What a week

We launched Shockey Monkey. This is probably the only place I can be honest about it so pardon the rambling. And to be honest, after years of development and feedback and making sure we have a platform to grow our partners and our business, I’m pretty much dead tired. Let the following be the bottom line as far as I’m concerned.

How did it go Vlad?

This is my gift to the business community that made me who I am. Personally. Professionally. Thank you. It’s free. Really. No catches. You don’t have to buy ExchangeDefender. You don’t have to join the partner program. I won’t sell your contact information to the Nigerian mafia that I pay to SPAM you with 419 letters.

Seriously. It’s free. Enjoy.

The launch went much, much, much better than expected.

That’s sort of a total lie. We spent a lot of money on the event and counted on launching it on Tuesday morning to coincide with the room drop at CompTIA. So everyone was supposed to go home, take a long nap, wake up at midnight and get ready to do last minute checks and polishes.

At 6 PM on Monday, Frank Gurnee from CharTec texted me to congratulate me about Shockey Monkey. How did he hear about it? He got the room drop. 2 seconds later, text from Stephanie: “Hey, they decided to do a room drop tonight instead of tomorrow.”

Now here is the really cool part: The www.shockeymonkey.com at that time had a blank page (intentionally because we didn’t want to be in the search index, the signup page had the payment gateway disabled, the documentation page had a test CSS my layout monkey wanted me to vote up or down and the contact page I had requested just that morning was pointing to a non-existent file.

So the plane started taking off, and in the clear violation of FAA rules, I was texting fantically to wake up the monkeys and get them to get ready to fling poo faster. I was texting about 3 words a txt, mostly because the 10 year old next to me was staring at my phone expecting it to crash the plane at any moment, and partially because I didn’t know at which point the 3G would go to Edge and be dead.

My texting stream ended with the following response from my developer:

“Plz stop. Each time you msg me my blood pressure increases. Let me handle it… I have about 2 hours right?”

fml.

But wait, it gets better!

I get on the Airtran wireless network and start trying to condense the 8 hours of work and review I should have done weeks ago – in a 2 hour flight. Apparently, I’m very efficient when 30 people aren’t asking me questions.

The only thought that was racing through my mind was: WTF am I the one doing this stuff.

So we get to San Antonio, wait for an eternity for our swag (300lb of shirts which BTW the tshirt company shipped to the wrong address and we couldn’t even overnight them on time) and get to the conference. Of course I see like 20 people that ask me to come down to the bar. Alright, gotta be a ho.

I walk downstairs to the bar.

First person I say hi to is Bob Godgart.

Vlad: Hi Bob!

Bob: You know Vlad, real CEO’s don’t write code.

Mother@#%. That’s OK, I got him back. Later that evening I introduced him as “This is Bob, he’s the Arnie Bellini of Autotask.” 😉

Spent a little bit of time at a bar saying hi to everyone and then decided to go back to my room, order room service and just knock out the rest of the stuff I had on my to-do list. Thankfully, nearly all of it was completed in a few hours so I got to sleep by 4.

At 5:30, Kate called me to tell me she missed her flight.

All things considered, it was still the best 90 minutes of sleep I got all week.

The rest of the week is sort of a blur.

I’ve spent the past few days answering questions. Here is one that I’d like to answer with as much profanity and sincerity as cleanly as I can:

How does Shockey Monkey compete with Autotask and ConnectWise?

Here is the PR answer:

How does this compare with the Autotask, ConnectWise, etc
To be honest, it’s not even close. Mature PSA solutions are flexible, customizable, offer variety of deployment methods and have a very sophisticated ERP, CRM, billing and sales management process. If your business is at that level, please contact the providers and don’t even look at Shockey Monkey – it’s not for you.

We designed Shockey Monkey from the ground up to be simple. As veterans of the software business we had to take a hard look at the mirror and see what kind of software we were developing – selling features, selling enterprise quality and support. We simply could not write such a solution and make it available for free. Over the past few years the Web 2.0 has caught a lot of hype and popularity because it focused on the users, not the system and the IT. We wanted to create an environment that was easy to use, easy to configure and start managing right away. We also spent a significant amount of time to make it easy for you to upgrade to the professional services automation platform and currently have Autotask ready to go. We also created an XML export so you can integrate it into any other solution that supports XML import and data mapping.

Now here is the actual answer:

For the past 2 years we’ve been developing a ton of software for both Autotask and ConnectWise. Between them, they control 99.999% of our MSP client base. Plus like two dudes in Texas that use Tigerpaw.

The notion that we’d write a software product to compete with Autotask and ConnectWise is pretty idiotic. To be honest, I didn’t even want to call our thing a PSA but the common agreement on our team was that we needed to give people an acronym that they were familiar with. So here is what we went with: “It’s the gmail of helpdesks that also manages your calendar, billing and clients.”

Not a day goes by that I don’t wish we could outsource our Exchange.

Then there is a sad realization that we make millions of dollars hosting Exchange.

The idea behind Shockey Monkey is simplicity. It’s the anti-PSA. The un-PSA. It won’t show you a sales opportunity funnel. Or the Gannt chart. If you need that, or if you even know what that means, Shockey Monkey ain’t for you.

Listen.

I’ve spent the past 2 years talking to a ton of partners and the part of the final chapter of Vladville will clue you in on the fact that the End of IT World 2012 as Mayan’s predicted it isn’t coming in a form of IT – it’s coming in a form of people entering the business of technology from the completely opposite angle many of us did. I’m here because I love computers and I was too bad at thermal physics at UF that I had to resign to the life of writing software instead of designing chips.

The new crop of IT people come from business schools, car lots and mortgage industry and they’ve likely never even seen a server in their lifetime.

In order for technology companies (like mine) to stay alive we need to design the software that is free of IT and full of common sense.

My 2 year old knows how to run an iPad. He knows how to change cartoons, how to open applications, how to get to individual parts of it.

My dad can’t figure out how to deposit and withdraw funds from Ameritrade.

When I look at the future of IT, I am far less concerned about designing software for my 63 year old dad and far more concerned about designing software for my 2 year old son.

So Shockey Monkey is free.

Does this suddenly invalidate the whole complexity thing and put all of us out of business? Well, I sure hope not – or I would have written a perfect poison pill. My thinking is that by providing something free and simple gives a very broad base of people a shot at designing a process oriented system. When they reach the level of success that needs to be managed with the likes of Autotask and ConnectWise, we’ll make that transition seamless. But we are not going to be able to grow our reseller base or the business base of MSPs without providing the onboarding solution that will help people get into business, sell all our services, support them better and report true value to the clients.

The future is simplicity.

If we make it easy for people to give us their money, I’m confident they will.

It’s all about priorities

Back in the 90’s I wrote my first web hosting control panel simply because there wasn’t one out there. It allowed me to be unique, to be competitive and in a sea of millions of web hosting providers (even free) I was able to grow.

In 2010, I’m hoping the Shockey Monkey creates that opportunity for everyone I know that this blog and my voice can reach.

There is no bad blood here between OWN or Autotask or ConnectWise.

And before anyone else asks me that question again, let me be quite clear in my response: You’ve got a very narrow view. Companies like Google and Microsoft have thousands of developers to make sure IT world as we’ve grown up in ceases to exist. If you’re trying to find conflict among the few companies that are championing the channel and empowering it’s members to grow and succeed then allow me to suggest that you’ve got to redo your priorities.

In a nutshell

I owe my business and my success to the thousands of people that have sold our products, helped build our services and constantly work with us even when we’re being DDoS’ed off the planet and server resources go to 0 and slow everything down except the heart rate.

This is my thank you to all of you. I always say thank you, I spend a lot of time and money on my partners. And this, wholeheartedly, is the most sincerest way I can say it:

We’ve built something that’s genuinely all yours.

We don’t expect anything in return.

We’ll find more people that feel that way and will help fund your growth just for the attention you give them and their products.

Enjoy: www.shockeymonkey.com

P.S. I’ll explain the product and announce it a bit later this weekend after I’ve had about 30 hours of sleep I’ve missed this week.