As you may recall from Part 31, SimplyCast likes to take a multi-industry approach to its marketing. Targeting multiple industries means spreading out resources and limiting risks associated with targeting one specific industry.
This was a lesson that SimplyCast learned the hard way.
Back in 2013, while were attempting to go wide and take a multi-industry approach, there was one industry that we thought we would certainly succeed in. This industry was web hosts. So, while our multi-industry approach was still being refined, we focused much of our attention and resources on web hosts.
This focusing of attention and resources meant we were completing integrations that web hosts would need and spending a lot of time planning our approach. We even sponsored a web hosting and cloud service provider conference. At the time, we thought web hosting was the perfect industry for us to focus on because the SimplyCast platform would be perfect for them to add onto their existing services through the reseller program.
We were able to gather a few customers from our attempts in the web hosting industry but the lessons we learned were just as valuable.
This attempt at web hosts showed us how to look at the market and determine if an industry was ready before we allocated too many resources to pursuing it. This meant looking beyond your own customer base. Even though we had a couple of customers in the web hosting industry did not mean that the industry as a whole would be successful for us.
The web hosting industry was just not ready for our technology at that time; this may have been the biggest takeaway: no matter how well-suited your technology may be for an industry if they're not ready it won't succeed. This is not to say that in the future web hosting won't be available to us. We now have the resources and know-how to approach this vertical but only when they're ready to adopt our technology. Until then, taking a multi-industry approach to marketing ensures that a situation like this does not arise.
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