Ideate

1 min. with a Superhero: Uzi Shmilovici, CEO of Future Simple

by Fred Roed on 15/03/10 at 6:00 am
3 comments

Today I’m stoked to be chatting to Uzi Shmilovici, the CEO and founder of Future Simple, which created PipeJump, an online sales pipeline that my company World Wide Creative has been playing with recently.

Uzi, we really enjoy PipeJump for its clean interface and usable design. How do you balance ‘keeping it clean’ with the inevitable requests for more features?
Thanks Fred. Great point. This is actually the hardest part and a real challenge we are struggling with every day. It is so easy to mess up the user experience. This is why we have a set of very clear rules on how our user experience should look and feel like. Whenever we add a new feature, we make sure that the those constraints apply to it. This is the only way in which we can ensure that PipeJump keeps being the easiest and smartest business application around.

Software as a Service: the future? Or more hype than reality?
Both. Software as a Service was here long time ago. It was previously called ASP, which stood for Application Service Provider. So, the name changed, but the concept didn’t. However, the new name definitely contributed to the new wave of hype that we see all around for the last 2-3 years. On the other hand, SaaS is definitely the future. More and more businesses are making the move and ditching packaged software in favor of hosted services. This makes perfect sense and this is why I believe that 10 years from now, people will not really remember the fact that we used to install software from CDs.

How did your company, Future Simple, come about?
Future Simple was born from the understanding that there is no one integrated solution for small businesses today that meets the current needs of the small business manager. Those that exist are either old or disintegrated. Moreover, there are so many new technologies that can be used today to make the user experience of business applications fantastic. Still, it really sucks. I wear a watch that reminds me that every day. It’s the Casio AT 550. It has a great touch screen and it’s from 1984! It took us 23 years until the iPhone was launched but the technology was there all the time. Our mission at Future Simple is to make sure that world doesn’t have to wait 23 years to create amazing business applications.

Where are you guys based?
We are based in Chicago, which is an amazing entrepreneurial city. There is a great web vibe here and it only seems to grow over time. Just look at the great companies we’ve got here: Groupon, EveryBlock, Threadless, Grubhub, Timelines and many more.

Sounds a bit like Cape Town, where Ideate is based. Uzi, what SaaS software do you use? What do you recommend?
Obviously, we use PipeJump. We also use some internal tools that we built which we might release some day. Other than that, we use Campaign Monitor for email campaigns, CrazyEgg for analytics and Quickbooks for accounting (the online version). We really love Crazy Egg. We think that they did an amazing job with the product.

Lastly, you’re competing in a scarily competitive environment with SalesForce on the one end and just about every wannabe developer on the other end – what’s your strategy to stand out in the crowd?
This is THE million, or even billion, dollar question. As simple as it may sound, Michael Porter, the Harvard Professor who is the guru of competitive advantage claims that it is all about doing things differently. Let’s face it, the world of business software is stagnating for more than 5 years now. Other than some incremental improvements, nothing really happened. We hear our users who tell us that the user experience in PipeJump is fantastic. We think that anyone who tries it will have to agree. And it will even be more so with the new version that we are about to release. Eventually, we intend to create a user experience that is advanced and ubiquitous. So, while the market is competitive, there are still a lot of great opportunities for companies who would step in and change the game. And Future Simple will.

Cheers Uzi, we LOVE the ‘fire in the eyes’ you’re displaying so clearly here. We dig your vibe, and we’re betting that PipeJump will pop to the surface as a leader in user-centred SAAS applications. Good luck, and keep in touch. Ideate readers: sign up to PipeJump now to manage your leads and grow your business – you will be well stoked with its ease of use and its robust functionality. (Give us feedback too!)

Fred Roed is the marketing guy in the Ideate crew. Fred is the CEO of web marketing company World Wide Creative and the co-founder of online learning portal Heavy Chef. Fred loves writing about people out there doing marketing right. Follow Fred on Twitter here. View more articles by Fred Roed.

Tags: interview

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