Don’t buy the Monkey

Greetings from France! Things have been crazy at work over the past two months and to be honest, I’m just not one of those people that can unplug. IT is very much who I am and it’s far more than a job or a career for me – it’s just the way of life. So since I can’t unplug the next best thing is to travel to a place where I can’t plug in a laptop.

Over the past few months we have been really hard at work on Shockey Monkey, coding and bug fixing, wheeling and dealing. And now that work has been completed I have only one recommendation:

I wouldn’t buy the Pro. Just sign up for the free one. But that’s just me.

A year ago we shocked the MSP world by giving away Shockey Monkey – an MSP service management platform – for free. For some of the more advanced and more vain features we offered a commercial platform as well (Pro) to folks that wanted to help us fund the development and get support along the way. It has gone far, far, far, far, far better than I ever thought it would.

The problem with all great things is that they all come to an end and most of the time it’s due to the arrogance of the people that confuse success with invincibility. Europe is littered with empires that conquered the continent, just to end up confined to a tiny fraction of itself when they didn’t recognize the change or became too greedy. Even the mighty empire that built the massive victory arc behind me in the picture once covered nearly all of Europe – before deciding it would be a good idea to attack Russia. In Russia. In the winter.

But in terms of my own empire, Shockey Monkey has been more successful and became bigger than I ever thought it would. We’ve been busting our butt to bring the new one out and as we’ve been working with a ton of new partners one question that always came up was: “So when are you going to jack up the price and eliminate the Free/Fro versions? It would instantly put you on the same level with your competitors and be a no-brainer.”

The answer to that comes in October – but I have to stress that the following is my opinion, my opinion only and does not represent the views of the employees, shareholders or anyone even remotely connected to my empire – I wouldn’t buy the Pro version of Shockey Monkey.

Stay tuned.