One of the great things about blogs is that it makes it easy for anyone (that has a blog) to express things – both good and bad. While mainstream media seems to be endlessly focused on “bad stuff sells newspapers”, people like to express (and consume) a full range of their experiences.
Bloggers regularly talk about their positive experiences. I obsessively subscribe and read search feeds (across NewsGator Search, Technorati, Google, and Yahoo) for all the companies I have an investment in. I’ve found this to be an awesome way to keep a pulse on what’s going on in my world.
Today I noticed a great post by a guy named Chris Spagnuolo titled Tearing up the spreadsheets…our move to Rally Software. I’ve very proud of the team at Rally – they are creating a superb company that builds SaaS-based software to help manage Agile software development. When I made the original investment, I got questions from other potential investors that included “what’s Agile” and “software tools will never live in the cloud.” Today, a large number of companies are using Rally’s software to manage their software development process.
Chris’s post has detailed and thorough praise of Rally’s product and describes his company’s path to adopting it. It’s a great example of unsolicited customer feedback (and praise) and comes to us via the power of blogs. A decade ago entire teams of marketing people were tasked with finding, writing, and publishing “customer success stories” and “customer testimonials” – now all you need to do today is delight your customer and their enthusiasm will show up on the web.
Thanks Chris! Even though we’ve never met and I have no idea who you are, I appreciate the time you took to write up your Rally story. And – if you ever need anything regarding Rally, just drop me an email.