I just realized that I haven’t posted a single word about the fate of our SalesAdviser product (SaaS recommendations for e-commerce). I’ve had this project to publish a video of me explaining why we failed at it, but I think I won’t have time to devote to this before long. So let’s write it here.

We’ve decided to stop the SalesAdviser product in July, 2014 because it didn’t catch up commercially speaking. Main reasons for this failure are :

• Too much focus on the technology for a business that wasn’t so much technological : NC-ISC is a great stuff, no doubt about that, but if you have the best engine in the world, maybe you shouldn’t try to sell cars for elderly people. They don’t care about the technology, they don’t understand it, and they won’t use it to its potential.
• No beta-test customer / no customer in the direct network. We had a few indirect connections with e-commerce people, but nobody directly involved in using/testing our service to help us drive it in the right direction.
• A Business Model that seemed to hurt our customers feelings : one of the great ideas (we thought) for SalesAdviser was to be paid on a percentage of the sales made through the recommendations. And I think « percentage of the sales » is a repellant for the people in e-commerce

Whatever the real reasons are, we didn’t make it with this project. So we decided to pivot toward an « engine maker » business model, and we started by doing some consulting, and writing a complete data processing workflow with NCISC at the core.

It took us between mid-October and mid-February to reach the beta status for eXenGine and deploy a demo with the wikipedia analysis.

Now we have our first customers, and we are looking forward new ones who want to use a better engine than all their competitors.