When my friends and I thought about the company we wanted to create, we all agreed we would want it to be the opposite of most I.T. companies in existence today.

First, we wanted to be free from the “old school” business model that most enterprise software companies occupy.   That is, let’s market heavily using traditional and expensive means; staff a costly enterprise sales force that generally does a poor job of representing the customer’s interests, make a sale, and move on to the next opportunity. 

From experience, we know this is poor way to align your organization to the objectives of your customers.  The traditional business model found in the information technology industry can distort the relationship between a vendor and customer, sometimes to the point of being adversarial.

We also know from experience, working at these types of companies, after a while, it's simply not fun.  For me, it was a rare moment when I could walk away with a significant sense of doing something worthwhile.  To us, selfishly perhaps, this is our biggest driver. 

We wanted to create an information security platform that had a direct relationship with the customers and communities it served and protected, that lived and died by how well it solved the needs of customers and communities.  We also felt that we had to reflect the new ways people were communicating, how online work and social lives are fusing together, and leverage the connectivity of these new networks.

By taking the approach that CertiVox is serving communities of business professionals, consumers and publishers, we believe we can attach our existence directly to solving the needs of those groups, and do it in a more meaningful and productive way.

As an example, CertiVox will make available, for free, API access under various licenses so that members of those communities using our software can implement their own capabilities, thereby avoiding the bottlenecks found in traditional development cycles that plauge I.T. vendors.

Secondly, our platform will always have a free version in addition to our paid subscriptions.  In one sense, it's really altruism as we truly believe that privacy, securing information easily and productively, shouldn't be the domain of a few.  I don't agree with Mark Zuckerberg or Scott McNealy;  Privacy, to me, isn't an outdated concept.  This really hit home for me when we celebrated the birth of our first born a few months ago.  I think anybody with kids will agree with me on the need to retain these basic rights in our society.   

Leaving altruism aside, we still plan to recoup our costs.  On free accounts, CertiVox will do this from sponsorships and branding on top of the secured and packaged content apps sent through our network.  In another post, I will describe this in detail so it's clear how this model works, without sacrificing any of the privacy and security that our customers, both free and premium, will come to expect.

Further, CertiVox won’t be investing heavily in traditional sales and marketing activities.  We just simply don’t believe in them, and you probably don’t believe the messages.  What we will be investing heavily in is technology and programs that can enhance our ability to listen and react to the feedback of the communities we serve.

If we do our jobs right, we’ll deliver the platform that communities trust and will use, and we will be allowed to carry on.  If not, the communities will leave us, and we will cease to exist.  CertiVox won’t be dependent on how successful we are at selling marketing messages to potential customers; CertiVox will be dependent on serving and protecting communities.

Finally, CertiVox offers the same Marketing Manager platform to its Professional subscribers that it uses to manage our own brand and sponsorship runs on free accounts.  This means a distributor of protected content apps who uses the CertiVox platform has an opportunity to remove all costs associated with information security, content delivery and digital rights management. 

In fact, by leveraging the content-use analytics in the dashboard, and by running branding and advertising sponsorships on their own protected content apps, they can turn information security into a profit center.  Now wouldn't that be cool?