By Jon Budington, President, More Vang

Just after the holiday break, I found myself preparing for a meeting. The client was a decade-long contractual user of our Banjo software product, and the invite had 40 names on it—names I didn’t recognize. I could see from the agenda that the project we would be discussing required custom software development—close to a quarter million dollars’ worth. It would be hard to schedule into our already crowded product roadmap, but we didn’t have much choice. This was a seven-figure client; keeping them happy was non-negotiable. It was also a  reminder that software products are never finished. Once you engage, you’ve taken on an entirely new level of responsibility.

I can still remember the day I uttered the words “we should make a software product.” It seemed like the answer to all of our data-to-print problems. Six years, four lawyers, and some 20,000 hours of software development labor later, we have not one but two successful software products.