Game Plan: Power to the People
by Tony Wanless

February 2007

Problem: Entering a business-to-business market when corporate chiefs won't give you the time of day.
Solution: Turn ordinary workers into evangelists for your product.

One of the problems in business today is that large organizations often feature endless layers of management and control. This almost ensures that it can take forever for a decision to be made. When you're a company selling a product to businesses, this means you can't reach decision makers very easily.

The Problem
A tiny little Vancouver software startup faced this problem after it developed database software that helps small groups and individuals manage and share data - a very useful tool in the modern world of team-based business.

Smallthought Systems, which launched its Dabble DB software in June, believes in simplicity. Its software, which has been generating a lot of buzz in various online and offline technology media in the U.S., is easy to use, and because it's web-based, easy to access. Developers Avi Bryant and Andrew Catton even based Dabble on Smalltalk, a basic programming language developed in the 1970s to create educational software for children.

Sounds useful. But big companies are loaded with complicated management structures rooted in old thinking that doesn't trust simple software – it doesn't come with a squad of IT consultants to install it and train everyone in the organization how to use it. Also, it's usually priced very low, which immediately makes it suspect in their eyes. So they're pretty slow to adopt nimble, entrepreneurial, techniques.

The Solution
Smallthought, which has grown to five people after receiving an investment from Ventures West, is part of a clutch of small creative companies in B.C. active in a new field called by names such as Webware, Enterprise 2.0, or Software As Service. This software uses the Web to provide tools that formerly were only available from very large software providers.

Harnessing several new web-enabled streams such as social networking, community websites, longtail economics and blogging, Smallthought applies them for business use.  It knew it couldn't crack the C-level, so it went down to the shop floor where the users are. Through various buzz building methods, word of mouth, and mentions by early-adopter gurus, it's been signing up smaller departments of big companies, small team-based businesses, even individuals who can now create their own data bases cheaply (as low as $10 a month for individuals).

"It's really a bottom-up marketing approach using social networking, or community building techniques," explains Bryant "In a sense, it's subverting the big corporate IT system. Typically, someone in a group will use their personal credit card to get our software because they need it. Eventually, they migrate it to the corporate account."

Dabble's main benefit is that it's very easy to use because everything resides on the Web, and so groups can begin building databases immediately without having to be trained. But that ease of use is also an impediment. Even though its servers are secure, many companies still frown on their corporate information residing in a public forum like a website, so Dabble is still often used surreptitiously. Several have asked Smallthought to build proprietary versions, but they’ve refused.

"We're interested in handfuls of people who have a problem and solve it themselves," he explains. "We don't want 1000 users in one organization. We want communities."

There's something bigger going on, however, and it involves a sea change in how organizations will work in future. Dabble and other webware transfers power from the top to the bottom: Instead of company chiefs sending selected information and decisions to employees those people now can gather their own information and make their own decisions. The democratization of the marketplace created by the web in the last few years is now moving into the workplace.

Lessons:
1. Sell to the user, not the decision maker. The market is learning that the end user of the product is the one who makes the decision. Now the workplace is as well.
2. Small is beautiful. On the web, you can do quite well by selling in small lots to many.
3. Simplicity rules. Often, you'll get farther with something simple and understandable than with something that’s extremely complicated.

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