eRoom Story

Story of eRoom’s entry into the market
- Pito and Jeffrey in 1995: Home delivery of groceries
- The importance of domain expertise
The case we made to the VC about our competitive advantage: Internet + Desktop software + groupware
eRoom, the product
- Shared web workspace
- Click-to-install server. Later SaaS.
- Super-easy to administer and manage
- Originally “for teams”, later “for enterprise”
How to position it? Groupware, Collaboration, Teamware: all were dirty words
- Customers (early adopters) really liked our value proposition
- “We are constantly reinventing the wheel”
- “there’s too much email”
- “we should be sharing better”
- “we are inefficient”
How to sell: Download vs. Corporate sales team
- Direct sales: selling an alpha and beta test
- At first it went well but then it didn’t
We needed to get more specific
- Go beyond “nice to have” to “must have”
- Vitamin vs. Aspirin
What happened next
- Horizontal/Vertical/Horizontical
- The importance of real domain expertise
- Why vertical (IMHO) is easier place to start