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Below, a bit of history..
Panda Software was born in 1990 almost by chance. At that time, Mikel Urizarbarren a, founder of the company, knew little or nothing about computer viruses.
However, he decided to follow his intuition and, together with his wife and a young programmer, created what is today one of the most important software companies in our country. The initial investment? One million pesetas and plenty of imagination and courage.
Urizarbarrena also had an essential element to succeed in the software world: experience. Panda did not come out of nowhere. He and his two partners had already carried out another project (Eurosoft, a company that manufactured software for driving schools) which gave them the necessary know-how to launch the new one. Nor did Tomás Andreu Cuenca, general manager of Total Solution Europa, start from scratch when he created his company: “The project arose three years ago from the merger of two small companies, one dedicated to distributing American customer relationship management (CRM) software, and another that developed an enterprise resource planning (ERP) program.” They started the business among five people. Today there are 27.
Linneo Software was also born from the experience of its founders. As its manager, Aránzazu de Irala, explains, “I decided to create my company to try to cover the shortcomings in the way of working and meeting customer needs that I had seen in other companies.”
HOW THE SECTOR IS
Entry into this market is not a bed of roses, no matter how good a programmer you are. The first thing to do is find a niche, which is not so easy given the large number of companies that have emerged in the sector and the fact that, in the field of custom software, large consulting and development companies share the big clients.
Tomás Andreu explains that the establishment of his company “was preceded by an enormous amount of research and development work, until a solid software product was finalized that could provide solutions to the management demands of managers, executives, and users.” In short, it is not about reinventing the wheel, but there is still software to be invented – both for the business environment and for the home – and aspects to be modified in a business that, by its very nature, is in permanent evolution.
Perhaps the dizzying speed at which changes occur in this sector is one of its main characteristics. For this reason, the entrepreneur who decides to enter it must, as Andreu recommends, “maintain a constant investment in R&D, since the degree of obsolescence of software products is very high.” The ideal is for our company to sell products, but also to offer service. Otherwise, maintaining it will be difficult: nowadays, having a great product but providing poor after-sales service is synonymous with bankruptcy.
For example, if you try to convince a company to change its management style by buying your product, but you do not offer an integrated solution for all its problems nor demonstrate that hiring you is profitable, rest assured it will never do so. And that is only achieved by adding added value to our programs.
De Irala believes that the most competitive factor of her company “is the after-sales service, software updates, and technical support that the client always has at their disposal to resolve any doubts about the program's operation. It is also important to allow the client to make suggestions about possible improvements to the program and for these to be considered in updates.”
For his part, Andreu also believes that “to succeed, it is essential to offer value in the form of services. For example, those offered by Total Solution Europa are consulting and project management, development, implementation, data import, and maintenance.”
HUMAN RESOURCES
An aspect you must keep very much in mind regarding the human resources of your company is the importance of continuous training for the team you lead. Being constantly attentive to innovations in the sector, new customer needs, new programming and design styles, etc., are keys to success. There are two ways to sell software: create a product considering the needs of the market you want to target and try to attract customers, or first locate those potential buyers and offer them a product tailored to their needs. In short, you will have to define very well what business model we are going to follow.
Regarding the minimum investment, it will largely depend on the characteristics the entrepreneur wants for their business: from creating a modest software company at home, to aspiring to found a business with twenty employees on staff, several local servers, licenses for different programming languages, etc.
