One Developer’s Story Part 4: Coming to America and the Development Explosion

Software development can be an amazing gamble. In part 1 of this series, Nikolaus Kimla told the story of how Pipeliner CRM was conceived and researched. In part 2, he related the revolutionary story of how the goal of disruption was formulated. In part 3, he and his company sought an industry. Now came time…

Software development can be an amazing gamble. In part 1 of this series, Nikolaus Kimla told the story of how Pipeliner CRM was conceived and researched. In part 2, he related the revolutionary story of how the goal of disruption was formulated. In part 3, he and his company sought an industry. Now came time to make the bold move of coming to America.

At the conclusion of our last installment, we had gone to Microsoft, at first interesting them in taking Pipeliner as a plugin to Microsoft Dynamics. In the end, they turned us down, insisting that Pipeliner was far too “developed” to be a plugin, and viewed it as more of a competitor.

With the Microsoft deal now not happening, I found myself wondering, “What next?” I wondered if I should simply cease worrying about Pipeliner and chalk it up as a nice adventure. Or perhaps I should go ahead and program the features I’d listed out to Microsoft as missing. Or maybe I should I change development platforms and go with Silverlight or HTML5.

We got practical, though, and took a look at the facts we knew:

  • We couldn’t yet see ourselves as competitors.
  • Even though we weren’t “ready for prime time” Adobe was really supporting us.
  • Customers to whom we showed Pipeliner said, “Wow, this is so cool!”

So we knew we were on the right track—we just needed to continue programming.

I went back to my team and listed out the features we needed to program, and asked how long it would be before we could sell the product. They answered that if we programmed in iterations, the first version would be ready within a year. We would then be releasing one feature after another.

Coming to America

Armed with this information, I then took a look at where the company should be located. At the time I actually considered that the future world markets were in Asia, just based on growth. In the end, though, I decided to bring the company headquarters to America; if a product is released in the U.S., Asia will buy it, too. The same is true of Australia.

It wasn’t easy to pull up stakes and move, but that’s what I did. The whole story of this move will be a part of another series of articles on starting up a company, so I won’t tell it here as this is the development story. But suffice it to say, I had to move to America, while cost-effectively leaving development in Slovakia, where it is to this day.

Development Explosion

Once here, I took a look at which target group in the CRM industry should we focus on. As mentioned earlier in this series, CRM traditionally had been utilized by management to control sales—hence CRMs were generally marketed to management and IT.

For us, though, figuring out our target market was almost a no-brainer. Because Pipeliner had been specifically designed to empower sales, that’s where we placed our focus. We positioned ourselves as “sales enablement.”

We then released our first iteration and then continued releasing new featured versions in an almost rapid-fire manner. In the last few years, we became the fastest growing product in the CRM space. We brought out one feature after another, and we saw that others were following us. We came from behind to be the industry innovators!

One of our most revolutionary developments was that of not just one, but multiple pipelines. Many companies today have multiple processes, and creating a CRM with multiple pipelines made it possible for them to customize pipelines for each of their processes. We’re the only CRM to offer this unique functionality.

Another unique feature released was Performance Insights. Now, instead of spending hours searching all over through spreadsheets or through various aspects of a traditional CRM solution just to perform an analysis of rep or team performance, it became as simple as a few mouse clicks.

While releasing a whole host of innovative features, the whole while we kept upgrading our synchronization, the powerful mechanism that makes a Cloud-Installed Hybrid CRM possible. To this day, that’s also functionality that can be found nowhere in the CRM market.

If you look at our release site, you can see how our releases were done, and what features were released with each. I even came up with the concept of using descriptive and intelligent names for each release.

Next, we knew we needed to be totally mobile as well. While we had a mobile version, we wanted to be the best.

Next up: Going super-mobile, and Pipeliner’s amazing future.

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This content is sponsored by Pipeliner CRM.

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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