frankly at this point, it would be impossible for them not to know who we are.
That might be the view from your end of the equation, where you wake up every day and check your analytics stats. However, if you are ramen profitable, your current sales are probably roughly equivalent to the healthcare costs of the night shift on the janitorial staff at one of their offices. They're a large, publicly traded company -- they might not even know who you were if you worked for them. (Far stranger things have happened.) Its not like my bosses have ever come to me in the morning and said "Patrick! There might very well be some young buck working in his kitchen on the next big thing in examination management systems! Drop what you're doing and discover his identity so we can prepare to squash him like a bug!"
We could deliver exactly what they're looking for without all the risk of developing it from scratch.
I don't think you're thinking like a big company here. You see existing code and think "Yay, working features!" They see integration headaches. You're not tied into their accounting system -- that is going to take six figures to fix. (You think you can do it cheaper? Wait until you start working in a large organization that does everything in teams of highly paid people whose salaries and healthcare benefits start running the second the first of three planning meetings begins.) You aren't on brand yet, which is going to require a redo of all your HTML -- including a turf war between marketing, their product-side artists, and their web group. Oh, and you. You're a bit of a problem, too -- they can't absorb your code without you, but you upset the apple cart among multiple groups within their organization. Who do you report to? Who can you boss around?
When you start thinking in these dimensions, you can see why they might say "We'll do it in house, own it all, and not have to worry about any complications."
I guess I should amend and say "they" who know about me are the web developers and the people in the tech team. Perhaps they have no desire to buy someone else's stuff and would rather build from scratch. That's what I'd do. So, you're right, the people with the purse-strings probably don't know who I am. Any advice on how to change that?
And I can definitely see the point about integration headaches. Technology acquisitions seem like they'd be a nightmare to me.
Stop acting like a programmer, start acting like corporate sales. Find a contact within WotC. Ask to be introduced to the product manager of their existing product which is closest to what you have to offer. Contact him and sound him out on the possibility of being acquired. Be prepared to be told "No, we have no intention of doing that at all." Also be prepared to be told the same thing in a non-obvious manner that consumes several months of your life.
Personally I'd be thinking more along the lines of "Take my existing business to the next level" if I were you, since time spent on it will yield predictable results. Start with the low-hanging fruit such as charging more, optimizing conversion to the trial, and (biiiiiig subject coming up) marketing. If you're making (pulling a number) $2,000 a month today with 10k uniques a month then it is highly likely you'll make at least $4,000 a month when you have 20k uniques. That really isn't that far away -- it is only a single factor of two. (Multiplicative improvements make "factor of two" really not that bad in our business.)
Personally I'd be thinking more along the lines of "Take my existing business to the next level"
Thanks for this advice. That's how we've been operating all along, and it's done well for us. I guess I'm mainly just scared of the increased competition.
Also, your pulling-a-number-from-the-hat estimates are quite good. You should be a fortune teller :)
Compete.com + AdWords keyword data + reasonable guesstimations of your conversion rate based on my own experience with a bit of a discount thrown in because of the demographic = +13 attack bonus to guesstimating revenue.
Don't worry about competition. Worry about your customers.
Consider the possibility that a well-heeled competitor's launch of a competing product will be great for you. It all depends on the size and state of your market. Their effort will almost certainly grow the overall market, because they have so much more PR money than you. Their product will get reviewed in all sorts of places. Many of those reviews will compare the product to the existing alternatives. Provided you stay competitive and have a bunch of fans, one of those alternatives will be yours. You will then get lots of incoming links from people who are shopping around in this product category that they've never heard of before.
Your competitor's product won't be the same as yours. And if it is the same on day one, two months later it will be different again, because you will change your product in response. Surely the world of tabletop RPGs is big and variable enough to support two approaches to the same product.
An alternative way to look at my point: If the competition comes up with some kind of killer feature that your product lacks... you can add it. If they try some feature that nobody has tried before and it flops... you will know not to try it. They're doing R&D for you, at no cost to you.
If their product is better than yours, your customers might still stick with you. Every customer you land before the competition ships is fairly likely to stick. They're invested in your product. Who necessarily wants to cut and paste all their campaign materials into a new system?
And there is no guarantee that their product will be better than yours. It might be bad. Terrible things can happen, even to projects run by the very best of programmers. Wait and see.
Before you go to them, make sure that your website looks like you would want it to look when their CFO, Art Director, etc visits. Your site needs to bleed credibility on the first impression. For instance, you should at least temporarily swap in art on the front page that isn't tremendously compressed. And you might want to make it clear that the video is from Wired. This gives you credibility for someone who's never heard of your site. It's very likely that the CFO of WotC has no idea who Michael Harrison is.
That might be the view from your end of the equation, where you wake up every day and check your analytics stats. However, if you are ramen profitable, your current sales are probably roughly equivalent to the healthcare costs of the night shift on the janitorial staff at one of their offices. They're a large, publicly traded company -- they might not even know who you were if you worked for them. (Far stranger things have happened.) Its not like my bosses have ever come to me in the morning and said "Patrick! There might very well be some young buck working in his kitchen on the next big thing in examination management systems! Drop what you're doing and discover his identity so we can prepare to squash him like a bug!"
We could deliver exactly what they're looking for without all the risk of developing it from scratch.
I don't think you're thinking like a big company here. You see existing code and think "Yay, working features!" They see integration headaches. You're not tied into their accounting system -- that is going to take six figures to fix. (You think you can do it cheaper? Wait until you start working in a large organization that does everything in teams of highly paid people whose salaries and healthcare benefits start running the second the first of three planning meetings begins.) You aren't on brand yet, which is going to require a redo of all your HTML -- including a turf war between marketing, their product-side artists, and their web group. Oh, and you. You're a bit of a problem, too -- they can't absorb your code without you, but you upset the apple cart among multiple groups within their organization. Who do you report to? Who can you boss around?
When you start thinking in these dimensions, you can see why they might say "We'll do it in house, own it all, and not have to worry about any complications."