Q&A: BitMethod’s CEO on ‘Change’ of focus to developing a product

Point-of-sale systems are experiencing an earthquake of disruption, and Des Moines-based BitMethod wants to be in the midst of that tumult with bulldozers ready to knock down old, dated ways of managing an establishment. So said BitMethod CEO Dan Shipton in a blog post Monday announcing a “A Change …


BitMethod CEO Dan Shipton announced his company’s decision to place increased emphasis on its product, Change, in a blog post Monday. 

Point-of-sale systems are experiencing an earthquake of disruption, and Des Moines-based BitMethod wants to be in the midst of that tumult with bulldozers ready to knock down old, dated ways of managing an establishment.

So said BitMethod CEO Dan Shipton (left) in a blog post Monday announcing a “A Change of Focus for his three-year-old company. A web and mobile app development shop that has done mostly client work up to this point, BitMethod will now focus all its development efforts on its flagship product, Change.

Change, which we first reported on when BitMethod introduced it to the world last October, is a restaurant and retail management system with an iPad-based point-of-sale. Data captured at the point-of-sale integrates with a website customized for the business owner that lets the owner see what’s happening with the business, configure menu and options and integrate with software like QuickBooks.

Shipton said that BitMethod will focus about 75 percent of its time and resources on Change and devote the other quarter of its efforts to consulting and outside design work. The four-person team plans to apply lessons learned from building apps for clients like SmartyPig and The 80/35 Music Festival to the process of creating its own product

“We’re excited to use the knowledge we’ve gained from working with our amazing clients,” Shipton said in the blog post, “to now empowering independent business owners.” 

Silicon Prairie News caught up with Shipton by phone Wednesday afternoon to learn more about his company’s new direction. 

Silicon Prairie News: What led to the shift in focus for BitMethod?

Dan Shipton: As BitMethod has aged it’s become more prominent and we keep getting better, higher-profile jobs that get harder to say no to. And then we’re trying to work on a product like Change, which is basically the largest project we’ve ever taken on, client or otherwise, and trying to do that outside of our normal process. I think right now (if) we’ve got a client project, we dedicate a bunch of time to it and it gets done, whereas with Change it’s finding a night here or a weekend there. And it’s a really complicated back end, trying to simplify what a point of sale is and what it means to the vendors, so we just needed to stop actually developing. We just had to take our programmer, Neil, and take him off of client work and put him on Change. Otherwise, this would take awhile to get there — longer than we wanted to take.

SPN: In your blog post you said you’d devote all development efforts to Change but that you’d still do some client work. What does that mean in terms of the breakdown of how you’ll devote your resources and time?

DS: It just means that from now on we’re not going to be taking on actual development work. We’ll take on consulting work, we’ll take on design work, but we won’t actually be taking on, like, putting the nuts and bolts together. We won’t be actually building out the iPhone apps for folks or the mobile apps for folks.

SPN: What is the timeline for Change going forward?

DS: Nothing I want to commit to right now. … We’ve got a decent version working. We’ve got a decent iPad app up and going right now. We’ve got a lot of tweaking and polishing and hardening to get it into Mars (Cafe, BitMethod’s test site for the project), but that should happen fairly swiftly after we get to devote all our time to it.

SPN: What’s your ultimate hope or vision for what Change could become?

DS: We want Change to become the nerve center of the places that we’re going after — these quick serve, these small restaurants, these small independent businesses. We want it to become the nerve center. We want it to be more than just a point-of-sale. It needs to be their CRM. It needs to be just their window into what’s going on in their business. And that’s going to become more and more apparent as we roll it out. For right now, we’re just focusing on putting out a solid point-of-sale, focusing on what a point-of-sale does and doing that extremely well. And then we can go and start tacking on more.

 

Credits: Screenshot from bitmethod.com. Photo of Shipton from changeapp.com.  

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

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