Posted by aogFriday, 29 June 2007 at 11:48 TrackBack Ping URL

Passing the sanity check

As you might have noticed, SWIPIAW and I have returned from our business trip. We did a product pitch to the network security staff at a large NYC based multi-national financial firm. I.e., people whose job is to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of assets while providing access to millions of customers, very top end.

As with most endeavors, it was a mixed bag of results but overall very positive. The client didn’t order up 1,000 copies of the product, but that’s not terribly surprising. On the positive side, the client

• agreed strongly with our characterization of the problem space. In comprehensible words, that means that the client thinks we have correctly identified a real problem that needs to be addressed in companies like theirs.
• listened attentively and made insightful comments, demonstrating that it was interesting enough to pay attention.
• liked the technology we built to address the problem. The main issue they had with it was lack of polish in the user interface and comprehensiveness. The former is just work, the latter will mean trying to do a better job of integrating with other applications, as we are way too small to build a comprehensive solution ourselves in the next few years.
• indicated a desire to form a working relationship with us.

So, while we didn’t make a sale on the trip, we did gather strong evidence that we have viable business plan and product, plus gained some very valuable information on how to improve. I found it very encouraging to know that we’re not living in our own little delusional world.