TenForce – Pragmatic Project Management

So we did some brainstorming sessions, omg what crazy ideas we came up with. One good thing though: I think we had a smart approach. After the initial definition and some market and technology research, we went to present a product idea to friends and family. With the explicit question to be critical.

And boy, people were critical. We heard it all:

• too weird, too advanced, nobody will use it
• too difficult, you’ll not be able to support it
• it exists already, and a lot cheaper and better too
• ok, that looks like a fine application, but where is the business model

This happened 3 times… it sucked each time… (see here for a similar approach)

Until we presented TenForce. People liked that. We got some good feedback. So we developed prototypes, alpha, beta, V1, V1.1… and so on. We began to sell the product in our home country (Belgium of all places) several times. Last year, we did good business with it, using the well known call, call, call, demo & sell technique.

The thing that never stops to amaze us is the wide variety of our customer markets. They are in manufacturing, banks, publishing, services,… So we know it should be applicable to a lot more companies and organizations. There are so many markets, countries and organizations we can’t reach now.

Web2.0

Recently it dawned on us that we could apply a lot of the Web2.0 ideas to our product. Luckily, it was web based since the start, but it does not have the Web 2.0 look at all, neither is it available online.

So we got together with the people who are mostly ahead of the 2.0 curve. They are now embarking on this venture to Web 2.0-ize our product and development.

The good news?

• We have tons of features up our sleeve with much user experience and feedback build in (our biggest customer has 215 users )
• We have development/support/gui/marketing teams up and running.
• From previous projects, we know how to work internationally (If you travel 100kms in any direction from where we are, you are in another country!)

But,

• this is all very new
• it could completely and utterly fail
• we don’t live in silicon valley, (the nearest valley is 50kms from here and it doesn’t look like silicon valley)

BUT, we’ll go ahead. At least we can tell our kids we were there when it all happened..