Continuing from the thoughts in the predict or control blog, I thought it makes sense to review what we actually have - and whats successful, what isnt, what we can control and what we can only predict.
So the business currently has three components
- Open source: The ettrema platform, with milton as its flagship product, is used globally by thousands of online storage products and the website gets over 100 unique visitors per day - all developers of server products.
- Commercial: With about a dozen commercial contracts completed on the ettrema platform, we've seen this as a real competitve advantage. The most successful to date is an e-learning system built for Reckit Benckeiser to educated pharmacists about Neurofen. We've just landed the contract to build the next one, and there are more in the pipeline.
- Startup: Shmego.com has been about 3 years in the making. Its been successful in the sense that its driven innovation and development which has enabled our open source and commercial arms, but its been an uphill battle in getting people excited about it.
If we were to abandon efforts based on predicting the future, then transforming shmego into a cloud product would have to go on the back burner. The fact is there's very few people right now who need a ubiqutous access product. And while there's plenty of people who need the previous generation of dropbox like functionality, there's also plenty of established business providing that product.
But looking at where our greatest success actually is, its in the corporate/marketing e-learning space. Could we transform this into a scalable business?