Stephane Grenier. (Darren Brown, OBJ)

It has been said time and again that the most important thing for entrepreneurs to do is make sure they develop a product that their target market actually wants. One entrepreneur who has taken that advice to heart is Stephane Grenier of Orleans.

Over the past four years, he has developed a software program called LandlordMax, designed to make landlords' lives easier by helping them keep track of who their tenants are, what they are paying in rent, when rents are due and overdue, vacancies, and when leases expire.

Mr. Grenier updates his software regularly from customer feedback through his website, which gets 180,000 unique visits a month. Those communications skills have paid off and so far, Mr. Grenier has sold units of LandlordMax "in the thousands" around the world.

OBJ: Tell me about LandlordMax.

GRENIER: It's for property managers and real estate owners – it's probably split close to 50/50. It lets you organize your accounting, work orders, tenants, buildings, units, managers, receipts, invoices. It lets you run reports so you can find out who owes you money, when you have late rents. There are over 100 reports you can run. You can either download the software online, or you can purchase it and have it shipped.

OBJ: How did you come up with this idea?

GRENIER: I started in Los Angeles, I was doing consulting work over there about four years ago. At the time, the real estate market was just starting to pick up and I knew quite a few real estate investors and they were all complaining about how their software was too big, too expensive or too difficult to use. It was either that, or they had to use Excel and they didn't want to learn all of those formulas.

I have a computer science degree, so I started creating it. When I moved to Ottawa, I worked on it for a year and a half. Now I am back and forth on building it and consulting.

OBJ: What makes your product better than what is already out there?

GRENIER: The number-one selling point is that it's easy to use.

The second selling point is the customer support. For me, customer support is very important ... on our website under the success (testimonials), half the comments are on the ease of use and the rest are for the customer support, saying the cost of the software is worth the customer service alone. My wife and I do the customer support. It's a very active product. The enhancements come from what the people tell us they want, so we get a lot of good feedback.

OBJ: What is the market like for your product?

GRENIER: It's being used for a few units to ... the biggest one I have seen was for 500 to 600 units. A city in Canada has bought it, a bunch of universities in the U.S. have bought it for their dormitories. A bank in the U.S. and many mobile parks are using it.

It has sold in every continent other than Antarctica. South Africa has sold quite a few and 86 per cent of our sales come from the U.S. There are a lot of sales across the world. Also, you look at what's happening in the U.S. right now, a lot of the mom and pop property investors (who are less likely to use software to manage their properties) are being squeezed out and a lot of the larger investors are scooping up those properties. Our market is likely to grow over the next few years as more of the larger clients take on more properties.

OBJ: How did you reach these markets?

GRENIER: Mostly though online marketing like Google Adwords. We use Yahoo Directories, we've done press releases. We have had bloggers review our product. I also have a free cash-flow analyzer on the website. We built it at our cost and people can use it for free. That's generated a lot of traffic to the website. It's really useful because landlords can go in and figure out, "OK...I have renovations worth this much on unit 501, when will I be cash-flow positive?"

I am very transparent about the company and I have a blog on the company website. That gets a lot of attention and leads to a lot of sales. If you are transparent about your company, it makes a big difference. We have charts without the numbers on our site to show people our growth and traffic growth. If we have a bug, I post it on my blog, along with what I have done to resolve it. These are things that some companies would hide, but we put it right out there.

OBJ: How have you developed your product based on customer feedback?

GRENIER: From day one, over 90 per cent of the features were customer-driven. We have an idea initiative program. Every time someone sends us feedback, positive or negative, we list them all. Then when we update the software, we chose new features based on the cost versus how many times it has been requested. Every new version, we go through that list and the top features are always customer driven.

For example, customers want to have pictures in the program. I understand it, but I didn't appreciate why some clients would need that feature. It was requested enough that we have pictures for units and tenants. From what I understand, some of them wanted pictures for before and after tenants moved in for damage deposits, something I would have never thought about because we don't have damage deposits here in Ontario.

OBJ: What would be your final words of advice for people looking to develop a software product but they aren't sure if it will sell?

GRENIER: My advice would be get it out as soon as you can, but make sure it is bug-free. Don't try to put in all the features at once, build the basics first and see what people respond to and build from that.

THE EXPERTS SAY

If you take major packaged-goods products, they have feedback built in because they have market research. In many ways, they find out what customers think early in product development because they put products into people's homes to be tested so they can optimize their products.

For entrepreneurs it's a little more difficult. Often, as an entrepreneur, you are in love with your product because you have to have that passion to focus all your energy on this one thing. What tends to happen is they get blind-sided. So that's where customer care comes it, like what (Mr. Grenier is doing). He's optimizing his product, and doing new product development. That's something many small and even large businesses forget about. Take real estate developers, some wouldn't spend $10,000 for a piece of market research to find out if their customers like the layout of their home, but they spend millions on subdivisions.

Customer care is great for the development process in terms of optimizing the product and researching for product line extensions. Then you don't have to generate a wish list of what you think someone might need, you actually take the feedback that you receive from customers. The problem is, people typically don't put money in their budget for this. You need to decide if you're going to set up a 1-800 number for people to call you, or set something up on your website.

Tricia Ryan, The Marketingchefs.com

Larger businesses will hire consultants and do large-scale research, but for a small business person, your best research comes from two sources: your best customers and people who won't buy from you. Sometimes it's easy to get feedback from your top two or three customers, because they're probably doing business with you because they are happy with you. So you'll probably hear good stuff and maybe some constructive suggestions.

It's a little tougher to get it from the people who you get close to and then they don't do business with you. That's really the most valuable information, because then you can determine whether this person really was in your target market and maybe that's why you couldn't sell to them, or maybe it was the way you communicated your message. You always want to be thinking about what your target market is thinking and what they want.

Feedback can be difficult to get from customers so it is a good idea to offer incentives for things like online surveys. One of the things a small business owners can do in order to get feedback is to partner with another small business that reaches the same target market but isn't in direct competition with you, and offer an incentive on their product and vice versa. So they can offer a discount on their product if the customer fills out the feedback form and you offer one to their customers.

Geoff Dillon, Toronto-based small business consultant