Selling sawdust

• By Sonali on 16 March 2010

Industries based on Natural Resources are remarkably efficient.  For example did you know that lumbar mills sell sawdust that then gets used in particle boards, pet bedding and natural fertilizer amongst other things.  So what does this have to do with social media or software development.  Well, it occured to me that software firms don't emulate this nearly enough.  We pour our time and energy into creating utilities for internal use, but very few shops turn around and offer them to customers or sell them.  As usual 37 signals is at the forefront of this revolution.  Basecamp (their project management tool) and campfire (their IM client) started as internal utilities, both of which have millions of users and rake in $$$s for 37 signals.  Both contributed to making 37 signals that rare breed of profitable Web companies.

Well, at Compleo, we have our own example of selling sawdust.  We noticed that a lot of our customers were asking for minor changes on their custom Facebook fan pages.  So we wrapped a WYSIWIG editor around FBML to make it easier for us to update content.  And then we realised that we would much rather not have clients tethered to us and depend (and therfore pay us) to update their pages.  Marque's toolbar is very familiar to the lay person and as far as we can tell, there are no other competing products.

So we now offer Marque at a very minimal cost to customers to update their pages.  Net result - more accurate and engaging fan pages, happy customers who love the product and yet another innovation for us to be proud of.

Here is a screen shot of what Marque looks like.  Tell us what you think...

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