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The Challenge

We started our company, Cogwise Software, the same month the market started crashing last year (September, 2008). We lost a huge deal we were working on that month because of the crash. After that all we had was the clients I had from our prior company and a couple clients from my partner’s company. So, things seemed impossible. It seemed like many times we were fighting to swim upstream and many times we would hit some kind of barrier. Every marketing method we tried was expensive and we seemed to keep missing the mark. Our competition was willing to tell customers whatever they wanted to hear and give them whatever price they wanted to get a few bucks in their pocket and we weren’t willing to match bids that were too low or lie to potential clients in order to get work. So, we suffered through barely getting enough work to eat. We also had no loans or capital so we were working off of what we could get in as quickly as we could get it in. Many times we would be late paying contractors or other bills. Starting a business in one of the worst recessions in American history was not easy nor fun but it did make us stronger and smarter because we were willing to bet it all.

 

Dragging Knuckles

Initially, we tried many of the ways we knew to get leads and most of them didn’t work in this economy. Around the same time I had a partnership with another company, who was feeding us leads, dry up. They no longer could feed us leads because they didn’t have any. The comments of many devs at this time were, "if you had clients with active projects you are good but if you don’t then you are in trouble". We had active projects but it was not enough to sustain both my partner and my self. I went in the direction of stopping adwords because it wasn’t working and working on elaborate SEO and content creation. My partner was doing some cross-promotion of niche brands. We were also doing a ton of cold calling to design firms and trying to establish partnerships so we could piggy back their marketing efforts. Lastly we were both working locally to increase our social activities around promoting our brand.

 

What Worked & What Didn’t

Our SEO efforts paid off. It took months for it to work but content creation to link to our brand and social networking was essential to our visibility and brand strength. We now get organic leads in a much higher request rate. Adwords effectiveness was terrible during this time and we were right to cut it off. Seems many of the larger dev firms were spending money hand over fist to knock us off and in the end we couldn’t spend as much for a lead as they could. We did a couple projects that were low profit but they had good ideas so we could get a residual cut of their profits. I don’t recommend that to everyone as many times those kinds of partnerships don’t pay off but they do increase your network and your visibility. Also, working locally to go to networking events and increase our local visibility also seemed to work. Being willing to talk to whoever was willing to listen and not be intimidated by anyone’s success was essential as well. Many people who are successful don’t mind helping you get there if you treat them equally.

 

Evolution

A lot of what we did to survive had to do with being vocal. We put our name out there as much as possible. We spoke as loud as we could about our philosophy to anyone who would hear. We made close friends with our developers and treated them like real people with ambitions and desires and helped stoked the fires that kept them interested in what they did. We always provide as much value to our customers as we can afford to. Many times I didn’t bill for tech or business advisory time. Instead we would make a margin off of our developer’s work. We would always spend a certain amount of time discussing our client’s businesses and how to make them better. We ended up being good business consultants, good marketing consultants and good software developers. Our business turned in to an end to end solution for many of our customers. We evolved to learn the productivity methods like "Getting Things Done" and read books like "Think and Grow Rich". My partner and I compared notes, we talked frequently and we were honest with one another. We didn’t harp on our failures but noted them and strived to be better by advising each other. We were and are grateful for each other. During the hard times we were careful not to blame each other or quit.

 

Now

Work has picked up and I think we are caught in an upswing in the economy along with the fruit of our successful promotional efforts. We have adapted our internal processes and picked the right people to be successful. We have shrugged off negativity and reached high. We set tangible goals for ourselves and our company. There are a ton of qualified people out there who need work and we have sucked up a lot of them recently. Lastly, it sounds corny, but we never gave in and we pressed forward no matter the hardship. We were reflective, honest with ourselves and learned from our failures. This was our roadmap to this point and I feel our future is bright. I hope to write about our company’s awesome progress in the next few months.