Big Man on Campus

A funny thing happened on the way to market... I had always envisioned Kerika as a product for "professional" users -- you know, whilte-collar folks, "knowledge workers", "information workers" -- the kind of people I used to work with in the past when I was at Jiway and Morgan Stanley.

One of our early beta users, Adam Philipp (a great patent attorney, by the way), introduced me to Alan Leong who teaches at the University of Washington's Bothell campus. Alan suggested that his students, who need to work on group projects, would be good beta users. He introduced the software to some of his students who were working in small groups to produce business plans.

Much to my surprise -- and I have to confess I had received Alan's suggesion with skepticism at the outset -- the students turned out to be some of our most regular and enthusiastic users! It turns out that

• Most students have to work on group projects, particularly in their senior years.
• They don't get much by way of technology support for working in distributed teams other than plain old email.
• Email really doesn't hack it for student projects: these folks like to embed graphics in their files -- after all they are the so-called "digital generation" -- which means their ordinary files are too darn large to be emailed around.
• And, of course, they very much appreciate Kerika's ability to manage all their documents and help them stay on the same page (excuse the pun!)

I am now rethinking my business plans and strategy in light of this rather exciting and serendipitous discovery.