Terry Cunningham’s Adventures: Crystal and Coral8 (Part 2)

SM: What was the first product you built for your customers?

TC: We built a little product called Quick Check, which was an instant check writer. The existing accounts payable function only let you write a batch of checks, which was problematic when the courier showed up with a COD. Our little product allowed small business owners to write a single check.

I was able to purchase a list of all small business owners who had the same accounting system that I had been installing for my clients. I hired a direct marketing consultant and asked him how I could use that list to sell my product to everyone who had purchased the same accounting software. We paid him to write a sale letter which described our $99 add-on. Our consultant wanted to make sure the note was personal, so I had to sign, fold and stuff 14,000 letters.

It actually worked. We had a 7% buy rate. Back in those days, direct marketing was getting a 2% response rate. The good news was that I could not sign the letters fast enough. I would do a couple hundred a day and mail them. The phones started ringing right away and I would handle the orders. I would then send out a couple hundred more. It was the perfect trickle. After that I said, “Wow, that was cool, let’s do this a bunch of times!”

SM: How much money did you make with Quick Check?

TC: I think we sold 1,000 copies. That was a lot for us. We then did Quick Invoice, Quick Utilities, and one of the products was Quick Reports. By 1989 we had nine add-on products. Borland came along and I was introduced to one of their product managers via a friend of a friend. He was a product manager for Object Vision, which was one of their first visual development tools, but they did not have a reporting tool. They were looking for a report writer to bundle. They thought we had a pretty cool DOS report writer and they wanted to know if I would consider doing a Windows report writer.

I sat down and figured out it would be three to four months of porting. The first version actually took six developers six months to do. It was an unbelievable effort. We were working in a basement, and every time someone plugged in a kettle to make tea the circuit breaker would trip and all the computers would shut off. That is how we learned about disaster recovery!

We gave it to Borland and they asked us how much it would cost. We told them it was free. They thought we were joking, but I told them that by the time they shipped we would have the next version ready and we would up-sell it. They thought I was crazy, but they agreed.

We did a bunch of fun stuff with Borland. They shipped the product and then a phone call came along in 1991. We had been shipping with Borland for about a year. A product manager from Microsoft called and said that he had Bill [Gates]’s pet project called Visual Basic, which was going to be their next generation visual development tool. They wanted a report writer and they asked if we would do the same deal we were doing with Borland.

I agreed to the deal. The only difference was that Borland shipped 50,000 copies of Object Vision. When Microsoft put us in the box and shipped, they sent out 1.4 million copies in 12 months. That was a new problem for us. We had phone calls coming in from all over the world.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Terry Cunningham’s Adventures: Crystal and Coral8
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