It’s the challenge of the ultra-connected: When you’re on five different social networking sites, keep e-mail lists for business, friends and three volunteer projects, and need to meticulously track your contacts with key people ... just how do you do it all?
Major companies have systems to do these things, while small businesses tend to use more limited tools, including services such as Microsoft Outlook.
Enter local startup BatchBlue Software, which is offering a customer-relationship management (CRM) package designed with small businesses in mind – and meant to be flexible and customizable enough to serve a sales team as well as a small public relations firm.
Pamela O’Hara, president and co-founder of BatchBlue, spoke with Providence Business News about the product, the market and the business outlook.
PBN: How did BatchBlue get started?
O’HARA: I’ve worked most of my career in Web site and Web application development. ... I did some consulting with small businesses, and I was struck by the gap between what was available for small businesses and what the large organizations I’d worked with had. ... About the same time, I ended up with my co-founders, Michelle [Riggen-Ransom] and Sean [Ransom], our VP of technology. They were both coming out of Amazon.com and were very interested in starting a business. So I talked to them about my idea and presented a plan to them and they were very excited. ... They agreed these tools should be available to this underserved market, five to 20 employees.
PBN: Why CRM in particular?
O’HARA: I’d been hired by a local business to help them find a CRM solution, and the problem was, they were tracking not just customers, but they did workshops, they had sponsorships, they did newsletters – it was very diverse business needs. But we found this is what small businesses are like. They do a number of different things and they’re following their audience in the way that small businesses can, because they’re agile. But the software products that are at their level don’t allow that type of flexibility. You track your customers’ name, their address, their e-mail, and that’s it. Maybe you get the ability to add some notes. But you can’t say, this is a workshop attendee, so I need more information about what workshops they’ve attended or what books they were interested in at the workshops. ... What we wanted to do is provide that level of flexibility.
PBN: What types of capabilities did you set out to provide?
O’HARA: We felt we could take the basic online address book and provide some simple tools so all you have to do is add these six other fields, but it’s real simple.
PBN: How did you develop the product?
O’HARA: The first thing we did before we even started writing any code was put together a user group to help us flesh out our ideas. ... We hit up everyone we knew in small businesses and started blanketing Rhode Island, and as we picked up our dry cleaning, we’d ask, what do you use? Do you use Excel spreadsheets? And we found [that] people’s contact information is all over the place: a stack of business cards, an Excel spreadsheet, e-mail software and the phone. ... So once we had a group of people together, we started developing the product, and we’d send out e-mails every month saying, how’s it looking?
PBN: You launched the beta in September?
O’HARA: Yes, we launched it in California at a big launch show [DEMOfall 07]. That was kind of a big deal. A lot of the big-name tech products have launched there. ... And before the launch we had a few hundred people using it; afterward, it was a few thousand.
PBN: As you refine BatchBook, you seem to be really striking a balance between keeping things simple and generic, and making it very customizable. Who are your users?
O’HARA: It is a very broad user base right now. What we’re seeing more is not a specific industry but a specific type of business within each industry, the forward thinkers, either someone casing a really special niche or someone using new tools like Facebook and Twitter. Now we’re coming up with custom versions for specific industries; for example, we’re working with real estate agents to see what type of information and reports they’d need.
PBN: You’ve also added BatchBox to track e-mail contacts.
O’HARA: E-mail is the most important contact tool, so we felt it was very important to integrate that. We’re also looking at doing more integration with some of the e-mail products out there, but this was the first step for us to help people track e-mails in the system.
PBN: You launched the commercial version of BatchBook in February, priced at $9.95 to $99.95 depending on the number of potential users. How many paying users do you have?
O’HARA: We’re hitting our targets. We’re not retiring yet ... it’s in the hundreds. It’s a pyramid: There’s the most at the free level, and we have people up to the higher accounts. ... We’re projecting to be supporting ourselves within a year. That was our original goal. •
