It’s amazing to look back on the last year and see how far this company has come. Having started up a few software companies over the years, it’s always the beginning of the journey that’s the most exciting and difficult part for me. When I joined Flypaper last fall, the company was tentatively called FreshBrew and while we still weren’t totally sure how this would evolve, we knew we had a game changing technology. We took this idea to the Invest Southwest Capital Conference (and won a $250,000 investment) and then DEMO 2008 (and won a DEMOgod™ Award) and before we knew it, were we off and running. The thing that amazed everyone we talked to – investors, press, analysts, customers – was that no one had yet created a platform that allowed users to create, edit, reuse and track Flash content. From our collective backgrounds we knew we had something that could be really big. We had the solution to a painful problem. Figuring out the best way to sell and market it has been the challenge.
We’ve now seen Flypaper be adopted by all kinds of users in all different industries. What we also found was that enterprise-level businesses were creating enormous amounts of Flash content for training, marketing, internal communications, investor relations – you name it. This was costing them millions of dollars and ate up countless hours of programmer time. The biggest frustration for these companies, and the third party developers who create their Flash content, is that just a small change to any project larger or small, could take weeks to implement and eat into the budget.
When we approached these mid sized to large companies, they couldn’t believe they could actually have a central repository of all of their Flash content and projects, and then reuse, edit, and track all their Flash content whenever they needed. We saw that we could make some changes and deliver a very powerful Flash Content Management Platform that is truly cost effective. We finally found our sweet spot where the Flypaper solution could be most effective.
Going into the New Year, Flypaper will now be totally focused on the enterprise user and the third-party developers (marketing and design firms, eLearning developers, etc) who create content for enterprise-level clients. We’re empowering companies to create high-impact, Flash content that can be shared across their entire company, re-used again and again, for a fraction of what it was costing them before. We’re also giving Flash programmers and third party-developers a Platform that will save them time and resources and give them a competitive advantage, as they can now deliver projects faster and allow clients to do their own maintenance.
We’re very excited to roll out Flypaper 2.0 in January with a bunch of great new features and a brand new collaboration application, all designed with professional content creators in mind. Just after the New Year, I’ll blog about some of these great new features that make Flypaper easier to use and the output even more cool.
- Pat