What Comes Next

If Rumpelstiltskin sold a product to enterprise customers, he would quickly learn a lesson that we learned at my last company: no matter how fantastically his product could spin straw into gold, his sales would also depend on his product’s ability to display and report on every aspect of the spinning process. It doesn’t matter if your product works like magic; if it can’t effectively communicate about the work it is doing, it won’t survive in the enterprise for long.

At TurnTide, we created a product that approached the spam problem in a new way, designed to cooperate with traditional message-by-message spam filters. The Anti-Spam Router used TCP traffic shaping to effectively reach back across the network to the spammers, and limit the rate at which traffic could leave their systems destined for a protected network. The result for customers was great; they had dramatically less spam entering their networks, meaning they saved on infrastructure costs from bandwidth to servers in addition to keeping spam out of the inbox.

The problem we faced was an interesting one… how do we count and report on the traffic that the product keeps out of the network altogether? Traditional spam filters don’t have this problem; they can count and report on all of the messages they receive, process, and mark as spam. We used a few different techniques to report on traffic that was no longer hitting our customers’ networks. We built baseline statistics when the product was initially installed, but before traffic shaping was enabled. We modeled the growth in baseline spam number experienced by the Internet at large. We added a custom reporting engine so that any statistic available to the system could be tracked, measured, compared, graphed and exported.

At the end of the day, these and other features were an effort to make a new kind product report as if it worked like the existing products in the market, since that was how customers had already learned to think about the problem. Since TurnTide really did work very differently from those existing products, reporting using the old metrics was never a perfect fit.

Building innovative products that go after existing markets from a new direction is a good strategy, and its the only way I’d ever want to enter a market as crowded as anti-spam was when we founded TurnTide. Existing markets, however, have established a way of thinking about problems and solutions. The existing vendors have educated the market, defining metrics for success in their own terms based on the structure of their solutions. Products that don’t operate within the expectations set by earlier offerings have some extra work to do; either directly re-educating the market, or trying to fit into the existing metrics until market traction allows for organic change in how people think about the problem. Even with its shortcomings, I’d definitely pick the later approach again.