The market Saleservant is trying to start is two-sided: bloggers and publishers write about fashion, and brands want to be written about and are willing to pay commission on sales resulting from the articles. Currently the brands using the service are too small to excite interest or indeed to do much of anything (they typically have no in-house marketing at all), so Lenka and Allan wanted to check with me on their plan to target mid-size brands instead. Their plan seemed well-developed and to have worked in at least one case, where they have landed a mid-size beauty brand who actually have a marketing department. They are finding that consultancy from Lenka is vital to landing these brands, as they still don't have very much time or experience in selecting and marketing to electronic publishers. Of course Lenka's consulting won't scale, but I suggested it's a great way to get a lot of feedback quickly from these early customers in the new segment; at a later stage, they can look to automate Lenka's work and bring her knowledge into the product. At the same time, their strategy (if it works!) is likely to create good case studies that prove the new model works, which is a big help for investment. Overall I was impressed with the strategy and suggested they focus on it, reducing their attention to the old small-brand model so they can learn quickly from the new customers.
Allan asked specifically about reducing development cost given that the new strategy will likely require little tech change in its early stages. He has outsourced the development to an offshore firm and is having trouble getting them to reduce their hours (he really only wants bug fixes now, but will of course want more later). I said that this should be very easy to arrange and that if his current vendor is being difficult, there must be lots more who would be very happy to take on a flexible engagement with the promise of more work later. (I typically recommend against offshore development at an early stage, but in this particular case, with a working product and little need for enhancement, an offshore solution is likely to work well. I did suggest that Allan consider bringing development in-house once the product clearly fits the market, as he will have a lot of new features to build very quickly then!)