Welcome to the Core blog. In this space--as often as possible, we will be sharing our views of launching products in today's business and technology landscape’s. Sometimes it will be me writing, other times it will be members of the CoreObjects team, and still other times we will have guest contributors from CE2 (Entrepreneur and Executive forum).
Let me start by saying that launching products is our passion and always has been. The first time I was able to put it into practice was as the Chief Architect for Stamps.com. We got started earlier than the crazy, get-rich-quick dot com stuff, so we were very focused on building a great product. I know US postage doesn’t sound exciting, but if you think about it, what gets delivered to your door six days a week, rain or shine? Also, what really hasn’t changed in decades?
We were determined to change how people mailed things.We were challenged by seemingly endless regulations (ever read the Domestic Mail Manual?), printer driver weirdness, and extreme security requirements (postage is legal tender...). These challenges lead to the proverbial all-nighters and more than a few screaming matches, but our focus was always clear. In the end, this let us create the most convenient and creative way to mail anything that’s ever been devised (not to mention one of the most secure ecommerce systems ever implemented). This was exciting stuff.
It’s been 10 years now and our passion for working with new exciting ideas and turn them into a real business continues. Each one of us feels this way about whatever we’re working on. It’s got to be exciting and have the potential to shake things up. To us, that’s what building a product is all about. We want to become a hub for the market changing ideas. We have launched over 45 products till date and 12 products over the last 12 months alone (what is more exciting to know is the fact that 8 of these 12 companies raised VC financing over the past 60 days and they were all self funded or had raised some angel money when we started working with them). We are very proud about this.
But, raising money is only a small step in building a great business. We’re always thinking about how we can help our portfolio clients get there. The business ecosystem we have built (and expanding every day) is our contribution to make these entrepreneurs more successful and help them realize their vision (read about our CE2 network). I think our tag line summarizes it well, ‘we build the software that builds companies’.
The failure rate of new product ventures is very high. We want to change that. How? I guess you have to keep visiting this section more often to see for yourself.
- Girish Venkat, Founder and CEO