Tales from the frogpond

Everyone company (at least its management) wants their team members to work together well. By getting to know each other, learning about strengths, weaknesses, interests and other personal properties, future cooperation will ideally be more productive and have less friction. In one evening, hanging around with friends at our favourite Turkish restaurant, I started to toy with ideas of an activity that we could initiate for above purpose. And everyone's entertainment. Going back into my past I recalled an experience from my military times in 1991: one night, our training unit of rookie soldiers was woken up by our seargants…

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My computer experience started it with the famous Apple II computer. I am still thankful to my father for being so progressive and willing to invest into such a machine at a time where nobody else around us owned a personal computer. And I am still thankful to my uncle for providing the machine to us. With the wisest choice ever: he did not hand over computer games until Christmas. Instead, all the floppy disks we owned for several months had software like VisiCalc, a word processor, and the like on them. No chance to get distracted! My first contact…

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At froglogic, our product portfolio catered to a global market of businesses seeking robust Software Quality Assurance (SQA) tools. Diverging from other niche product vendors, we did not confine our focus to a specific industry. In essence, any company engaged in software development, be it in automotive, financial institutions, governmental bodies, or any other industry, fell within our potential customer base. While the scope was promising, our challenge as a small business lay in navigating a global market with a limited sales force. Recognizing this, we explored the option of collaborating with partners in specific markets already adept at selling…

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One of the most common discussions in software companies, or more generically, any company offering tech products, is the business model to choose. Over the last decade, a strong push towards subscription and SaaS models happened, very much driven by the growth potential of high, recurring revenues which ultimately also boosts a company's valuation. Although customers often dislike subscriptions, they mostly accept or even expect subscriptions these days, if not only due to the lack of alternatives. So let's look at how we dealt with that topic at froglogic. When we started froglogic, the dominant business model in the B2B…

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frologic’s sales team was a very small team. Just before the exit, when we closed annual revenues of several million euros, and employed more than 40 people, effectively only 4-5 worked in sales. But how did we manage to make this work? While certainly there was room for improvement, we had a somewhat different approach to sales than most traditional software sales organizations. Nobody in our sales team had a real background in software sales. Initially this was no conscious decision. In the first years, we didn’t really think of sales as a dedicated role. Instead we just answered requests,…

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In the dark and cold Norwegian winter of 2002/2003, Harri and I hung out quite a lot together with our girlfriends. Both our happiness with the job at Trolltech decreased as we saw our ideas not resonating with Trolltech’s management. In addition to that, after a few years in Norway, the long winters made life not so enjoyable. We started discussing ideas of a tool to automate testing of the applications written using Qt. At this time, the topic of automated software testing wasn’t that hot, esp. when it came to testing GUI applications. There mostly existed only a single…

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