Now that we’re a good two months into 2021, we’re starting to see the sales pipeline for Focus grow, but we’ve haven’t seen the kind of conversion rates I’d expected this year so far.
Although I am glad we haven’t seen a dip in our user base or revenue numbers, this flat lining of our MRR is cause for a bit of concern. We hadn’t been focused on outbound in Q4, but are hoping to see the investment in sales in Q1 begin to pick up soon.
That being said, we’ve seen a couple fascinating opportunities for strategic partnerships pop up in the last six months that point to a brand equity in the market that I also did not expect this early into the lifecycle of the product. I’ll be happy to share more on that as the conversations evolve!
One of the key questions that I wanted to answer this year was: Would it be smarter to invest in more features to compete with other MDM providers or to retain our keep-it-simple policy to support as many types of users as possible?
We recently completed a competitor matrix, comparing FocusMDM with other low cost MDM providers in the market, which you can take a look at here.
What we noticed when we completed this analysis is that Focus stands up quite well against our competitors. While retaining one of the lowest prices in the market, we also support a number of features that our competitors haven’t prioritized, but which are imperative to our specific market, being the international development space.
An example of this is app-time-and-data-blocking feature, which allows administrators to block certain apps for certain hours of the day—which is often used for CHWs who want to access Facebook, but for whom admins only want Facebook accessible after 5pm and on Wifi networks. This would not be a typical enterprise rule for a normal corporate office, but is strikingly common in the space we work in.
So for now, our decision on this question is that keeping it simple and slowly adding in new features that multiple clients request is the best way for us to retain our corner of the market and support the users that specifically chose Focus because of the uniqueness of the tool.
Read the first post in the “Building in the Open” series from Shabnam here.
