Scaling your business to earn more revenues

[author: alex]

Business Scalability: the art of growing your business

After working in IT for over 10 years, you start to notice things. That amount of time spent doing anything will likely leave you with a massive amount of reusable knowledge.

In our case, we’ve discovered our potential to help companies scale their business, using technology of course.

Unrealized potential

If you’re currently running a SaaS web service or application, you’ll eventually reach a moment where you can’t seem to generate more revenues from your customers.

In most situations, there is a huge unrealized potential from enterprise, non-profit, and government institutions. Those customers often have needs which prevent them from using SaaS “cloud” services, either due to legal requirements (such as Sarbanes-Oxley and PCI compliance), or due to the sensitivity of the data they hold.

“We’d make 100x more money, if only we could sell our SaaS cloud app to enterprise customers, ”

    - One of our future customers

The decision to scale

Making the choice to scale your business is a tough one, because the time and investment required can be quite significant, without a guarantee of success.

At Unscramble, we set out to remove that business decision. We want companies to say:

“well of course we want to scale our business”.

How we help scale businesses

To achieve those goals, we created Jidoteki - a simple web application designed to take your SaaS web application, and package it as a virtual appliance, which you can then sell to your customers.

In order to get started selling virtual appliances to BIZ/NPO/GOV organizations, we recommend the following:

• Use configuration management tools to provision a virtual appliance with all the necessary software packages and dependencies.
• Figure out how you want to sell your appliance: either as a standalone paid download, or on a subscription basis (usually yearly).
• Implement a simple control-panel on the appliance, which can help with restarting services, and updating the appliance.
• Bundle your actual SaaS application as a separate package, to be deployed and installed by your customers on their virtual appliance.
• Implement a recovery method for your customers to access the files on the virtual appliance, for when things break.
• Implement a clear and semantic versioning scheme for your virtual appliances, so customers can stay up to date on new versions, feature additions, and bug/security fixes.

Naturally, when you look at that list, you quickly notice the amount of work required to get up and running with a distributable “for sale” virtual appliance.

That’s where we come in

At Unscramble, we label ourselves as experts for a reason. Not only does Jidoteki do most of the difficult work for you, but we also have the skills and experience to help you get up and running in a matter of days.

We provide consultation services to help scale your business using technology, so you can generate more revenue. We’ll complement this with Jidoteki, so you can have an entirely automated hands-off process.

So, what exactly do we scale?

• Development processes: we simplify developer’s lives and greatly increase the speed at which they can code, test, and deploy their work across multiple environments.
• IT infrastructures: our experience with companies having thousands of servers and millions of users allows us to build systems which can handle current and future loads without downtime.
• Sales of SaaS products: we know how to turn a simple SaaS website or web application into a highly lucrative product generating additional monthly revenue.

Do you need help?

We’re currently available for consulting in the event your business has a scalability issue related to the 3 points I mentioned earlier. We’ll gladly meet with you and discuss your problems, and evaluate what can be done to solve them as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Want to do it yourself?

Go for it! Signup for Jidoteki and give it a try.

If you’re really stuck, join our chat room on IRC FreeNode #Jidoteki, or send us a tweet, we’ll do our best to guide you in the right direction.