Duane Jackson’s small business accountancy software vendor KashFlow can afford to pay for market research, but sometimes hearing it from the horse's mouth is best.

KashFlow has an established customer base and rumour has it Jackson’s been approached by more than one private equity firm offering £10m-plus for the business. But when your nearest competitor is the software giant Sage, you need to use every trick in the book to keep ahead of the game.

As Jackson’s latest blog reveals, this includes the occasional bout of guerrilla market research. Sage had a pride-of-place stand at last week’s Business Start-up exhibition, which Jackson visited incognito to see what information he could glean.

Good job he did. Sage is about to launch a purely online version of its small business software, which puts it squarely in competition with KashFlow, also an online-only service.

The new Sage offering was 18 months in development and is due for launch in January. It costs £10 a month with free online support included. Apparently, the “very nice” interface is Blackberry opimised, meaning you can check your accounts on the move.

All this info from a quick chat with the guy at the stall. It’s a lesson to us all: when you desperately need competitive intelligence, sometimes all you need to do is ask.

Why not sign up to our small business newsletter and learn more?

Rating

By Dan Matthews  on   Dec 01,2008

Add a comment  |  Add a rating  |  Email to a friend

Keywords

accountancy    software    websites    online    market research    launch a product   

Comments