Creating Ecosystems for Competitive Advantage — a BoS Hangout (30th June)

We’re running a very practical hangout this week on the topic of building a software ecosystem around your business.

The event is being led by Bill Cushard and PJ Marquez from ServiceRocket. They will be working with BoS attendee Simon Randall (CEO and founder of Pimloc) on a real-life case study during the hangout. Together they will help you understand the strategic and tactical challenge of building a strong ecosystem for a growing organisation.

Join us (free to attend) if you’re thinking about how you can build a stronger community of customers and users… and bring your questions.

The Case Study

Our case study guest will be Simon Randall, CEO and founder of Pimloc. Pimloc is a venture backed video security and privacy business that is growing rapidly. This means that:

• Customers are starting to want API & microservices level options
• Simon sees the value in potentially building a set of developer tools/services to give customers more power and potentially become a more developer-led instead of sales-led business.
• The business is gaining a lot of traction and Pimloc doesn’t want to slow that down, but switching to a developer-led strategy might reduce pace in the short term even if the 5 year vision is it probably should be developer-led.

This is a significant decision for the business and Simon and his team have several questions which will be explored live during the session:

Strategic Issues

• If he needs to build an ecosystem, how should he make sense of it in the context of the company’s strategy? What are the trade-offs?
• Will this mean that the business could move from a sales-led (top-down) to developer-led (bottom-up) organization?
• What are the economics of this potential switch or should Pimloc run developer-led and sales-led strategies together? 

Tactical Decisions

• What are the best practices and the playbooks that work for different contexts?
• How should you start to build a community that works?
• How can Pimloc prototype this and therefore de risk the process?

Online Format

This hangout will be framed around a practical case study to help you think about how you can approach ecosystem development.

Participants are strongly encouraged to come with the questions that matter to them so that we can address them in the session. We’ll introduce Simon, CEO and founder of Pimloc, who will share a brief overview of the origins of Pimloc, their current growth and why they’re considering where to go next. We’ll also prioritise questions from participants.

PJ and Bill will discuss Simon’s situation and help him to make decisions about his next strategic and tactical steps by asking questions and sharing their experience and expertise in building software ecosystems for startups and at scale. Attendee participation will be encouraged throughout the session.