I've quietly watched as my partners transition in the managed services market for quite some time and seen a fair share of MSP pitches from both the community and the commercial organizations. One thing that has been somewhat consistent among the small business consultants has been the obvious price point miss that these professional management solutions had and that small business consultants were valuing the software at.

At the same time we at Own Web Now were working on an upgrade of our internal management systems and we saw an opportunity to get some free help in specing out the future of how we do business. After all, our partners will be using it, what a novel idea to give them a say in how it should operate to make them most effective (and thus more profitable for us). But as I sat there coding the framework underneath Shockey Monkey management system I realized we could really do a lot more with it. I decided to add a few more forks to it.

So we decided to go an extra step: make Shockey Monkey a hosted management system for our resellers and give them the same power to manage their SMB practices as we get in our business. Pretty good symbiosis, they resell our products and make us money, we give them a management system to manage and grow their business with ease. The biggest problems with SMB helpdesks is the cost (free!) and the deployment issues (who wants yet another server to manage, patch, backup, tweak). We can do better.

But Vlad, what are you selling?

Nothing, this is not going to be a commercial product. What I hope to do here is detail my journey on this software development project, the wins and defeats, that you can face as a software product manager. Hopefully it will give you younger whipper snappers in college an idea what its like to manage software development and the monuments of inefficiency that are programmers.

P.S. Parts of this blog post may be outsourced to India.

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