Yes, I’m alive. No, I have not suffocated under the pile of money we made in Q3 and ExchangeDefender is well on it’s way to being a defacto security platform with 5.0 release coming-any-day-now-Duke-Nukem-Forever-style.
Yes, that’s really me on Facebook. Yes, I’ll be your friend.
Now that’s where the good news ends, at least for me. I’m back to the Ironman mode, working about 12-20 hours a day. On Friday, I started my vendor tour at ConnectWise trying to solicit feedback and figure out what the next 5 years holds for us.. because the IT industry as a whole is dying.
Now dying could just be consolidating. It could just be outsourcing. Whichever way we look at it, the road ahead has far fewer players with far less profit margins for premium products and the traditional way of marketing ourselves is just not going to cut it anymore because competing with free is just not a possibility.
But what if free lead to product differentiation and instead a marketing upsell opportunity?
Here is the bottom line: everything is trending towards free. And given the option of taking a freebie or paying for something, almost everyone would try the free route first. What do you have to lose? If you really get what you pay for, all you have to do is pay a little more than $0.
Our partners and vendors need to get aboard with a plan to cross-promote ourselves.
If you work with us or we work with you, please reach out and find me. If you don’t work with us then this is probably one of those posts I’ll be linking back to a year down the road to explain why things are the way they are and how early you had the opportunity to do something great.
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