When I moved back to India (from the U.S.) in 2005 we were taking up a lot of web design and development projects and hence needed a tool to track tasks and customer communication. We developed the first version of DeskAway in 2005 just for our internal use mainly to see what people in our team were working on. Our goal was to simplify the whole process of getting a project from start to finish with the least amount of friction.
At that time I was also reading Michael Gerber’s E-Myth where he spoke about having systems in place so that things can be automated. We looked at other products out there that we could but couldn’t find anything that was simple, feature-rich and yet affordable. Virtual teams were becoming popular, SaaS was on the rise, we wanted to move out of services (and into product dev) and this is when we saw an opportunity to fulfil the need for a simple, powerful and affordable collaborative online service backed by personalized customer service. We launched DeskAway in late 2007.
How many people work for DeskAway and how did they come to the company?
Currently we have 10 people who contribute to DeskAway. Our core team from the design/development days stuck with us and we had to hire a few more people to manage customer service and support.
What has been the biggest challenge so far?
The biggest challenge has been to manage customer expectations. With SaaS, you are not customizing for each individual customer so dealing with feature requests is one big challenge – deciding what goes in the software and what stays out. Plus, there are quite a few PM tools that have cropped up in the last year or so.
Differentiating your business on the web is another challenge. One thing we have learnt is that its not about the features that make your product successful. Its the overall experience that your brand provides to the customer at the end of the day. Customer support, online help, features, software load/response times, what you stand for etc. need to work in sync to provide a positive user experience.
And what challenges do you see for the future?
Some of the challenges I see for the future are:
- Creating the right balance between simplicity and feature-richness as we start to add more enhancements to the app
- Taking DeskAway to the larger enterprises
- Scaling up – Hiring like-minded people who understand working in a product development environment as opposed to working in a service company (Here in India, we have a lot of service companies doing work for customers abroad).
Do you have any plans for other services?
Yes, but they might be a part of DeskAway. Sorry, can’t give out any more details on them.
What do you think are the major obstacles to getting people to use web based services?
Major obstacles to adoption are security, trust, cost and the inability to change from the old ways of doing things.
What is the biggest incentive to get them to switch over to cloud-based systems?
Combination of educating them on the value, letting them see how others have benefited, giving them a free trial initially (again, to assess value) and being extremely helpful and clear when answering queries. Personally, I think that the free plan which lets you try out the service before you buy it is immensely helpful when making a decision.Your online marketing needs to get people in your site, your site needs to communicate the value proposition clearly and your free trial needs to close the deal.
How do you see web based services in five years time?
I see the browser as the new OS and enterprises consuming SaaS for almost all of their business functions and processes. There will be a lot of principles and techniques adopted from social networking apps to enterprise software.
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