I made my first-ever blog post last week–the one about ways to embed a form on a webpage. I talked for a while about Zoho Creator, which is a cool system for taking form data and putting it into an online database. It really does kick ass, but I wondered whether a company putting this much time into a free program can make any money.
We have done exactly nothing to publicize this site. Until this morning, we didn’t even have a link to it on our site. Less than 6 hours after the post went up, Pete Thomas from Land of Zoho Creator commented on my post, generously agreeing with some of what I said, in addition to gently suggesting that I do a little more homework before I type stupid things on the Internet. (He didn’t say that, by the way; he was much kinder.)
A couple days after that, Sridhar Vembu, who I believe works for AdventNet, the company the makes Zoho Creator and a bunch of other software, commented on Pete’s post, writing:
In fact, even within the Zoho Suite, Zoho CRM & Zoho Projects are doing really well in terms of paying customers, in addition to gaining tons of free users. The reason we haven’t offered a paid version in Zoho Creator (and some of the other Zoho services) is precisely the absence of features like look-and-feel customization. We are also working hard on improving site scalability, responsiveness, UI consistency, integration across Zoho services, integration with third party services … all of which we feel are important before asking for money!
In almost any business, there is a period of investment before revenue and profits materialize. Zoho suite, being a fairly ambitious engineering effort, needs a longer period of patient engineering work; as a company, AdventNet is well prepared for this - we have been in business profitably 11 years now.
So I sort of feel stupid. But it completely rules that people actually find stuff on the Internet and take the time to comment on it. Especially when the original writer, me, is obviously kind of a jackass.
