Licensing is available reBlogger

reBlogger is a poduct that is destined to become a standard component of every “backoffice”.

Every company with bloggers must have a way of tracking those bloggers and managing their output. Many other companies will also use reBlogger to track industry news and still more companies will create internal R&D depatments to slice and dice the valuable comments made within their industries. For these reasons and more reBlogger is a product whose time has come.

Sell us into your vertical market

We’re looking for sales companies who are interested in licensing our engine from us. Because our product has such broad appeal, we need partners in all vertical markets:

• government
• military
• motor
• sports
• science
• industry
• etc.

If you’re a consulting company or a software vendor, our reBlogger software might make a good fit for your product offering.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

It’s hard to be the leader because quite often the second mover has a clear goal to replicate and improve upon. The first mover has no road map to follow, only innovaion, vision, gut feel, customer feedback and instinct.

We’re already aware that we are being cloned by another company (right down to the design of our web pages) thanks to a user from that company spilling the beans. Someone once said imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I guess this is flattery then?

The truth is when they see reBlogger 4.0 they will perhaps give up and go find another less innovative product to copy. If not, the innovations in reBlogger 5.0 will put an end to their aspirations once and for all. 5.0 will introduce features that will cause a storm on the internet, they are truly world-first never-been-seen-before features.

So why license our software?

We have two major advantages over any competitor:

1. IP laws protect us. This means that – as the first mover – we can slow them down and besides that, what they are doing (cloning) is illegal. At the very least they will owe us a % of their revenues if they make money.
2. Copying is not innovative, leadership is innovative. We have a big vision of where this is all going and although I have shared some of the future vision on this blog, I have not shared the truly ground breaking stuff.

If your company sells into major vertical markets and you have existng company sals relationships – then please contact me about purchasing a license to sell reBlogger into your industry. Contact me: markwilson at topxml.com

Responding to expresso’s forum comments

Hi expresso

Thanks for your comments in our forum.

We really appreciate your comments, it’s wonderful for us to have such excellent and raw feedback. Keep it coming! We’re beginning to pick up contacts in very large organizations (who have figured out the value of trackng bloggers) and we’re also being approached by a company doing due-diligence on us.

Things are happening in the reBlogger-sphere!

But you made some good points… so it’s confession time. reBlogger is obviously the first product of it’s kind and we’ve been building it for 18 months and running it on our own websites, one of which has 15k unique visitors per day: TopXML. We’e very fortunate to have users like Tony John and yourself who give us frank, honest and useful suggestions about how to improve RB.

But because reBlogger is so ground breakingly new, it’s very difficult for us to know just how people plan to use it. So we’ve had to build the bridge over the river while we’re actually walking on the bridge – does that analogy make sense?

What I’m saying is that we’re building it as fast as we can and the more feedback we get, the more we can figure out what the priority is to build next. We have improvements and features for MANY years and versions to come… we just need to figure out what people need more… improvements (like performance) or more features? I think the demand is for both. So we’ve decided to work on improvements for a time, then switch to features for a time, then back to improvements – and so on. You’ll be happy to know we’re working on improvements right now.

Of course, you’re not interested in our “problems” you just want to know when you’re going to get a more usable product.

We are about to launch a minor update which has:

• an improved or more robust install – based on your suggestions about what confuses you and what details are missing
• a simpler install which removes the need for keywords before it begins to run
• improved scalability for massive installations
• improved robustness (debugging etc.)
• improved fetching based on Tony John’s suggestions

Then in the next iteration of development, focussed on features we will be building some o the things you mentioned like calendars and gadgets. We’re also working on very easy drag and drop redesign of the look and feel, draggable reordering, search and much much more.

So I hope you’ll accept this as

• an apology for what is not working as smoothly as it could
• a request for you to continue sending us raw and honest feedback
• a promise that great and wonderful things are coming in time

It’s not possible for me to put a date on when these things will arrive because we prioritize fixing things and responding to customer problems as higher than building new features. But reBlogger is stabilizing very well – after all it’s almost 18 months old – and so we can begin to build new features more and more now. The next version (RB 4.0) will be simply stunning, a work of beauty.

The irony is that we don’t want too many customers right now because we need to keep coding rather than doing too much support. But sales would bring revenue and that would help us grow. But growing takes time. I think this is a problem all self-funded startups face, the chicken or the egg.

I hope this post has encouraged you to purchase RB as it is and stick with us as we grow.

Thanks,
Mark Wilson.