Hundreds of vendors with thousands of solutions promise to help your business do everything from accounting to project management to sales and marketing. But finding the application that’s just right for your business isn’t always easy.
That’s the experience that Michael Haddon had when he was running Corearth, a small Australian telecom. In fact, he became so frustrated by the constraints of available business solutions that he decided to create sister company to Corearth, one that would offer a new type of solution. Instead of developing a pre-packaged offering that businesses would have to conform to, he wanted to design a solution that would adapt to the needs of the business.
Kradle is Born
Haddon launched Kradle Software in 2015, and registered the company in 2017 in Australia, the US. and the UK. The idea behind Kradle is to give organizations and people a new way to manage their activities.
Kradle tracks and measures resource allocation, enabling businesses to identify and visually map opportunities and gaps in their processes down to an individual task-level. Kradle provides the data people need to see and monitor what’s working and what’s not—and take steps to improve the process or projects they’re working on.
How It Works
A no-code database is at the heart of Kradle’s solution. Users can build their own database, create custom workflows, and manage the solution on their own, without coding expertise or expensive specialists. Kradle provides data storage for workflow information, built-in task, project management and collaboration tools, and analytics capabilities to round out the solution.
Kradle also uses Zapier to integrate with over 1000 other applications, many of which are commonly used by small and medium business.
Organizations can use Kradle to tackle a range of problems, from improving productivity, to integrating workflows, to managing finances or customer relationships.
Kradle’s Growth Plan
Kradle is available now in Australia and in the US, with plans to launch in the UK in this summer. The company has data centers in each of these countries, and is focused on scaling within these three markets.
Kradle currently offers a 30-day free trial but will also roll out a freemium offer soon, giving users free access to the freemium version forever. If you want to try it, head to www.kradle.com and sign up for a free account. A Kradle team member will help you to onboard and answer questions.
In the early going, Kradle has learned that while the solution is designed to be easy to set up and manage, many small and medium business users in particular just don’t have the time they need to get up to speed on their own. Based on feedback from early adopters and market research, Kradle is developing more comprehensive support services, slated to roll out over the next six months. This will allow time-strapped customer to offload management and support to Kradle.
Perspective
The “SMB market” is actually composed of a very fragmented, diverse group of businesses with very different needs, requirements and constraints. “Out-of-the-box” applications fit the bill for many SMBs in many instances, but it’s also true that they can miss the mark in many others.
Kradle is aiming to fill this gap with a more customizable, comprehensive approach. Instead of adapting your business to the software, the software adapts to your company’s unique requirements, Kradle’s Still in the very early going, Kradle is also investing to streamline the on boarding process, so users can see the value they’ll get from Kradle faster—and use the solution across a broader swath of business processes.
But, while this approach has merit, starting with a blank slate can also be overwhelming to many people. Kradle’s biggest challenge may lie in overcoming this. It needs to clearly communicate not only how the solution works, and that it’s easy to use—and articulate how it can provide benefits for a multitude of different purposes.
©SMB Group 2018
Source: Laurie McCabe’s Blog