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Changes at Lead Maverick and Partnerships

Posted by Chris Thompson - CTO, Lead Maverick in Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX on Oct 27, 2007

We at Lead Maverick have had an incredibly busy week. We moved into our new offices located in far North Dallas and managed to push a new tool for our customers into testing.

We're also in the process of moving our email services in house rather than pay monthly fees to a 3rd party.

This immediately raised some "discussion" between myself and my boss, Sean. I really didn't want to bring the email solution in house as we don't have the staff to set it up or administer it. He didn't want to pay the extra money to a company for email service that can be set up with information found in Google.

He convinced me that Windows Small Business Server 2003 was the way to go, it includes Exchange, and administration is pretty much point and click.

We bought the server. He was pretty much right, it is all point and click. It's just the where to point and what to click that brought our solution to an quick halt. Currently we are outsourcing the setup of the Exchange server as well as setting up our Active Domain. Should I feel bad that we are a web technology company and we don't know how to setup email? Not at all.

When starting a business we have to pick our battles. Setting up a network and email was not a battle we had the current knowledge or time to fight.

This same model applies to some of the services that Lead Maverick offers it's customers. Do we have the IQ to provide you with a custom keyword research tool? You bet. Do we have the mental stamina to give you snappy avatars to greet your visitors when they visit your Lead Maverick page? Of course. Do we have the hutspah to design a intuitive interface for view your web traffic? Oh there's no doubt.

But why take us away from what we do best and reinvent the wheel? Why not use services that Trellian, Google, Snap, SitePal, and Yahoo offer and pass the quality on to you?

The downside? Well, we can't always guarantee that Trellian will have the fastest response time or we can't promise that Net Applications won't change their membership API without telling us. What happens when the worst happens? Lead Maverick's customers suffer.

This isn't to say we take the attitude of "Uh, sorry you're having problems but take it up with Google." We balance ourselves on the line of "yes, we outsource this stuff and we don't have control over it but we will do our best to make sure it works as well as possible with Lead Maverick".

All that to say, we thank you for your patience as all of us work together in providing you, our customers, with the highest quality application possible. We know your business is your baby because our business is ours, we empathize when you feel the pain when something doesn't work. We will do our best to make sure that our pain is as painless as possible (don't over analyze that phrase).

Always remember, Lead Maverick is a phone call or email away and your questions, suggestions, and / rants are always welcome.

- Chris