Regarding The Fundamentals Of Our Cerby Are Strong:
“we are not sure what to make of this message and find it, frankly, alarming. Are we to understand that your company and your product are in danger and that we had better move to another product? To us, this message sounds like a cry for help, or at least it rings alarm bells.”
-a concerned customer

Hey there,

The issue is that everything we can do from our end — price, functionality, value, philosophy — has the risk of being overshadowed by the Market’s irrational, paralyzing fear of financial Armageddon.

As I mentioned in the very first paragraph of that message, our company tends to experience an upside when budgets are tight since our software is relatively inexpensive and provides a great value.  The only negative implication I can find in the message we sent out is the ‘downside’ note that we’re not winning every sale — who does in any situation?

We’ve always had the risk, when getting most of our income from one-time sales, that we’d someday saturate our niche.  Realizing that inevitability, we’ve built up our On-Demand option that provides ongoing services (e.g. application hosting, backups, optimization, support, custom development) for monthly residuals.  While that’s more of a time investment than simply selling licenses to run on your hardware, it’s also more stable and creates a stronger “outsource” partnership between us and our clients.  It’s leasing out our experience instead of depending entirely on software which was written in the past.

We’re not in grave financial danger — we could run the company from a coffee shop on a shared laptop if it came down to it.  Unless we start making a lot of silly mistakes, or the sky actually does fall, it’s not going to get that bad.

If we lose the pulse of the community and stop producing software that you feel is worth what you’re paying, then that would be a very appropriate point for you to jump overboard.  However, if you’re simply worried that some external forces will dissolve our company and force us into unemployment, you can worry when we start giving everything away for free and we stop writing spry responses to your e-mails of concern. ;)

-Jeff@WGM