After numerous different articles about the impending Venture Capital flood, I still had my doubt.
I don't see the same thing as in the 90's where nearly everyone who had a webpage was getting money thrown at them, but there's enough going around to give me pause.
CaseySoftware is a relatively small development house. We have a handful of sharp developers and a variety of clients, but we are definitely not a major player. Our clients are starting to see the funds roll in so more work, more projects, and more concepts are being floated now than there was just three months ago. Websites are being re-worked from asp to php, open source applications are being integrated, and our project management is well suited to handle it all.
Purely through connections and our involvement in open source projects such as dotProject, we have been invited to bid on a new project nearly every other day. This doesn't sound like much until you consider the fact that in the past two months, we've responded to 21 RFP's and they breakdown like this: Won: 14, Lost: 2, Undecided: 5
Personally, I think these numbers are stunning… and completely unsustainable. We need to start planning and expanding into areas where there is sustainable growth and not these pseudo-random spurts. Therefore, we are working to bring our asp-model of dotProject hosting online as soon as possible.
We can hope to always have more and more clients offering big name projects, but more realistically, I believe that the asp-model (as covered yesterday) is a much more reasonable, sustainable, and mutually beneficial way to go.
Now we just have to make the time to do it…