I've been blown away by a new (for me) discovery of a software company called 37signals. They offer project management, contact management and other software all 'as a service' -- you sign up online and start using it automatically, without any downloads or client software to install. Their latest offering is a contact management application called Highrise which launched a couple weeks back.
They have a blog as well, and here's an excerpt from the post which stopped me in my tracks:
Thank you It’s been just over 36 hours since we officially launched Tuesday afternoon. We’ve been overwhelmed by the response. All things considered, the launch of Highrise has been our most successful product launch ever. Thank you!
Some early stats Highrise is definitely getting a workout. Here are some early stats on the amount of data that has been added to the system so far:
Over 150,000 contacts Over 15,000 notes Over 10,000 tasks Another interesting stat is that 9% of the people signed up are using OpenID. Lots of early adopters on board!
We heard you: Here come Cases for everyone When we launched we only offered Cases on Plus, Premium, and Max plans. There was a fair bit of negative reaction to that decision. We hear you. So today we’ve made a change. Now all plans include some Cases.
They go on to explain how, based on feedback, they are changing the storage pricing; also, how to get a credit if a customer 'over-bought' based on the original pricing.
Let's summarize:
36 hours old 150,000 contacts entered Already have enough feedback to tweak the service packaging Already decided to tweak the packaging Already have a process to switch plans based on the packaging
Are you kidding me? My employer couldn't do this in 36 days, let alone 36 hours. This is one of the most amazing things I've seen.
Agility matters.