How to get a partnership with Microsoft or any other big cos from your industry

If you’re looking for a magic solution you can stop reading now if there is one I for sure don’t know it :).

This story is about hard work, years of iterations and failed attempts, all while serving tens of thousands of customers as a bootstrapped company (no VC money), about building a team that cares about the user’s problems and understands that our focus should always be the customer, not the competition.

Advanced Installer is a top solution for Windows developers and enterprise software packagers for years. We launched in 2004 and have grown organically ever since, by offering our customers a reliable, powerful, and cost-efficient solutions for their software deployment challenges.

Over the years our application has grown from a small niche product towards the top-recommended solutions from our industry and some of our colleagues were starting to question the growth options of the platform, required if we wanted to continue growing our company as we did so far.

We had two options: try new products or better serve our current industry, by becoming leaders through innovation, instead of simply racing to get a feature-complete state (as we did in the first years when the product got launched and was limited by our organic growth, i.e. no VC money).

Find the REAL problems to solve

For small companies trade shows/conferences are very expensive in the beginning, so you tend to question if spending all that money is a good investment. However, if this is a sure way to meet users face to face (assuming you don’t have other cheaper methods - note, not all software companies are located in big cities where they can find possible customers on the same street/building) you should definitely do it.

Go out, meet your users and make sure you understand their problems BEFORE you start building the solution you think they need.

This is especially important for B2B solutions where the web is not always the best method to get user feedback. Beware, this does not mean you should completely ignore it.

The feedback you’ll get about the user’s problems and challenges in a short talk cannot be compared with online discussions on forums, etc… These 1–1 chats give you the chance to identify and prioritize the most important problems your customers have, thus a chance to innovate and build a better solution than your competition.

Another important long term goal you should have for conferences is to create connections with as many industry leaders as you can, i.e bloggers, consultants, execs/PMs at the big companies, and so on. This takes years until you start seeing an ROI, and these relations must be bidirectional, usually with initial contributions from your side.

Building such relations could mean many things, for example a simple blog post share from time to time, or recommending a potential customer to them, help them find a better solution for customers, even if sometimes this means recommending competition products. All these won’t pass by unappreciated and they compound in time, and start coming back to you too.

Once the conference ends, nurture your new connections, follow up with an email where you talk about your opinion on a topic you previously discussed, or comment on one of their blog posts you find interesting or a simple retweet from time to time.

We all meet lots of people at conferences, it's hard to remember all faces. Nurturing those new connections is highly important.

Build a 10x solution

Building all those connections won’t help you at all if you’re solution sucks.

If you simply copy the competition and just add some small improvements on top you will always be a lagger. Customers don’t change from using big known brands to new small ones unless there is a clear technological advantage to compensate for the risk they take in choosing you (the less known company).

As Peter Thiel said, to turn them around you need to build a product that is 10x better, not just 2x. You must have your customers say “hell yeah, this is perfect”.

So we started gathering more feedback, watching the industry with a fresh set of eyes and of course what our platform leader, Microsoft, was doing and got back to the drawing board.

Our first step was the Visual Studio integration for Advanced Installer. While now this seems like an obvious choice, years ago we thought different, and boy were we wrong. We made mistakes, even re-written the initial versions but this should not stop you from working on a solution that users are clearly in the need for.

The faster users report you issues and start asking for improvements the more it means you’re on the right track to solving their problem.

While the Visual Studio integration was an unexpected success, we also had failures with other tools and features that we tried to launch. We had features that in over a year since their launch brought us practically no feedback from our customers, clearly we failed on providing value with them.

The fun fact was that even if those tools failed us that year, on the long term, the background work we laid out to build them gave us a skeleton on which we could work on our most support successful solution, the Desktop Bridge support, i.e. the future of APPX/MSIX.

Instant success comes after many failures

As with many successful companies, you’ll find that the solution which got them on the stage is the not first they tried :). That was the same for us and our support for Desktop Bridge too.

It took about 3 years of tries and 2 big failures to get to Kevin’s announcement from Windows Developers Day, on March 7th, 2018, and many more years before to build the strong foundation of our team that made possible all this.

Again, all this work while at the same time serving thousands of customers and keep the company on an organic growth trajectory.

This is just the beginning of a new journey for our team and we don’t plan on stopping anytime soon. We’ll always continue to grow our skills, learn more about our customers, and strive to build the best solutions, as we did so far.

P.S. Follow me if you want to hear more from me (or about @advinst) and also let me know what you think in the comments below…