Our mission, or why we get out of bed in the morning

This is the first in a series of open strategies Silktide Software will be putting on our blog. We can’t tell you everything we’re planning, but we believe transparency nearly always helps us and our customers.

We love the web. We want to make it a better place. Our challenge is figuring out how to do that best.

All our products revolve around the simple goal of making websites better, which can broken into 3:

• We can identify what can be improved with a website.
• We can recommend what can be done about it.
• We can change the website.

Not everything we do will accomplish all of this at once. SiteRay and Nibbler – our only two products for now – focus exclusively on the first two. We’re going to get amazingly great at those before we worry about helping with changes: that’s a whole new product in itself.

As an example, this is how an ideal SiteRay might work:

• SiteRay looks at a website.
• SiteRay asks select questions about this website, e.g. “what are your key actions?”
• Issues are identified, such as “the actions in this site are displayed very low in the page, below the fold”.
• Recommendations are made, such as “change the design to bring actions higher up the page (see these examples)”.

This example neatly highlights the type of problem which computers are not very good at identifying, and that is one of the reasons our jobs are so-incredibly-cool, because we get to solve it.

How does that pay the bills?

I’m a firm believer that companies founded solely to make money, and without a greater reason for being, usually die with neither.

Our aim is to make websites better, and fortunately there are a lot of people who are willing to pay for if  they’re convinced we can deliver it. There is no doubting the size, growth or significance of this market, and it isn’t likely to be going anywhere soon.

For sure, there are some private Excel-plus-back-of-napkin calculations here, but fundamentally: as long as we can deliver what we’re promising, money isn’t likely to be a problem.

Delivery

For the foreseeable, we’ll deliver all of our solutions as SAAS (software as a service) – i.e. we provide a complete solution, hosted and supported, in exchange for relatively small regular payments. Most of this service will be provided via the cloud.

This is why:

1. Delivery scales. We can share resources such as servers between many clients, offering a lower cost to them than they could source themselves.
2. Conversely, non-SAAS does not scale. For each customer who installs on their own hardware, we need significantly more resources to support them, resulting in higher costs for them and us. We grow slower.
3. Customers only pay for what they use, as do we (when we use the cloud). Economists love this sort of thing: the efficiency allows us to keep prices low and keep our finances healthy, even during a downturn.
4. Low commitment is a strong incentive for customers to try us.
5. Regular payments allow us to give all customers ‘the latest version’, without big charges for annual upgrades, and different customers using different versions of our products. This means less support for us, which means lower costs for them.

Basically everyone wins, except for those who really want to install on their own servers. We have a few of those customers who we’ll continue to support, but we’re not planning on adding any more of them.

Summary

Write software that helps people make their websites better. Don’t shy away from the hard problems. Deliver it as SAAS. And let the finances take care of themselves (more or less).