Exclaimer products and Exclaimer people - The founders view
Back in the year 2000, we were running an IT services company when one of our customers wanted to ‘add a bit of text to the bottom of every outgoing email’. So we asked ourselves ‘how hard can that be?’ and got on with developing a solution. A year later, we’d discovered that the answer to our original question was ‘surprisingly’. Somehow we seem to have been asking the same question and ending up with the same answer ever since. Fortunately, we never seem to get put off.
Of course, writing a piece of code that does a job on the developer’s machine and turning it in to a robust, field ready product suitable for deployment on mission critical email servers in high volume environments are two very different things. Fortunately, we already had a head start on that. Gary Levell, our CTO, was the original inventor and developer of Lotus Organizer, which if you’re as old enough as some of us, you’ll probably remember for its ground breaking user interface and widespread popularity. Organizer sold 55 million copies and was deployed across some of the largest organizations on the planet. Some of our development team worked with Gary on Organizer, so we know a thing or two about putting together a ‘proper’ product.
And here we are 11 years later. We’re on our 3rd office, working hard on our 9th, 10th and 11th products, still financed through operating profits and still debt free. And what have we learned? Well for one thing, we’ve learned that it really is OK to start a sentence with the word ‘And’ but in many senses we haven’t learned that much. We knew when we started what was vital for our business to succeed and we’ve been proven right time and again.
Our customers
When one of our developers comes up with a ‘cool’ feature, we tell them to go away and think about the customer. When a testing engineer tells us he doesn’t think a problem will affect many people, we do the same thing. Our design, support and sales guys are totally committed to the concept that if the customer has a problem, it’s our fault and not theirs.
Delighting customers is our business. If we’re not doing that then we don’t have a future.
Our products
We work really hard on our products. Chris Crawshay, our CIO and general source of inspiration, has thrown away more ‘ok’ ideas than Steve Jobs. Each product, each feature, each user interface element and each word on the screen is agonized over and those that don’t make the grade are chucked. We constantly review customer feedback and if something isn’t working for the customer, we change it – no matter what our emotional attachments might be.
We also understand that installing our software on your mission critical email infrastructure is an act of trust and we don’t take that responsibility lightly. We test our products real hard. Just ask our CEO, Andrew Millington, about the money we spend on the racks of server equipment necessary to simulate customer environments. Our test department is just as big (in number, if not average weight) as our development team because testing this stuff is hard, time intensive and requires a great understanding of Microsoft environments and what our customers do with them.
Our people
Without the right people, we’re going nowhere. The performance and reliability of the products, the support that the customer receives, and the future prospects for the company are only as good as the guys we employ. We’ve grown a bit from our humble beginnings but each new hire contributes in their own special way – apart from adding to the salary bill (says Andrew). They work hard, they create the value, they deliver and they have fun. And as you can see from the picture below, we don’t recruit on good looks alone.
Chris,
Gary &
Andrew
