Kindly share your feedback on how GoodFirms has been doing so far in increasing your visibility among potential clients.
GoodFirms did increase our visibility and we get visitors on our website coming directly from our GoodFirms listing.
Please introduce your product and give a brief about your role within the organization.
SAM9000 provides tools and knowledge to help Agile teams, knowledge workers, become highly effective and efficient. We offer them online study guides, books, and software to manage projects, tasks, secure file sharing, in the cloud. I am Paul Larney, and I founded SAM9000.
What was the objective behind coming up with this software?
Agile and Lean thinking are very powerful systems. At the same time, they are difficult to master. I define Agile projects as “complex projects, with many unknowns”. We want to make it much easier to master Agile projects. We also want a broad range of businesses to use Agile (Consulting, Marketing, other Professional Services). That is, more industries than now, and we want to champion that.
How is your software beneficial from a value addition perspective to the clients compared to other software alternatives available in the market?
Typically Agile software manages one project/product at a time. When you need to manage several projects in parallel, these solutions become highly inefficient. SAM9000 makes it extremely easy to manage multiple Agile projects at the same time, even fun. Because it is designed for that specifically.
What industries do you generally cater to? Which industries in general are highly benefiting by using your software?
The software is really horizontal. It is not tied to a particular industry but to a way of working. SAM9000 is highly beneficial to knowledge workers contracted to provide some skilled service, with many unknowns. For example, consultants, engineers, digital marketers, and yes, software engineers, even though we focus more on these other categories.
What are the key features of your software that makes it stand apart from your competitor products in the market?
As mentioned, our competitive advantage is the ease of working in Agile, on multiple projects in parallel (for example, because your team manages multiple products or receives multiple orders from clients).
To facilitate this, we use, among other systems, a multi-level Kanban, we call it a 3D Kanban. It makes it possible to arrange and prioritize projects, jump into any of them, arrange and prioritize tasks, and jump to your dashboard to arrange and prioritize your day. We also have built-in document management to know what was discussed and agreed upon.
And of course, a key feature is the auto-scheduling. Whenever you change the priority of a project, all its tasks, for everybody, are rearranged and reprioritized. The AI, SAM9000, hence the name, takes care of this constant scheduling. It is like having your personal assistant tracking your tasks and your day to help you achieve your goals.
This is why juggling 5, 10 or 15 complex projects, in parallel, is possible and seamless in SAM9000.
What is the customer satisfaction rate according to you? What steps do you take to cater to your customer’s needs and requirements?
Customers love several aspects of SAM9000. First, the ease of managing multiple projects as a team, seamlessly and easily. Second, the file-sharing, project-based, so they can send and receive important digital documents to and from their clients.
We came to this level of satisfaction by constantly improving the software, getting feedback, and more importantly, aggressively acting on this feedback.
For example, to define projects and prioritize them, we went through several systems. We thought they were pretty good, but they confused or slowed down users. We did not hesitate to scrap them, multiple times, multiple attempts until we found what worked the best.
Are your customers repetitive? If yes, what is the percentage of repeat customers that you have?
SAM9000 is a SaaS, so you subscribe to the product. As long as you are happy, you stay on.
Does your software product provide any resource or knowledge section for its users? If yes, what kind of material is provided to your users to help them get acquainted with your product?
This part is very, very, very important to us.
It is a big difference, we believe, between our software and others. We have two divisions at SAM9000 Teamwork, for tools, and SAM9000 Academy for learning.
The way we see ourselves is actually, first as the Academy to teach you what Agile is and how to use it to your maximum advantage. Second, after we help you with the theory, we provide customers with the tools to actually succeed with this knowledge.
This is why you have access to tutorials within the software. And outside the software, we just published our first book on Agile, and more are coming soon on Amazon.
What kind of support system do you offer to your clients for catering to their queries and issues?
We offer very responsive email support, and remote help when needed.
What has been the revenue for your product for 2020?
We do not share this information at this point.
Where do you see your product in the next 10 years?
I want to see the full realization of our vision. A ton of knowledge available and easy to access for our customers, on Agile, Scrum, Lean, and also other professional certifications.
I also want to see our teamwork software SAM9000 Kanban, Files, and others, helping digital knowledge workers in many industries (often surprising us, as we found out). It would mean we succeeded in bringing 21st-century tech to help smart businesses become very successful thanks to Agile knowledge and tools made for non-technical people.
