Written by Tyler King, CEO of Less Annoying CRM
Less Annoying CRM’s mission is to help small businesses succeed. We primarily do this by offering simple CRM software that is affordable and simple enough for low-tech small businesses to use.
There are a few reasons:
Small businesses are an important part of our economy, but they’re getting left behind. Technology and globalization disproportionately advantage the largest companies which creates a “winner take all” system. I wrote more about this in this post on the Technological Divide.
Realistically, we can’t fix this problem on our own. This is a massive systemic problem and we’re one tiny business. But we can at least help, even if just a little bit, by giving small businesses some tools they need to keep up.
This is a bit simplistic, but I think the personality of a business is basically just the average of all the personalities of the people who work there.
At a small business, each employee’s unique personality will subtly impact the company itself. As a result, every small business is different, and most of them feel distinctly human because the personalities of the humans who make up the business shine through.
Large enterprises are still made up of individual people, but there are so many of them that no one person can really impact company culture in any meaningful way. As a result, all big companies end up being kind of the same.
If you like working with people, you probably prefer working with small businesses instead of enterprises.
If we like dealing with people so much, why sell to businesses at all? Why not make software for individual people? The answer is a bit boring: Individuals don’t tend to pay much for software. As individuals, we mostly expect our software to be free (think about email, web browsers, chat apps, social media, etc.).
Because it’s so hard to make money selling software directly to individuals, most consumer software companies monetize in other ways such as selling user data or showing tons of ads. It’s very hard to run an ethical business with that model.
So as a strictly practical matter, we sell to businesses because they’re willing to pay for software, and that’s an essential part of us remaining an independent, ethical business.
Lots of software companies start out serving small businesses because they’re willing to buy relatively basic software. But then it comes time for the software companies to grow, and the normal playbook is to “move upmarket”. This means expanding the product to have more features so it appeals to larger customers.
Put another way, most companies expand by solving the same problem for more people. If you’re a CRM company, you start out offering CRMs to small businesses, and eventually you offer CRMs to all businesses (but realistically, mostly big businesses because they have the most money to spend).
We don’t want to do that. Expanding who we serve beyond small businesses would mean making the product worse for the customers who got us here, and that would be a betrayal, in my opinion.