Pre-Launch Controversy!

There's been a bit of tooing and froing between Duane Jackson, CEO of Kashflow, and Dennis Howlett - a blogger who regularly writes about accountancy software.

Dennis is also alleged to be a major shareholder in KashFlow competitor, FreeAgent Central, although his regular attacks on their competitors (particularly KashFlow) are not on their behalf.

At issue was our initially incorrect subscriber numbers for KashFlow.

KashFlow has a total of 3,000 paying customers currently on their system and have had 20,000 in total since launch.

We quoted 15K customers - which was some way off the mark! (It is worth reiterating that CTO is completely vendor independent and is not affiliated to KashFlow in any way.)

Dennis wrote a particularly scathing blog about Kashflow mentioning CTO:
Numbers matter in on demand | AccMan

Then things got a lot more heated on the UK Business Forums:
Twitter Dangers

Duane was helpfully pointing people towards CTO during our pre-launch phase.

After all the controversy we had a lot more visitors!

Dennis did think we were onto something though: "[carrytheone is]...a good idea and one to be welcomed."

But he did go on to say that: "How long carrytheone can survive as a separate entity remains to be seen because in reality, such integrations are features that any competent developer can mimic."

That is quite wrong - because he assumes two things:

- the first is that your average small business owner has access to a competent developer (most do not); and

- the second is that your average small business would want to pay thousands of pounds in development costs to mimic a service that costs £12 a month.

And then what happens if the store owner needs support (at £50 per hour) or bug fixing or a new feature? Just 3 hours of development time and you have already surpassed CTO's annual cost!