Immply.com Blog

A bad economy is actually great news for the small software company. Use these positives and grow in the bad economy when the big ones are not doing so well.

Now, you are charging for your products and services right ? If not, go read this and this. Then read on.

1) Customers are looking to cut costs, use that advantage - We recently acquired a customer that would normally have gone to a much larger competitor and spent 2 times more money with them for the same work just because of the brand recognition. They were evaluating the spend when we reached out and offered to work at 1/2 the price. We did not cut our costs, we don’t have the excess fat and can actually be profitable at that cost while the larger competitor cannot.

2) Let the customers try before they buy - We were recently in competition for the business of a potential client. We went ahead and created a great prototype and won the business. The potential risk was high because we may not have gotten anything but the reward was a big business. Obviously, you must make sure that the customer is serious in choosing someone and the business potential is big enough to make such an investment but it paid off as we were not all talk and a 5 page proposal, we actually showed what we could do.

3)  Cut licensing costs - No more software licenses for email, MS Office - go gmail, google docs. Everyone has a cell phone - right! Use skype, yahoo messenger, gtalk. Who needs webex and salesforce when zoho is here.

4) Add good employees - Contrary to the advice of stopping hiring, keep looking for good people. You find the best people in a bleak economy so add the good ones when you can find them.

5) Monitor your productivity -  An hour saved is an hour earnt. Use tools like RescueTime to monitor your office productivity and make the necessary changes.

6) Ask all your vendors to give you some relief -  Ask for a rent relief, ask for better payment terms from other vendors you get service from. Just ask and persist.

7) Partner up - Partner up with complimentary businesses. We are strong in web development and are partnering up with web design firms so we can both use our strengths to get more clients. This makes us a much stronger force together.

Remember your past clients - You already have some good clients, don’t you ? They need more services from time to time, don’t they? Reach out to previous clients and see if they need help. Offer your services.

There you go. Now’s the time to grow. Now stop reading this and go do it !!