies available to us to do just that.

Not coming from a sales or marketing background, what I found most relevant about the presentation is that it spoke directly to a lot of the challenges of building consumer facing software products in the current internet era. The barrier to having a large scale presence in this software market has been reduced significantly with the availability of the numerous platform as a service vendors e.g. Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, Windows Azure, RackSpace (to name but a few). With little or no capital expenditure it’s possible to have a viable product up and running reasonably quickly. Assuming there are software development skills available to you, the true costs are only those of the time and effort you and your team is prepared to put into getting something up and running. Gone are the necessities of large structured engineering departments, dedicated sales & marketing teams focussed on customer acquisition, manufacturing to support packaging and distribution and finally professional services and partnerships for implementation and deployment options.

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