New companies need to export or die
As part of our ongoing series examining the ecosystem necessary to bring technology to market, we asked John Craig, a veteran of commercializing mobile technologies, to share his thoughts on how startups can achieve market validation to drive revenues. This is the first of his commentaries and we welcome your feedback.
By John Craig
The importance to emerging Canadian companies of being focused on winning deals outside of Canada.
As the co-founders of Purple Forge, Brian Hurley and I placed a significant amount of emphasis on exporting to the U.S. and around the world to get our business started. For those of you who don’t know Purple Forge, we develop and sell mobile applications as a service for politicians, event organizers, governments and interactive marketing firms. We are headquartered in Ottawa, Canada with offices in the U.S. and resellers around the world.
In 2009, we had a very simple idea — developing mobile applications for community engagement. The idea was to allow organizations to reach out to their key constituents to broadcast their news, events, social networking feeds and other information. These constituents would then share this information using their own Facebook and Twitter accounts, and then the organizations would ask these people to perform activities to the benefit of those organizations.
Cool, right? We thought so – and we wanted to prove it. So where to start? Well there was always the Government of Canada, which was in our own backyard. We knew the sales cycles are 18 months or more, and it was very conservative about adopting new technologies that hadn’t been proven elsewhere. We needed to find a customer who was willing to take a risk. Better yet, was willing to take a risk and would pay us to do it. That way, we could prove the value of the idea.
