When you’re choosing a mobility vendor, while it might seem natural to make a decision based solely on the features you want compared to the features that vendor offers, we’re here to tell you that there’s a better way. Put another way, don’t choose one vendor over another just because one is missing one or two features.
Our philosophy of product-building is based off of years of experience into building software and working with enterprises. Today, I’d like to expand on the idea of product customization and explain some concrete examples to better describe what extensions, or customizations mean to App47.
The three areas we’ll cover–this is our first post in a three-part series–are product extensions, enterprise integration, and embedded app stores.
To cover the first area, product extensions, let’s first take a step back and talk a little about how my experiences in building several companies. App47 is startup number seven for me. Along with my business partner, we’ve started companies using our own money, landed VC dollars to grow rapidly, and bootstrapped service companies through revenue.
One of the many things we’ve learned through the years is building ahead of demand, but only slightly. This translates into when App47 was first built, we focused on the core set of features we heard from the market, and that prospects we were talking with in the early days. Once in GA, we listened closely to sales calls to drive which features to build next. We continue that process today, building ahead of demand but only slightly. Balancing this feedback with innovation, market disruption, and our own view of how things should be done gives us an ever-evolving feature set.
This all sounds like a good strategy, but it does present one wrinkle in the sales process: we may not always have all the features you want released at the time you see the App47 demo. We have successfully managed this through the years by following the strategy above, listening to the market, being reactive, and building slightly ahead of the market. Most times, we manage this through our normal R&D process, however in a few cases based on timeline and size of feature, we will partner with the prospect to quickly meet the demand from the market.
So: why walk through this philosophical approach to how we build products? Well, the hope is that you walk away with a better understand of how the App47 product is built: to your needs. When you speak to us in the near future about your mobile application management needs, know we are listening and looking to partner with you for success.
Next week, we’ll talk about taking this a step further and tightly integrating into your situation. Feel free to contact us at sales@app47.com to get the conversation started.
