Growing Software

Optimize Customer Setup

Although shrink-wrapped, mass-produced software is sold "as is," many products and services require additional setup procedures before the customer can realize the full potential of the software. Companies that sell products that require or benefit from setup efforts often overlook the costs of such operations. If these costs are ignored, optimizing the customer setup is usually ignored as well.

Creating a great product that is expensive to deploy per customer may not be problematic if your customer base is small, since the costs in such a case could also be small. But as your customer base grows, so do the costs of these extra efforts—with increasing customizations, rollout times, and rollout costs. Most small companies ...