The ISV start-up dilemma

Keeping costs down and speeding time to minimum viable product

The challenge for a new ISV is all about developing a minimum viable product (MVP). Because as soon as you have this, you can go to market. You can attract users. You might even sell product and gain paying customers. Your nascent brand will begin to take shape. And with these credentials, you can start to think about venture capital and the funds required to take your company to the next level. Before you get to this point though, you have to develop your product as quickly and inexpensively as possible.

Regardless of the vertical, analytics is going to be an essential component of your offering, even at MVP stage. Years ago reporting may have been an afterthought but today it has become a Top 5 Boardroom issue. Executives expect to be able to understand their business performance 24/7. They will want to be alerted when things turn south, they expect to be able to drill down, drill through, share reports, add annotations, collaborate, understand not just what has happened but why it has happened and take action in a highly-governed environment.

You could solve the problem by building some simple dashboards just to get you through. It’ll feel like an efficient use of time, and it will kind of hold you over for a little while. But not for long and it’s a far cry from the analytics capabilities and scalability you’ll need to remain competitive in the future.

You may not know but Yellowfin was a start-up ISV at the outset. So we feel your pain when it comes to managing costs and getting product to market. We know from experience that cheap and cheerful dashboards are a false economy once you start to scale and your customers become more demanding. We decided to do it properly and did it ourselves. In the process, we almost went out of business trying – so not recommended. Luckily we survived, we pivoted and Yellowfin was created to focus on an embeddable analytics platform. Given our past, it’s no wonder we found success offering the platform to ISVs – from start-ups to the likes of BMC, Kodak, Sage and many others.

Dashboards aren’t analytics and your customers will want analytics. Don’t do analytics yourself when you don’t have to.

Yellowfin’s KickStart program could be the thing for you. Created to help ISVs during start-up, we offer:

• free and full access to the award-winning Yellowfin enterprise analytics platform and software developer kit for 12 months;
• free access to our global support community;
• free access to training through Yellowfin University;
• paid access to consultants;
• and the ability and tools to white label the platform so it is indistinguishable from your core offering.

For the right partners, we’ll even discuss revenue sharing.

KickStart is our way of equipping start-ups with a supported, enterprise BI platform, plus the training and best practices they need to bring their ideas to fruition. Our bet is that with this backing, you’ll develop a better product and you’ll get it to market faster.

Our payoff is being an embedded part of your success.