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| Financial Peril Forces Innovators to Rely on Intuition |
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One hundred thousand dollars in debt in 1998, the future looked bleak for the small company of the husband and wife team of Lakshmi Raj and Raj Narayanaswamy. With three failed products based respectively around workflow, document management and customer support, the entrepreneurs were seriously thinking about abandoning their company altogether and going back to consulting. But instead of closing up shop. they decided to incorporate the lessons they learned from their failed products into a new product. Web TimeSheet was launched in 1998 and one month later Replicon had its first customer, a small Seattle company.
Pioneering Application, Pioneering Service Delivery
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The husband and wife team saw the need for companies to have business applications on-line and Replicon, a pioneer in the web based timesheet software market, harnessed the Internet as a sales and marketing platform. SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions, allowed users to log into the software via the Internet as opposed to the traditional single-install licensed versions on each client computer.
Replicon’s flagship program Web TimeSheet is focused on providing incredible ease of use to the customer. It provides its users with seamless integration into a multitude of leading payroll, accounting and project management software. |
Remembering Lessons Learned
Soon after securing Replicon’s first customer, investors started to come on board, a relief for the couple who had financed the whole company up to this point with their personal finances, maxing out credit cards and taking out loans. Marcel Jacques and Maury Parsons were two of the first investors and, according to Lakshmi Raj, were instrumental in making the company a success. “They played an important role in shaping the company, giving us practical advice on investing and money management,” she says.
Lakshmi attributes the success of Web TimeSheet to the lessons they learned in the three years before 1998, when they struggled to get a product off the ground. She says the number one thing is to put the customer first when designing a product and create a product that can be used by any company, anywhere. And that is what Web Time Sheet is, a simple solution to the problem of tracking and entering time sheet data. “When we built it we took a very global view,” Raj says. “And we had to stop thinking technically, we had to think about what a customer would want.”
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