Over the years, I've periodically touched based with Scott Abel from Spiceworks. I did one of the first reviews of their initial release, and was quite impressed. Scott and I also collaborated on a trio of articles (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) about starting a tech company. And I've talked to Scott before about their development process. Today, Scott and I had the chance to catch up on how the exploding growth of Spiceworks has changed the company, his role in it, and so on. For anyone looking to get an idea of what the view is like inside a sucessful startup, this is mandatory reading. What follows is an email Q&A with Scott, unedited and unabridged.
Q: It’s been a long time since we discussed Spiceworks. The product is doing quite well, has an expanding user base, and is getting excellent response within the industry. How has Spiceworks the company changed as a result?
A: It’s been pretty hectic here since we last talked. The adoption of the Spiceworks application has exploded in the last 12 months. We now have more than 325,000 active users in every country in the known world! (I think the actual count is 194 or 196, depending on who’s invading who J). The scale of usage is just amazing. Worldwide, there are more than 10 million employees and 15 million network devices supported and managed by our application. This kind of growth puts us at nearly 8 percent of the global small business IT market, which we think is an amazing achievement in less than 2 years.
As exciting as all that growth has been, not much has really changed in the way we run the company day-to-day. Our top priority is still building an application that simplifies IT for the IT professional. Its all about making their job easier, more fun. While we’ve added one or two engineers, our users still direct most of the product evolution. If anything, our new community features have allowed us to get even closer to our users than we have been before. They’ve been fantastic in their feedback, telling what to build and what to change. Without them, we wouldn’t have the killer product we have today.
Q: When I first tried Spiceworks, I was rather surprised by the particular business model of using advertisements within a desktop application. So far, it looks like that has not changed. Do you have any plans for other revenue streams?
A: You’re right, no change to the basic model, its only gotten richer. It’s been fun to watch this evolve over the last year and a half. When we started there was a lot of controversy around “did ads belong in an IT application?”. Would users like it? Would it be effective for advertisers? Fast forward to today and the results speak for themselves. We’re adding more than 1,000 SMB businesses a day to our IT Network and we now have more than 50 advertisers regularly using Spiceworks to reach this valuable market. I think we’ve now proven if the ads are unobtrusive, if they really add value to the users day, not only will they “tolerate” them, they’ll embrace them.
What’s been most exciting is to see how the community has gotten involved directing exactly how we should expand our revenue streams. We now have users suggesting new ways to tie advertising into the entire user experience. For them its all about making their job easier and researching IT products and services is a big chunk of their job. We’ve gotten some great suggestions about where and how we should surface advertisers information in a way that truly adds value to their day. Once again the community has stepped in to help us tune the Spiceworks experience to be the best that it can be.
Q: As the company and the product grow, how has your role changed and developed?
A: Its funny, you’d think with this much growth it would have changed a lot, but it really hasn’t. While I do spend a bit more time on helping our sales team with all our new advertisers, the vast majority of my time still goes into making sure we have the best possible experience for our users.
I still focus on trying to keep the product as simple to use as possible. When we add functionality, we try to do it in such a way that it doesn’t add complexity to the product. We still follow the 80/20 rule – the product should just “do the right thing” out of the box for 80% of our users. For the other 20% we try to make it really easy to customize. As my old boss Steve Jobs often said: “simple things should be simple, complex things shouldn’t be too hard”. That single phrase guides everything we do.
Remember, its easy for a company to get caught in the trap of adding features for features sake. It’s the way the software game has been played for years. But that defeats our vision of simplifying IT for the SMB IT professional. If our product becomes overly complex, then it becomes difficult to use, and we lose users. But if we get the balance just right, then managing a computer network can be as easy as managing your music on iTunes. We’ve truly created the “iTunes of IT.”
Q: The extremely fast pace of development leads me to believe that the technical choices you made at the beginning that we discussed (namely, using Ruby) are still delivering great dividends. Is that the case?
A: Absolutely. I’d put our decision to use Ruby on Rails as one of the best we’ve made. It continues to pay amazing dividends in time-to-market, product reliability, and for us, scalability. In the last two years Rails has allowed us to deliver 10 major releases and countless minor releases into a rapidly growing installed base. I’m not sure we could have pulled that off without it.
Q: Have you found it easier or harder to find programmers who know Ruby as the years go on?
A: For us, it’s definitely gotten much easier. When we started 2 years ago nobody knew who Spiceworks was, or what we did. All we had going for us was that we were building “a cool new product in Ruby on Rails”. Today, it’s rare that we interview a developer who hasn’t either heard of Spiceworks, or more likely, it’s used at their current company. We’ve kind of become “the” hot start-up to work at in Austin.
Q: One thing that really impressed me about Spiceworks has always been your obvious customer-focused attitude. In fact, executives from another company in your space recently told me that Spiceworks’ attitude of listening to the customer has been a major guide to their business approach. As your user base gets bigger, how has Spiceworks adapted so that the customer’s voice can still be heard at the individual level and not just the aggregate level?
A: Yes, our users truly are the ones who have made the Spiceworks IT Desktop application what it is today. In fact, you could almost think of Spiceworks as an application of the people, by the people, for the people J. Seriously, our user community has been the single largest driving force behind the product we have today. We still get a huge amount of product feedback directly through the community, much as we did a year ago. This continues to be a great vehicle for touching a broad base of users.
But in our never ending quest to get closer to every user, we launched two initiatives in the last year. The first was a set of product features that make it easier for them to reach out to us one-on-one. With personal activity feeds and private messaging, they can now easily contact Spiceworks with new product ideas, suggestions, or even support issues. We want to remove all the barriers that might stand between us and our users. Unlike many free services on the internet, we actually want our users to contact us. Every one that does makes our product better.
Our second big initiative is the IT Freedom Trail program. We started it last fall with a simple objective: let’s get out and see firsthand how Spiceworks is used in the workplace. We’ve been to half a dozen cities, visiting as many users in each city one-on-one. It’s been fascinating to see the real challenges faced by our users day-to-day, and how they use Spiceworks to solve them. These personal visits give us a totally different kind of insight into the product than we’d ever get through community contact alone.
Q: As the user base grows, has it been necessary to expand the team? If so, how has your role change? If not, how do you handle an expanding user base with increasing efficiency?
A: We have expanded our team somewhat but not as much as you’d expect. If you look at our growth since we talked last, our user base has grown by a factor of five, yet we’ve only added a handful of people to the company. Two big reasons for that. As I mentioned above, on the development front Ruby on Rails gives us huge productivity leverage that enables one of our developers to do the work of three or four. One the support front, our community has been amazing in providing help, support and guidance for new users as they come up to speed. IT Pros in the community answer each other’s questions, talk about ways to use Spiceworks to make their jobs easier, and they share best practices. This kind of collaboration has made it possible for us to scale our user base to 325,000 without having to add lots of additional staff.
Q: How has the Spiceworks community changed over time?
A: The most obvious change has been the activity level. User activity is up more than tenfold over the last year alone. It has doubled in the last 90 days. We’re seeing more and more users turning to the community for help and guidance around general IT topics. It’s transformed how our small business IT managers do their jobs. Before Spiceworks many of our users were islands in their own organizations. As the only IT person in the company, there was no one to bounce questions or ideas off of, no one to go to for advice on what products to buy or what best practices to follow. Now our users are just one click away from sharing their best practices, rating and reviewing products, sharing reports, and communicating with other users like themselves. Whether its advice on which VoIP solution to rollout, or how to best report on their daily progress – the community is there to help them make their job easier. It’s truly become one of the largest global communities of small business IT professionals. Whether you’re in the US or the UK, Austria or Argentina, or Germany or Greece – you can find a Spiceworks user in every country in the world
Q: What’s your favorite aspect of being involved in this company?
A: The passionate user community that has developed around our product. I love the fact that we solve a real problem for them – and we do it in a way that makes their job fun again. We truly make their job easier and give them back time in the day. You have to remember, these IT Pros are the lifeblood of the SMB economy. They keep these all facets of these companies running. And as goes those companies, so goes the global SMB economy. I’ve build lot of products in my career, but never one that was so valued by its user community. Having the opportunity to develop such a product is not something that happens at most companies. The entire team is having a blast doing it!