I see a number of online businesses getting started using hosted platforms or encrypted software solutions. Initially it might be okay when you think you know exactly what your customers want and need. As things progress you will realize the business model you had in mind may not be very accurate. Success of a great business is to adapt to a successful model early in the life of the company. The slower you are, more painful it is going to be.
There are number of articles about the flexibility of business models. Two main examples cited are Paypal and YouTube. Paypal started out as a company to beam money between palm pilots. Fortunately they figured out how to reinvent their model in time. YouTube started out as a online dating site. Imagine what if YouTube was created using a hosted application or using software which is encrypted.
Some of you creating the online businesses know exactly what your business model is and know who your customers are. Good for you, since you are among the tiny fraction of entrepreneurs. For most of us mortals, we have a good idea of what we want to do and we have an idea who our customers are what they need. Beyond that we have not done any user group research that would cost us tens of thousands of dollars. Our focus group testing is normally at beta launch or for some, after the site launch. Sometimes we know we have been right all along, sometimes we figure our models need little bit tweaking. Wouldn’t it be nice if you have freedom and flexibility to do so? When you are using a hosted solution or an encrypted software solution you will not have the freedom to do so. Before you buy any web business software, you want to know if you what it takes to customize the software and what’s involved and the cost. You would be surprised with the answers from many solution vendors.
iScripts develops the turnkey web software and distributes it with full source code that runs behind it. We don’t encrypt anything at all and we are proud of it. It’s not the smartest thing to do for a software company to share the source code with the world. We understand it and we are fine with it. We want you, our customers to have an option to change your online business anyway you want to. With the source code, you can get any PHP programmers to make the changes. iScripts can also do these changes for you. In most cases we would be the most economical and timely solution as we created it from scratch. You come to us for customization because you choose to, not because you have to.
Compared to hosted solutions and SaaS offerings, installable software might be teeny bit time consuming to install and set up. You might save few minutes in setting it up. But you are trading it for being stuck it in a rigid business model for a very long time. Once your business is established what would be the cost of migrating to a new platform if you can at all. However for short term projects hosted or encrypted solution is very well be fine.
Here is the bottom line you might need the flexibility for your business model more than you think. It’s good to know you have the option with us at iScripts.com
