Wednesday 7 September 2005

Redmonk and the open source analysts

Interesting Q&A from Redmonk's Steven O'Grady (Open Source, Meet RedMonk. RedMonk, Meet Open Source) following his associate's maxi-manifesto (Things To Do in the Analyst Business When You Are Dead). James and Steven are two very nice chaps but it's still unclear whether their model is scalable and profitable...

Read also our previous post: Open source analyst business model?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

thanks - its very nice to be thought of as nice chaps.

profitable yes.

scalable - what are your metrics for measuring scalability?

influence- our influence continues to grow (scale) apace.

clients--we continue to win new and interesting clients (scale) and our retention rates are solid. the only company that ever unsubscribed did so in a major budget cutback and came back within 8 or 9 months.

number of employees--well there is the rub isn't it? we dont want to grow for its own sake and start paying salaries we dont need to. we dont want to hire a salesman that slams his foot in our prospects doors. frankly we would rather they invited us into the house.

finally on questions of scale i should say we are not really set up as a growth engine. we dont want VC or outside investment. we dont want to chase growth of its own sake:

"Real Estate is the leading cause of death for start-ups." - Ross Mayfield

we just want to do good work and if that means staying small so be it.

what do *you* mean by scalable?

I would argue the one area our model is very scalable is in attention. attention can always be turned into money.

Anonymous said...

do we scale? great question. is one measure of scale garnering the attention of the 800lb gorilla? if so then you might find this interesting

http://www.redmonk.com/sogrady/archives/000952.html

anyone for lurkers? i wonder if you can guess who the big competitor is?