One of the things that I love about running my own startup is the chance to interact directly with my customers and other people. In my many years working at Microsoft and Sun Microsystems before that I rarely got the opportunity to meet and talk with customers. There was always the customer support team, or the business development group, or some other group that “owned” the customer. And the last thing anyone wanted was for an engineer to talk to a customer <gasp> who knows what they might say…. So, needless to say it is refreshing to be able to work directly with customers and other people that are connected to my business. This might be helping a customer through a problem they are having and in the process understanding how to make it more intuitive for the next person, or walking a vendor through code explaining the reasoning for implementations (which helps me think it through also). The benefit of the direct interaction is huge for my company and I believe it has been beneficial for my customers as well.
This week has been particularly interesting as we are preparing to launch our product out of beta and into its full release. I found myself smiling at the global nature of a small startup and somewhat awed by the reach that the internet of today allows. So much of this wasn’t possible even 5 years ago, well maybe technically possible, but highly unlikely at least. This week alone I have been on Skype with customers in Colorado, Florida and Switzerland; exchanged multiple emails with customers in New York, UK and Australia; interacted through web tools with developers and writers in South Africa, Philippines, China and India; worked with my test team who are distributed in places like India, Canada, Chile and the USA. All of this from my tiny office in Carpinteria, CA. The world is getting smaller.
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