Steve Shu's 21Publish Blog

What the heck does that title mean? It is a concept called net present value, and it is a time value of money concept taught in business school and relates to making investments. At some risk of simplifying things too much, if a project has an NPV less than zero, it means that expenditures will exceed income. In other words, don't take the project. On the other hand, projects (or customers) that have an NPV greater than zero, well these will add to the enterprise value of a firm.

So the other day I had a customer prospect say to me numerous times that we weren't going to get much money from him based on his simple requirements. It wasn't a negotiating tactic by the customer prospect. His requirements were pretty straightforward and fit into our affordable pricing plan (I mean people sometimes don't realize that they can get like 100 ad-free and customizable blogs for $19.90/month ... that's $0.20 per month per blog). No complicated pricing plan or upsell needed. The person was legitimately concerned about my investment in the pre-sales process - perhaps I was spending too much of my time (which costs my employer money) gathering info for him.

So why do I spend so much time with working with customers that use our products, but where we may not even make any money?

The answer is this. Blogging a growing "industry". I'm a new kid on the block for 21Publish. I hone in on honest and talkative users of the 21Publish product. I need to get product feedback from them. I need to experience what they are experiencing. I need to know what they want. How they perceive the product. How they value the product. Where improvements can be made. While we (21Publish) can't accommodate every request for enhancements, we're working at it. It's my role as an employee of the company to really understand the product at an intimate level. At some level, all of the users of a product (regardless if you are bean counting the lifetime value of a customer) can become advocates for a company if the company earns their trust.

The University Chicago may revoke my MBA with such sacrilegious talk about accepting NPV <= 0 projects ...