After 18 months in a B2B Software as a Service Business, I want to share a couple of lessons I learned how to address our markets with our products.

We build AI-driven software products, a software development kit teaching mobile phones reading. We can read any text in a real environment like utility meters, loyalty voucher codes, license plates, passports, driving licenses, or tire identification numbers – black on black background. Our business model is a B2B Software as a Service Model driven by our investors looking on Annual or Monthly Recurring Revenue and monitoring our churn rate.

There are no Excuses
The root cause for apologies in your Market2Order process is a missing or mediocre service level between marketing qualified leads and sales accepted leads. A lead can never be good enough qualified or never be closed fast enough after hand-over to sales. It is the understanding of personal accountability key to success. In a process flow, you cannot work like a flow-type heater or believe in Taylorism. It’s customer first, and during lead qualification, you need customer empathy on both ends for the customer and a seller. On the other hand, it’s the personal accountability of a seller to ensure a proper qualification service level – then we call a lead ‘sous vidre’ qualified.

Prospecting is the Hard Thing
In our core industries, we are very successful with face-to-face meetings at industry events. At these events, we can ensure the right customer empathy and gaining customer insights – so we can achieve both:

Making Markets for our Products and Making Products for our Markets

Nevertheless, we win with our innovative products anchor accounts, where we did not see a market before. After such a success, the tough manual work of Prospecting and doing the account based marketing is not everybody’s preferred work. Much groundwork, the real understanding of the use case, describing the benefits and build a story around the on-kind-wonder project. We are leveraging the Social Media Channels, harvesting contacts, emails, and phone numbers. Moreover, doing painful cold-calling. Not many people understand that selling starts with the first ‘No’.

Advertising and Pay-Per-Click
In the first years, the online channel and spending the marketing funds with Google, Facebook, LinkedIn will bring many leads and accelerate your growth faster than Prospecting and industry events. However, after a certain period, this lead flow will stabilize and not support the hyper-growth as expected when you start to segment your customer set and qualify your leads ‘sous vidre’. You need to invest more in personalized landing-pages, multi-language support, videos, whitepapers, and other for customer valuable content.

Mailing, mailing, mailing
Once you have the right content available, you can start a proper and valuable mailing campaign. A newsletter is not essential news for all your customers. You make the news as personal as possible. Follow up on the target groups and be as valuable as possible.

Webinars is for the technical audience
We do have monthly releases, and at least once a year, we launch a significant leap. Introducing this major leap to a developer audience in a webinar is the best way
for us to ensure customer success and minimize customer churn. We keep contact with developer audience and target for referrals.

KPI, KPI, KPI
Count how many leads you generate each week, measure how many calls you had, calculate the conversion rates, count the mailing contacts. Plan your events, schedule meetings before a marketing event. Measure your performance and honestly understand the implication for your Monthly Recurring Revenue and your Churn in your business model. You will need it anyway to explain to your investor, what you are doing with their money and it ensures clarity what your sales & marketing team is doing.

Having learned a lot about selling Software as a Service in the last 18 months, we still can improve our work with a channel partner, complementary solution vendors, and value-adding resellers. We drive business through system integrators – from the small digital agency to the global players, but multiple selling through our business relationships is by now rather a one-of-a-kind exercise or in other words, still enough to learn in the next 18 months.

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We at Anyline are recruiting. We need people in the space of Artifical Intelligence, nowadays one of the most contested areas of digitization. We are tripling the number of AI engineers within a year.

But how are we doing this? How do we find, attract, develop and retain those talents?

We stick to five critical success factors:

ONE. We invest in people when they need our help, and we are not waiting until we will need them. We are collaborating with universities, and most of our AI engineers did their thesis with Anyline projects. We have a certain amount of open seats booked for students and stick to their time plan and wait until they finish their exams. Do not ask what candidates can do for you, ask what you can do for your them (stolen from JFK :-))

TWO. Intrinsic motivation factors are essential in the beginning. Extrinsic will be more critical later; however, you have to walk the talk of individuals career plans. And with career progression, these motivational factors you need to cover at a certain point in time. Start to walk the talk from day one.

THREE. Mens sana in corpore sano. You have to take care of what they are eating and how young people want to treat their bodies. In our case, we have three times a week a chef in our office, once a week fitness trainer in the office, every other week a masseur and weekly a work out trainer. In the summertime, we have our volleyball session, too. For intellectual hunger, we invite top speakers like international top sports coaches for motivational talks, Corporate CEO to talk about their career and of course, internationally leading AI Experts. As a special treatment, we offer our people medical health service from Mediclass.

FOUR. A professional onboarding process of new people is a must to integrate them as diverse they are. We hire from Chile to New Zealand. We have people from Canada, Germany, Austria, Czech, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania; we have even Irish and Northern Irish people. We have elderly and rookies. We have a higher share of female talent in our teams than usual in high technology companies. Inclusion & Diversity is key. Wherever your office location is, try to cultivate English as your corporate language.

FIVE. Hire slow, Fire fast. After a month, you know if people are ready for the challenging work and willing to leave the comfort zone. A former boss mentioned once, comfort zone and growth do not coexist. Fire early, when people are not ready. Recruiting is hard, and finding the wrong needle in the haystack is part of the game (approximately what Steve Jobs meant in the quote about recruiting).

I was invited to talk at the Vienna University of Economics on March 15 about anyline.com. My talk was part of a current speaker series being run at the university. I gave the students an introduction to Anyline and explained the challenges of founding and how Anyline became an established company in the Austrian technology scene.

Presentation on Anyline & Mobile OCR

From Humble Beginnings

Started my presentation by telling the story of how Anyline was formed. Once I explained how Anyline emerged as the solution to a problem held by mySugr, I moved on to introducing the company goals that were set in 2014.

Since making this commitment, Anyline has grown to a company of 30 people. In addition, +10 million scans a year are now reported and we have +100 enterprise customers worldwide.

Where Are We Now?

Once the Anyline origin story was clear for the students in attendance, Andreas explained what we’re working on now and how we plan to achieve our future goals. Since becoming COO, Andreas has brought his favourite maxim into play wherever possible.

“Clarity affords focus” – Thomas Leonard

The result is what we call the Anyline compass. This compass has two key components, which are our mission and our vision. Below is the slide I used to convey this to the audience at the WU.

After clarifying the importance of of the compass, I introduced the audience to the technology behind Anyline and gave examples of how it can be vertically integrated across a number of fields and industries.

Anyline in Action

We’re happy that we work with a lot of market leaders and we try our best to show off the ways that these companies make use of Anyline to create and optimize innovative processes. Andreas gave the students a full rundown of Anyline’s partners and the solutions they use to improve their businesses.

Questions & Answers

At the end of the presentation, we opened the floor to questions. Thomas Reutterer, the event organizer and a professor of service marketing and tourism at the university noted that the students were highly engaged and asked very pressing questions. Andreas had a similar opinion.

“I was very impressed by the laser-sharp questions asked by the students. They showed a fantastic understanding of our business model, the risks involved in our business and even how the technology itself works.” – Andreas Greilhuber

Barcelona. Having an early – I mean a real early morning – flight, I will arrive 8ish. On my agenda various meetings with Samsung, IBM, ABBYY, microblink and many others until Tuesday evening.

Beside the augmented and virtual reality events Barcelona MWC is the place to be for a mobile OCR company like anyline.com

This year we have had already industry focused events for utilities and police in Essen, Berlin and Frankfurt. After this week in Barcelona we are starting the preparation of events for SAP in Austria and Florida. Continued by an MRO event to promote our serial number scanner with season final and highlight at Oracle in California.

Our products for meter reading, passport and license plate scanning are now underpinned by an universal serial number scanner.

A derivate if our serial number scanner – the vehicle identification number scanner – was presented to the world at the ai inside summit in Vienna.

Recently we delivered our first european driving license scanner (w/o MRZ) to Ministry of Interior for all police officers in Austria. The promising POC with an German Automotive OEM will demonstrate our business value in the core of the automotive value chain. Automotive industry will even more globalise our footprint in the mobile world.

With our machine readable zone product we are with United Nations, Australia, Global Blue (tax refund) and soon in Indonesia.

We convinced e.On, Vattenfal, Siemens, Tieto. With these partners we are #1 in Utilities with our mobile OCR meter reading product. We are Minimising risk in the Smart Meter Rollout, reducing churn and first and foremost simplifying the metering.

The high volume scanning use case digital interactive marketing with The Sun, Red Bull, Karlsberg and Landskron is a case for the business value we are generating in loyalty programmes.

So I have enough story telling raw material for my partners in Barcelona 🙂

https://anyline.com/news/multi-frame-integration-ocr/