InCloud Control is hitting the streets this month to better develop our customer understanding.  As a product company, we believe we have created a solution to a common problem in the small manufacturing space.

We believe that small manufacturing needs and wants the intelligent data and power provided by Traditional ERP solutions but do not purchase these tools because of these two reasons:

We are seeking the brightest people in the industry to discover what problems they have and how they are solving them.  Our initial interview is not intended to sell our system, but to validate or debunk our beliefs of what the market is seeking.  We want to find out just how critical the problems are in small manufacturing if they are willing to pay for a product that would provide a solution.  Following are some of our beliefs that need validating.

We Believe that…

• A cloud-based and mobile ready solution will be accepted by our customers.
• Price must be affordable for everyone.
• The product must be simple with limited features to quickly gain user adoption.
• The product must be simple with limited features to quickly on board and scale to massive growth.
• That providing cost transparency, production planning, execution progress, and material requirements will deliver immediate value to the customer.
• That all customers are familiar with ERP systems.
• That ERP is too expensive for small companies.
• That even if the ERP was free, the technical resources and time needed to deploy, customize, train, and manage is too complex to make the commitment.
• Company size under 99 employees will buy an affordable and easy to use system.
• Companies will buy a minimum viable product with limited features if newly added features are valuable to the business process.
• Our customers do not sit at a desk for 8 hours-a-day.
• Our customers will want to tasks, alerts, and progress delivered to their smart device.
• Our customers would rather advance production workflow via mobile device over paper.
• The user experience must be simple yet valuable.
• Users will want to see immediate impact on their jobs and the company.
• We believe production planning and scheduling is done manually in most small companies.
• Production costs are calculated through intuition and not intelligent data.
• Production capacity gains are important to our customers.
• Nearly all users will carry a smart phone on them nearly 24 hours a day.
• Maintenance is a small concern but the added automation to the customer will quickly become valuable.
• The app must be deployed and customized in less than an hour.
• Customers have made multiple online purchase in the past.
• Building a company framework during on boarding is preferred over a longer customization time with all detail built into first deployment.
• A customer can follow a series of interview questions that will automate their on boarding process.
• We will need to offer concierge services to on board first wave of customers.
• The president or owner will make the buying decision.

InCloud has created two teams that have cross-referential responsibilities in the early stages of the company.  Our product development team and customer development team collaborate on product features and customer interview loopback.

We have created two surveys that address our hypothesis and capture interview participant data.  That data feeds into a data repository where additional notes and detail can be aggregated and analyzed.

50 customers have been identified through references from industry leaders, groups, and university staff that has expressed a desire to help InCloud succeed.  We will publish our survey results at the end of the cycle to share what this industry demographic reveals.

If you want to participate in our survey contact us at hello@myincloud.com 

Small business manufacturing is where job creation and innovation is happening in the US.  So how can companies keep up on the latest manufacturing techniques, industry best practices, and regulatory changes?  Traditionally they could spend time away from the business at a technical college, or read mountains of technical books, but then who would be running the business?

Advanced professional educational programs where developed in an era of large batch production principles.  Iterations happen on an annual basis and sometimes biannually.  The time required to complete a course is nearly impossible for the owners and their small staff of mission critical employees.  And what happens when you finally complete the course and you find out that everything you learned wasn’t exactly what you thought you were going to learn?  Then there is the retention and application of what you learned to impact the business in a positive way.

“This large batch educational model just doesn’t work anymore.  Especially for the small manufacturing businesses. That’s where InCloud Control is focusing our attention on solving this problem each day.”

We take a different approach in educating our users.  We treat each student as One Unique Individual Learner.  We know every user’s learning style is different.  Some like reading scholarly documents, some like watching a person teach a principle subject, some like listening to a teacher on their headphones, some like an actual demonstration of the concept, and finally some like learning in groups with social interaction.

InCloud addresses each learning style in our MX platform.  We also test the impact the teaching has on the user, and ultimately their business.  Educational opportunities are delivered in real time exactly when a user actually needs answers.  Business owners love this because their key employees don’t spend time away learning broad subject matter.  Users love it because they know they have a choice in the learning style that suites their preference.  Both business owners and users love the fact that after they learn something new, they are able to articulate a best practice methodology and how applying that practice to the InCloud MX application process and ultimately the business, positive results are delivered each day.

The revolution of small manufacturing companies is being fueled by affordable business execution software.  We think we add a critical benefit to our customers by delivering education “Just In Time”.

Are you ready to start something revolutionary at your company?

InCloud initially architected our business structure to solve the interoperability problem plaguing the oil and gas industry.  Specifically, we were targeting the super major oil companies and their refineries.  We had gathered an impressive group of domain experts that helped form our vision and strategy around the product.

This type of product has an extremely high price tag and a sales cycle that averages over a year.  Because you are dealing with so many moving parts within the refinery itself, and then compounding those numbers during a planned shutdown of a plant, it soon became clear that this business structure could not be sustained during our early stages.

So we held a meeting that reviewed the results from our testing and interviews with customers, along with hearing from our product engineers about the improvements and advancements they had made.  What we discovered was that non of our product enhancements made a difference in shortening the sales cycle, converting our test customers into paying customers, and that the product had grown so massively, that training and support was becoming our biggest pain point and cost center.

We decided that we needed to pivot.

Sometimes the product you launch with is just to complex to fix the problem you intended to solve.  So we looked at individual modules and functions that could be launched as products of their own.  What we noticed was that one module in the entire platform was used more regularly than any other by the refineries machine shop.  We had developed a lightweight manufacturing module to help refinery teams track the repair progress of valves sent to the machine shop.  When we took a closer look at the module we noticed that, although the workflow and data model utilized the same complex platform, the functionality was very limited.

So we held interview sessions with the users of this module to see if we could understand the use case and what we discovered was the foundation of our new business architecture.  The users found the limited manufacturing module fast and easy to use.  There were fewer choices, features, and tabs than the complete system.  Users were required to enter in very small amounts of data, yet because the system was leveraging the entire data structure and services running in the background, there was tremendous value delivered to the production team as well as keeping the refinery manager updated on the progress of the repairs.

“We decided to shift from a business architecture based on big price tags, expensive and long sales cycles, and a few customers, to a company that would deliver an inexpensive product, with mass-appeal, and short sales cycles.”

We have made several small pivots on a weekly and sometimes daily basis since then, but none as difficult and critical as a complete business architecture transformation.

Pivots of this magnitude are rarely survived and moreover rarely attempted.  Our team was able to identify the opportunity early and have the confidence in a more focused product offering.  The team became motivated by the revelation instead of feeling dejected for riding the original business idea into the ground.

Constant testing and fast cycles of building, learn, adjust allowed to recognize our original idea was not going meet the growth objectives we had envisioned.  With that knowledge we were able to put aside our pride and egos to see a new direction and a new day for InCloud Control.

What is the most common failed start ups encounter after launching their product?

“No body wants what you made!”

So how then do we as innovators that have identified a market, a need, and a passion to solve the problem go about making sure your future customers want what you make?

It’s what Eric Ries calls in his book The Lean Startup, the MVP – Minimum Viable Product.  What this means is that you can not spend any significant amount of time and money developing your product in a vacuum.  You need to get out of the building, out from behind your computer, out in the world you are trying to impact and show your potential customers your idea as quickly as you can.

Ries goes on to discuss a scientific system to incorporate into every aspect of your business to ensure success.  And what is success to a startup?  A customer that is willing to pay you for your product.  A customer that falls in love with your product.  A customer that keeps using your product.  A customer that by using your product adds immediate value to their business – and ultimately adds value to their customers.

This is what we have experienced since following The Lean Startup system:

1. Customers thought our already simple product was not simple enough
2. Customers do not sit in front of their PC for 8 hours a day using our application
3. Customers do use their smartphone 24 hours a day for business and personal reasons
4. Customers do not want to go looking for important information about their business
5. Customers do not want more features than they need, want, or use
6. Customers will not tell you what they need, want, or use because they don’t really know themselves
7. Customer behavior will tell you what they need, want, and use because you can see through analytic data mined from your platform

Getting the product in the customer’s hands is most important.  Only then will you know if your product – and more importantly your reason for existing – is inline with what your customer are willing to pay for.

Are you ready to find out if your great idea can be a viable product that drives revenue for your new company?  Then launch your product today and see if your customers agree.

Are you the kind of company that makes great products?  The same company that your customers keep coming back to time-and-time again?  You’ve posted profits for the past 3 years in a challenging economy.  You’re making a steady and slow climb each quarter yet you wonder why you haven’t been able to take that next “Big Step” in production performance and market penetration.

If you’re that company, InCloud MX can help you make that next jump in performance execution.

“InCloud Control exists because the small business manufacturer goes to work each day to kick the big guys ass.” 

However, the business execution software they need to compete has never been made accessible to them.  Enterprise Software – like ERP or MRP is both financially out of reach and much to complex to deploy and consume – and frankly that is exactly what the enterprise software giants in this space desire.

Our approach flips that model on its head.  InCloud MX is affordable for any and every small business manufacturing owner.  At $99 per month, you get 10 users to input production orders, get access to reports and alerts, get order cost feedback immediately, have visibility into production scheduling capacity, and watch real time progress of each order.

We also made it simple for anyone at any level.  Unlike the massively complex features embedded into traditional business execution software, InCloud MX only gives you what you want, and more importantly what you will actually use to add value to your company.

The user experience is our focus, because we know if your people don’t Absolutely Love using our system, we can’t add value to their company and they can’t add value to their customers.  So we made InCloud MX with basic functionality visible to the user, while maintain complex services running in the background.

Why would we do this?

Because you told us that you don’t use 90% of MicroSoft Word.  You only really wanted Bold, Italic, and Underline…

Our approach allows you to simply enter in 3 points of data that deliver answers to your most important questions.  We also made it really fast and easy to get started.

Swipe your credit card and less than an hour later you will be entering your first production order into InCloud MX.  Yep, it’s that easy.

Are you ready to compete?

“Small manufacturing companies with revenue between approximately $200 million and $1 billion, and up to 10,000 or more employees. Typically, companies of this size have limited IT resources and seek ERP systems with low total cost of ownership (TCO). Nevertheless, they look for solutions that offer broad and deep functionality.”

“At what price point would they be crazy not to use InCloud MX?  And better yet, at what point to do you look at us and say that we are crazy for offering a solution this good for that price?”

“Do you have any idea how crazy that is?” was what came out of my CFO’s mouth next.  And that soon followed with both my CTO and I saying in unison…”That’s exactly what I was hoping you would say…Jinx buy me a coke…Jinx buy me a coke…”

Innovation, Revolution, and Democracy

There is a defining moment in every business where they either decide to get in line with the rest of the herd or move in an entirely new direction.  I find that being a part of a startup causes you to make that decision on nearly a daily basis.

The current problem with American manufacturing is that overseas competition has made it more difficult to match pricing, speed, and quality.  Mainly because the incumbent enterprise giants have fallen into slow moving lazy river populated by other fat and bloated US competitors.

Real innovation and real revolution has always come from entrepreneurs in the small to medium-sized manufacturing market.  But sustaining any significant growth year after year becomes difficult without the right processes, automation tools, and intelligent data to guide them toward opportunities, instead of reacting to trends and obstacles.

“I believe anyone in my company will be able to learn and like to use this software.  It’s so easy.”

“We actually could use everything available in this software.”

“Having a vote in what goes into the product, and then seeing it there the next week was unreal.”

“What this software does is all we really needed to be more profitable and ultimately better serve our customers.”