As I’m sure many of you have already seen, we’re really beefing up the ExchangeDefender Essentials lineup before we announce the final move in the 1-2-3 punch that will carry our partners up in 2012. This time, we’re adding an ExchangeDefender LiveArchive-like feature to ExchangeDefender Essentials, our budget-friendly solution.

Now on the corporate blog I have to be friendly and make it seem like sometimes you need to make tough decisions with tight budgets and make calculated compromises.

On here I don’t.

Now that little fact in itself makes some of my friends, employees and partners cringe because they try to imagine what’s it like to be on the receiving end of this. Those folks, fundamentally, do not understand how social media works. The main goal of this blog is not to beat down MSPs. It’s also not to pump up products and webinars. When you do that stuff too much people tune out in the most worthwhile way – they stop talking back. Feedback is the primary reason I write this blog – it gives me the opinion, insight, marketing research and everything else I could ever need to get the perspective needed to run my business. That’s also how we stay ahead of our competitors and why our products find so much success, as if they were built to order. Because on a really fundamental level, they are. Even when they conflict with one another.

So with that in mind, let me explain the Essentials, Emergency, all of ExchangeDefender and how it fits and where it fits and why even bother doing it.

The Basics

Typical abusive opinion should be written this way:

If you’re an MSP running a clients server without a failover like ExchangeDefender LiveArchive, you’re a fucking moron. Do you really think saving pennies and dimes is going to come even close to the losses you’re about to incur when the Exchange server goes down – and it will go down – and the client blames you – and they will blame you – and ruin both your reputation at worst and your ability to sell them additional products and services at best? Seriously? The business that is sitting there deciding whet her or not they need to be put out of business temporarily or permanently over a few bucks a month is a business that is gambling with it’s existence, do you comprehend the level of risk you are undertaking by trying to play into their nickel and diming games?

Now there are grains of truth in the above paragraph (I’ll get back to them in a moment) and to an aspiring IT industry sociopath writing a blog post like that would be incomprehensible. Oh my god, who would do business with someone that speaks in such a way? Turns out a lot of people – because the fact is that we don’t necessarily do business with people because we like them but because the product fits. When it comes to business all that personal stuff goes out the window.

I wish someone had told me that years ago, it would have saved me a lot of time and grief.

Eventually I figured it out on my own by accident and it’s what’s brought you our cloud services, expanded ExchangeDefender, LiveArchive, Shockey Monkey, Looks Cloudy, etc. In order to be successful you either have to be the best (the odds are against you on this one) or you have to work the hardest (this is really just a matter of choice). 

The Essentials

Technically, I held back on approving the buildout of Essentials product for years mostly because the profit margins in the high end product were great and I didn’t have the resources to support more than one product per category. There were also a shitload of problems and scaling issues that took years to resolve, but those are minor details.

Emotionally, I also grew so tired of people who had to sit and think about whether or not a $2 hit to their MSP bottom line would be worth it. I also grew tired of explaining how my $2 product did what my competitors charged double digits for.

Insecurely, I felt that introducing multiple products per category would lead to cannibalization. Surely most people will just switch to the cheaper solution from the more expensive one if they are not using it completely. Right? Right? Wrong. I was wrong about this.

Finally, the essentials product came about because it was a fundamentally different product (even though it is built on the same base with same features at the core) because it appealed to different kinds of partners/clients and it had an entirely different marketplace.

Initially I felt quite dirty about the Essentials product because I felt like partners were selling a product that would ultimately serve as a death trap. I spend millions of dollars building redundancy around redundant systems and really am consumed around making sure things never go down. Yet there were tons of people knocking down my door saying outages were not an issue.

Well, which is it?

Turns out, it’s both. There are just different requirements. And over time the products pick up critical mass and create a profit margin that allows us to include additional features without an overwhelmingly large cost structure associated with it. For example, the Essentials Emergency will cost us less than what it would cost us to sponsor a conference circuit aimed at low end and startup clients. In fact, it will cost less than a half.

Now quick question – what do you think will sell more products: word of mouth and referrals or me in a white suit in a hotel in Baltimore?

The way I see it, ExchangeDefender will continue to appeal to high end partners and MSPs worldwide. The Essentials product will appeal to those who only need the very basics. But with both, our entire team will be able to sleep at night knowing that we’re doing everything in our power to deliver the feature set that backs people up even when they make a decision that doesn’t make sense – because you know what, every software developer feels their features are the most important.

So I’ll introduce you to ExchangeDefender Essentials punch #3 shortly and I guarantee you’re going to like it. My opinion (and that of OWN) is that the MSPs will continue to grow in the cloud – and that the old infrastructure business support services (filtering, security, backups, management) are up for grabs and prone to more consumerisation and consolidation.

For years, I only chose to do my business on the high end. And for years, Postini kicked my ass simply by offering a barebones product for a $1.  But if the clients chose a competitive product based on cost, how loyal would they be to it once they could switch to a product to boost their margins? And at what point is a switch no longer worth the effort?

Ah, the fun of running a business. Here is to an awesome 2012!

So you know how you suck at being organized?

There are people out there that are perfectly organized in every way. They know where everything is, they can find it in a split second and you probably feel like they spend every moment of their time organizing their junk.

Personally, I like to stack my junk. Then pile it. Then push it around and every now and then toss it into a box to move somewhere where it can be less unsightly. I call that activity cleaning.

I designed Shockey Monkey for people like myself.

Helpdesks, PSAs, CRMs and SharePoint portals probably have a higher failure than success rate. Why? Because people spend more time trying to plan organization and processes that the first time something falls out of the process they fall back to what is more convenient – and completely untrackable.

We didn’t want Shockey Monkey to be SharePoint.

As a matter of fact, that was the design cornerstone.

You don’t have to plan onboarding yourself for months. Or weeks. Or days.

You don’t even need to spend the time talking to us. We actually designed Shockey Monkey so that it would be quicker to do stuff on your own than to call us and do the same.

Check out this 10 minute getting started guide to Shockey Monkey.

It will take you less than 10 minutes.

Step 1: Setup portal settings. Step 2: Add portal address to your email signature. Step 3: Add your largest client company & contacts. Step 4: Upload your logo. Step 5: Customize the postcard and mail it out or hand deliver it.

The first four steps take less than 5 minutes.

And that’s all I ask.

For the love of god, do not try to figure out every status, every email template, every setting and every little nook of the system.

Baby steps.

Just start tracking your activities.

Start tracking your time.

Then start posting it to an invoice.

Then add other clients and start sending invoices to Quickbooks.

The more of the system you use, the more efficient you will become.

But don’t do it ackbasswards and try to build this huge process flowchart that you will never implement. All that activity serves to do is scare you with your inefficiencies and take time away from actually tracking what you do.

Start small. Build up. You can’t fail at that. Hey, it’s free get on it!

It’s been over a week since I said anything on the subject and nearly two weeks since we officially launched Shockey Monkey Reloaded.

Watch the Shockey Monkey Reloaded Launch Webinar

Since that time we’ve signed up nearly 1,000 new portals and you keep on coming in strong as is the interest for sponsorships, etc.

Most of all, I want to thank to the many of you that have taken the time to talk to my staff and work with our support and developers on the bugs you’ve found. We’ve been squashing them daily and all the development resources have been assigned to making it flawless which it pretty much is. Hank got a much deserved vacation (I sent him to Las Vegas) and he’ll be back in the saddle next week with the priority being new integrations and some of the incredibly useful features some of you have brought to me.

Again, I can’t say thanks enough… well, short of giving you a free portal to run your business and serve you customers. That’s a good deal right?

Next Up..

We will be holding a webinar next week to discuss some of the questions that we get often. We also want to talk about the “Getting started in 10 minutes” which we feel is kind of critical for everyone signing up right now. We’ve hired two new people in the past week to help deal with this. And we’ll hire more if it keeps on going this fast, so please tune in and hear what we’ve been up to over the past two weeks.

Tuesday, December 20th, Noon EST

https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/236053112

Many of you are good to go and are set to use Shockey Monkey full on in 2012, if you aren’t yet the great news is that it only takes 10 minutes so what are you waiting for?

Before I forget..

The Shockey Monkey training video has been updated for Reloaded. It used to be 67 minutes. Now it’s 17 minutes. That is hopefully the evidence of the commitment we have to making this software simple enough for anyone to use – you, your clients, your clients clients and everyone that doesn’t have an IT experience. Why? Well, the reason why portal and CRM deployments fail (SharePoint) is because nobody uses them, even when forced to use an industry specialized PSA solution folks use less than half the features and that’s among the best of the best! The goal for me with Reloaded was to make you more efficient without having to do more to gain that efficiency. In street terms: money for nothing and monkey for free. (que Dire Straits)

Finally..

Listen, I know I get a bad rep out there due to the many (many, many) blog posts I’ve written about the shortcomings we as an industry get. I don’t tolerate rude people, under any circumstances.. but it’s the stupid ones that bother me more. Everyone reads this blog with their own opinion of me, OWN, Shockey Monkey, ExchangeDefender and so on and I don’t spend much time putting lipstick on pigs.

Yeah, we’ve fucked up a lot over the years and we keep on chugging along, services get better, people get better, products get better. Everyone works on stuff.

What I’d really like to say is that we’ve got your back and we’re putting enormous resources behind this stuff because it’s important. I know a lot of you would rather see me spend it on Exchange or support or customer service or direct sales people so you don’t have to deal with any of the cloud stuff… and I understand. But it’s my money on the line in this company and I’m not running this company for the next month, quarter or year. I am looking to establish a portfolio that will make OWN relevant for another decade and that unfortunately (as some of you have put it) requires me to take an eye off the ball… in order to setup the next few plays.

P.S. As for the title.. I’m just going to keep on adding –ed to the subject as I go along with Reloaded. Kind of how people name their kids Erinn when it’s exactly the same as Erin. Why not Erinnn? While I’m on that subject, congratulations to my buddy Erinn Davis who got engaged this week!

Some of you that are my friends on Facebook (www.facebook.com/vladmmd) have heard me talk about us intending to drop a nuke on the antispam industry. Since we’re way ahead of schedule at Own Web Now, this is getting to market sooner than expected. Here is the basic idea:

In the past year, volume of SPAM to be filtered has gone down over 60%. How about your antispam bill?

Vendors make an excuse that most of the cost in providing the service comes from support, marketing, management and maintenance so the impact to the price you pay cannot be changed.

If you’re an idiot, go ahead and believe it.

The smarter ones among you know the reality of the situation, if the client is not complaining about the price why bother lowering it? Even if you are pressured to do it by the client, it makes no sense to do it because you’re technically better off letting them go through the pain of switching than consider lowering your pricing. What are the odds you lose all of their business, right? Correct, unless you’re building a growing company.

We’ve always operated ExchangeDefender as a growing business and the ExchangeDefender as a antispam product has continued to get additional features that you get charged huge premiums for at other companies that don’t write their own technology but instead partner and license someone elses. So things like LiveArchive, Encryption, Web File Sharing, Web Filtering and so on are incredibly expensive addons everywhere else… so sometimes comparing ExchangeDefender that gets all of that for $1.50 to $2.00 depending on volume with something that just does antispam/antivirus can become a losing battle.

So I should offer just the basic (“Essentials”) product for $1.00, bring it to apples and apples, and call it a day?

Where is the fun in that?

If you’re currently reselling our ExchangeDefender Essentials product, or if you are currently selling the full ExchangeDefender product and facing questions about the pricing… I’d like to talk to you. You know where you can find me – Facebook, email, etc.

We’re about to drop a nuke on the antispam business and clear out our competition in this space because honestly… $1.00 for the basics is way too much.

Last Thursday (December 1st) we officially took the wraps off the Shockey Monkey Reloaded project, with nearly a year under development we believe we’ve built the best possible mix of features, simplicity and business model mix to help propel our partners forward and help you win more deals and more billable time.

Now I’m not going to say how many times I’ve gone to the bathroom the morning of the webcast but I’ll be honest in saying that I lost count. It was by far the most nerve wrecking experience on my professional life. The feedback has been tremendously positive. I know we’ve got a killer thing on our hands and I am so immensely grateful that I have no words for it. So I’ll stop my emo crap here. All I ask is that you take the following survey if you saw the presentation and let me know what you thought:

Shockey Monkey Reloaded Survey

http://www.ShockeyMonkey.com/reloaded

It will take you a minute, tops.

If you take an hour or so to go through the 10,000+ words I’ve written on this subject during the past two weeks, you know my opinion of where we are and where the SMB IT space is going. The best and most profitable days are ahead of those that think smart, move fast and consider the future instead of the past. Our industry has had to battle so hard because being “an IT guy” was so simple anyone could do it – and nearly everyone did. Now that there are some real challenges, things will be great for those that are serious about IT. And I believe that Shockey Monkey will be a core part of that solution. Yes, even if you use Autotask or ConnectWise or anything else for that matter, Shockey Monkey will be a big part of your future.

The Next Few Weeks

Shockey Monkey Reloaded upgrades have been rolling out all weekend and will be completed sometime tomorrow.

Once your portal is upgraded to Reloaded you will receive an email from the system. Get on it right away, we’re offering free Phone and Email support during this stage so now is the time to get excited.

We are spending the entire week doing bugfixes and working with you directly on any issues you find. That’s the top priority – only priority.

December 12-16, Documentation week. The whole team will be working on the upgrades to the site, whitepapers, marketing and new welcome paperwork. We’ll also make time for one-on-one.

December 19-30, we hit the ExchangeDefender partner base. Everyone will have Shockey Monkey created and linked back to our infrastructure.

January 1st – we rock and roll.

Announcements, Discussions, Opinions

Note that I haven’t linked to the webinar recording, nor am I talking about anything specific that has been covered in last weeks webinar.

If you were there, you know why!  

What we announced is no joke, this is the biggest thing we’ve ever done and we’re going to do it right.

Thank you all for your feedback, your emails, for following this blog and chatting with me. All of those lessons, put to work, is what brought together Shockey Monkey. I look forward to 2012 being the year where it becomes the defacto platform of the SMB IT space, no lie, I expect every single one of you to use it no matter where the heck you are. And yes, in Q1 we’ll have internationalization and Monkey will speak French and Deutsch.

Update: Monday 7:58 AM EST: In case you attempted to sign up for Shockey Monkey you were greeted with the note that signups are currently closed. This is true, we will resume signups once everyone has been upgraded which we expect to be later today. The signup protocol has actually been changed as well to remove the option of signing up for Pro or providing payment, etc (unless you hate the ads or want to use your own domain).