One Month into Monsoon > Huge Progress
Four weeks ago I acquired Monsoon, Inc., a company I have known for over twelve years. I first got to know the company through Kanth Gopalpur, the founder, when I was living in Portland and running Jive Software (NASD: JIVE), the company I co-founded and guided up until its IPO.
Monsoon has a rich history of greatness, but has been in “maintenance mode” for a long time. After a strategy by its previous owners didn’t work out, the company was put on the back burner while they figured out what to do with it.
By the time I saw the company, it was shrinking and in need of serious help. It needed vision, direction, innovation and a path to helping its customers be more successful. A turnaround. My kind of project.
And it wasn’t only Monsoon that needed help and innovation, but the whole industry that helps brands and retailers sell online. The space has yet to incorporate modern approaches to computing and business applications that would make these systems run smarter, faster and easier.
Other products have moved beyond the world of manual and into the world of automated, beyond slow processing and into real-time, beyond basic reporting and into predictive analytics, beyond revenue-reporting and into profitability analysis. It’s time for this category to experience that change as well.
What we’re looking to build out is the first open, predictive, optimization engine for selling online. Instead of helping our customers manually sell their inventory across marketplaces, we want to help them predict, optimize and grow their online business.
My goal is to transform this company into an industry leader by providing unprecedented value to our customers and driving innovation through deeper relationships with them. It’s not going to happen overnight, but we’re well on the path already.
In fact, in the last month we have doubled the engineering throughput, reshaped the team for velocity, built an aggressive new roadmap, reached out to every customer (I’ve had over 20 calls so far with some amazing folks), started development on new marketplaces and a new analytics product, and we’ve even brought back Kanth as a part-time resource.
There will be a lot more coming out of Monsoon in the near future: more communication, more conversation and a lot more output on the product. I’ll also be setting up an online community (what my previous company did) for customers to get answers to questions, share best practices and discuss the roadmap.
More to come soon, but I wanted to get the ball rolling on the communication, and to thank all the folks I have spoken to for the warm reception. In the meantime, keep the ideas coming!
Dave
