If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know I’ve been an investor in NewsGator since it was one person (Greg Reinacker – the founder). We had a board meeting yesterday (I’d guess it is my 25th or so NewsGator board meeting) and it was the best one yet. I’m incredibly proud of the NewsGator gang – they’ve really hit their stride and have created a real company that is an clear market leader.
One of the things that I love about NewsGator is their focus on building software that their customers actually want. While they have one of the highest quality software engineering teams that I’ve ever worked, we all know that isn’t enough to produce great software that humans actually use. The extended NewsGator team – including the product folks, sales folks, support, marketing, and executive team – are obsessed with their customers in a way that puts them far ahead of most other software companies.
Craig Cmehil (a technology / community evangelist at SAP) describes this better than I ever could in his blog post titled How I Got SAP to Open Their Doors and Start an Epidemic! In it, he walks through in detail how his relationship with NewsGator evolved from introduction to evaluation to negotiation to development to deployment. Craig – thanks for the shoutout, support, and enthusiasm – you are an example of the customer that every company dreams about working with.