クラウドベースのCRMソフトウェアで年間25%成長した創業について
月商 — · 創業者1人 · 従業員18人 · Petersfield, UK
John Paterson（Founder, Really Simple Systems CRM）· 創業 January 2006 · 記事掲載 — · reallysimplesystems.com · 元の記事
創業者は自己資金で2年間かけて開発し、まず友人企業を無料顧客としフィードバックを得た。初期はGoogle広告でリードを獲得。その後、マーケティング支出を増やし、SEOと顧客レビューによるユーザー生成コンテンツ（UGC）に注力して集客。既存顧客基盤を持つ企業との共同マーケティングも活用した。従業員18人の202X年時点（推測）。
売値の出典: 公式サイトにアクセスできず確認できず（2026-10-13 取得）
Finding your target audience and understanding their buying habits and drivers will help you tailor your marketing to maximize the return.
crm: Really Simple...
SNS: Twitter
stack: Laravel
My first experience of being an entrepreneur was when I was simultaneously offered a place at a prestigious business school and the opportunity to start my own consultancy business. I thought - I can always get back to business school but how often will I be offered the chance to start my own business? I never went to that business school. Finding your target audience and understanding their buying habits and drivers will help you tailor your marketing to maximize the return. After working with a few companies in the early days of personal computers I joined Systems Union, a small UK software vendor and the author of SunSystems accounting. From five people we grew that to $1m revenues, 600 people, and 23 offices around the world. It was a wild ride fueled by the adoption of PCs into businesses and then Y2K. After Systems Union I found myself doing a series of turnarounds, trying to stop troubled software companies from going bust and then growing them again. It was well remunerated but a bloody business, surrounded by unhappy customers, staff, and investors. Finally, after the last one of those I had made enough money to start my own business, or rather, to not earn anything for two years while I got the business going. It was important to me to be able to self-fund the business and grow organically rather than bring in any investors.
Day 1 - Firstly I needed to decide what business to be in. Should I do something new or go with what I knew best? I decided on software, as I knew about that, and specifically CRM software as I’d set up a myriad of systems over the years. Day 60 - Next up was to design the product and start writing the code. Fortunately, I used to be a computer programmer, so I just needed to brush up on my skills and get going. Day 180 - While I was still developing the product, I contacted a couple of friends who were also running their businesses who agreed to be my first customers, for free, and their experience and feedback helped define the initial product. Day 365 - It was about a year after I had started that I was ready to launch the product and got set up with a website and Google Ads to start generating leads. Of course, at this point it was just me so I was answering telephone inquiries, giving product demos, handling customer support inquiries, and then still writing the product code in the evenings and at weekends. Year 2 - Two years down the line I took on my first employee, a sales manager to help manage the inquiries. This helped free up my time to fine-tune the product and add more features. Year 3 - A year later we were in the position to hire a second employee to manage the customer support. This was also the trigger to move into proper offices rather than running the business from home. From then on the company has been growing steadily, increasing both the customer base and revenue, and taking on more staff. A big step-change came with an increase in spending on marketing, enabled as we generated more cash.
Simple Systems is now a fully-fledged business with staff, international offices, and a recognized brand. As our fame grows, and as the world recovers from the Covid-19 pandemic and remote working becomes the norm, and as CRM software becomes a must for all growing businesses (and not just large ones), the company’s future looks bright. We are continually developing the CRM product and increasing our customer base around the world. We now have offices in three countries and sell globally. We are ambitious for the future where we are looking to increase our brand awareness and exploit the need for cloud-based business solutions.
All the lessons learned are the obvious ones. Overall, people are the key to success and a great product is useless without great marketing. But also important is not to spend more than you have or you’ll end up in hoc to somebody. And of course, keep your customers happy and don’t rip them off. In general, but especially when you’re first starting, it helps to find partners that have an established customer base that fits your product or service. Co-marketing lets you find a readily available target audience and an existing level of trust and loyalty that you can tap into.
The tools and platforms we use are 100% Open Source. We develop our CRM software in PHP and Laravel, with the back-end in MySQL, and Linux servers. We use both Google and AWS for data hosting, as you can’t rely on just one vendor so the risk is minimized. Unsurprisingly, we use our products for CRM, email marketing, and customer support. As well as being great products, being our customer helps us to react quickly to the changing market and identify any issues immediately. In a market as saturated as CRM, marketing costs can escalate very quickly if you are not savvy with your spending. We don’t have the budgets of some of our more illustrious competitors so we need to be canny. SEO is key and we invest a good deal of time in making sure we are being found in the right places. As part of this, user-generated content in the form of customer reviews is essential and has the power to generate a large volume of new leads.
The book Crossing The Chasm, by Geoffrey A. Moore, was probably the best book I read on taking a software product to market. I also learned a lot about how to run a software development team from Frederick Brooks Jr’s The Mythical Man-Month, The: Essays on Software Engineering.
All the clichés are true. You need to have a lot of drive, you need to believe in where you are going, and you need to be able to survive financially while you build the business. As mentioned above, understanding how to market your business is essential, and not recognizing this is where I have seen many businesses fail. Having a good product isn’t enough, you need to understand who is going to buy it and why. Finding your target audience and understanding their buying habits and drivers will help you tailor your marketing to maximize the return.
We are always looking for great software developers, salespeople, and customer support staff to continue the growth of the business.
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