According to Paul Graham, the world renowned author, hacker, painter, public speaker and now VC, Y-Combinator, the seed money no bullshit VC he co-founded, gives their founders a T-shirts with the inscription:

“Make something people want.”

What a great motto!

But, how do you know what people want? for us, the answer has been to build something good but initially quite simple and get it to the market as quickly and possible. Now we try to iterate fast on improvements and additional features based on actual customer feedback.

In order to do this, we spent the time since the launch, beside supporting our already existing customers, in a series of meetings, talks and email exchanges with potential customers.We engage the customer based on the offering that we already have and give them a demo. If they are interested all the better, but if they are not, which is often the case with any new product which has some innovative aspect to it, we ask them the Three Questions:

1. What is lacking in what we showed you? what additional features would make you consider buying it?
2. What bothers you most in your technical support operation?
3. What bothered you most in the past and how did you resolve that?

Our purpose is to implement some sort of pilot implementation based on the most interesting answers that we’ve heard and get back to the responders with the results.

And while this process is not nearly even half finished, the results thus far were truly eye opening and we thought it might be a good idea to share some of them here and get your feedback.

So, here they are: what are users and would be users really want, also known as the SupportMatrix Totally Non-Official Roadmap:

Product Knowledge Base

Enable the user to see variety of information regarding the hardware/software setup of the current session, within the browser and side by side the DriverMatrix session, using a simple tabs interface.

The tabs page replaces the existing operator view, and the session tab includes the existing functionality:

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When the operator clicks the “Description” tab, he or she gets information for the product or application.

For example, here is a would be page for the a printer driver, including a photo of the printer, textual description, and a link to driver page:

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The description is inserted by administrator in a normal administrator driver view using a WYSIWYG html editor, which is embedded in the administration interface:

Click on the thumbnail to see the full screen shot

Statistics module

This feature adds a wealth of statistics and reports regarding the system usage for the support center managers as well as system administrator. The statistics covers sessions lengths, type of drivers, products and operating systems and system performance statistics.

Data about the activity is gathered constantly during the systems operation, and the statistics are periodically updated.

Some statistics are targeted towards the support center manager and record such things as which product or operating system takes longer to support:

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Other statistics are targeted towards the system administrator and can be used as a tool to fine tune the system to run better:

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Reports export

Enables the system administrators to export data from the system to other systems in different formats, such as CSV, for further analysis.

Session Preloading

Enable shortening the perceived delay time of a session start: the CRM system can signal DriverMatrix to preload the server side of the session, once it knows that there is a high probability that an operator will require this specific session. For such a preloaded session, the operator browser will start with a much shorter delay.

Screen Shots Based Instructions

Enables the operator to record his activity with the DriverMatrix sessions as screen-shots or video, for sending the end customer as a visual instructions when communicating by email.

So, which of the above features did you like and would like to see in the next version? or better yet, which feature is missing? do let us know.

Matt Asay, blogger, Open Source advocate, founder of Alfresco, Soccer fan and at least around these parts of the wood, a role model, has written a post on his CNet blog entitled: “Saturation point for enterprise open source?”

In his post, Matt raises the question whether current day commercial Open Source ventures, SupportMatrix being one example he gives, are focusing on niche markets rather then CRM, ERP, ECM and the likes and worries that such niche markets are not big enough to sustain Open Source development leaving it prey to un-software service companies such as Google, Yahoo and friends. Matt also ties this to a recent drop in VC investments in Open Source companies.

Well, Matt, first of all, thanks for the mention. You are absolutely right - we are certainly not “… the Open Source X”. There is no such X quite yet in the proprietary world. We’re rather proud of that, but it’s quite independent of the really interesting question - how big is the market for what we’re doing, that is, software that helps making big support center manageable and technical support better?

The truth, and please don’t ever mention that we said this to our investors, is that we haven’t got the foggiest idea.

Oh, we are well rehearsed in reciting the numbers in the harsh light of the slide projector: “… there are 100 big support centers per region, we have 4 regions (EMEA, North America, Australia and Far East), at an average 500 operators per big support center and a price tag of 5k$ per user we get a total market cap of One… Billion… Dollars! ” [insert little finger in side of mouth here for full effect].

But as old Field Marshall Helmuth Carl Bernard von Moltke used to say: “No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy .” and this is true today or marketing plans of start ups just as it was true for the Prussian army back in the old Field Marshall days. We’ll find out how big the market is once we manage to sell enough of our stuff to actually have enough meaningful dots in the graph. Until then, it’s all hearsay and wishful thinking.

You see, because we have no idea how big the market size really is or how much money we’re going to make, it makes perfect sense to try and throw as little money and resources on the problem to start with and the best way for a software start up to start small and remain frugal is is to use Open Source software. That way, if it turns out the market really is smaller then we thought, no harm done. We’ll just move along to something else.

If we do succeed however, we’re completely based on Open Source software and committed to the Open Source movement for good, and through the magical pixie dust of the GPL, even if we get bought out, this will not change in a major way.

In a way, Open Source works like an angel, except it doesn’t invest money - it invests IP. If the investment went sour, no big deal. But if it went well, we’ll pay back, with interest and a premium, IP to feed our Open Source angel next investment.

So don’t worry Matt. Open Source is fine and plays Y-Combinator with the coolest startups of the world. Losing doesn’t cost it a penny, and scoring produces hordes of paid developers to maintain it’s riches. World domination is proceeding according to schedule.

When the ancient Greeks went out to wage war against the hordes of who ever it was turn to slaughter, they made a point of burning the boats they came in the minute all the soldiers were on shore.

They didn’t do it because the boats were not valuable any more. In fact, when landing on enemy shore boats become more valuable, not less. But the value of these boats where in their ability to carry you back home, even if you didn’t manage to slit the throats of all those other people.

That value proved to a bit too distracting. Better burn the boats and make sure all the men understand that there really isn’t any way to turn back, unless it’s on the broken backs of the enemy soldiers.

Releasing your commercially developed software, the one you spent the last two years designing, writing and debugging and you really really hope to be able to generate revenue from again, as Open Source software, works in almost the same way.

We destroy the value of the bits and bytes, the precious intellectual property so dear to companies of old, venture capitalists and lawyers. We make a big mound of it and torch it all up.

Because the value in the software itself proves to be too distracting. When you’re proprietary you can kid yourselves that all you have to do is be better then the competitors in your niche. You can lull yourself to believe that the customers will buy because they don’t have a choice. You drink the KoolAid.

But the IT industry have grown up. It doesn’t work this way any more. If you want to succeed, you need to understand that bits and bytes don’t matter any more. Only customer satisfaction does. Competition does not matter any more. Knocking your customer socks off their feet with amazing service does. And you have to do it again and again and again.

When you know that you have to build your business so that your customers will pay even though you are giving the bits and bytes for free, when your worst competition comes not from some other company down the road but your own creativity and genius and sweat and blood and tears, when you are faced with all that - you realize you have no other choice: excellence is the only option and so succeed you will or die trying.

Open Source does that. I’m not the first to realize it, I know. Matt Assay from Alfresco said it before me. That is how and why RedHat wins CIO Vendor Value awards two years in a row, way ahead much bigger and stronger companies.

But you know what? it’s something else entirely when you can smell those burning ships and hear the locals shouting.

Burn, baby burn. We launch in two days.

Gby.

Burning ship picture courtesy of chatigirl, the Creative Commons and flickr.