Phew! After about a year of pretty heavy strategy and really heavy engineering work, I’m proud to announce the Intuit Partner Platform (IPP) is open for business. What is IPP you ask? Well, it’s the fastest and easiest way for you to build a SaaS business. Here’s the way I think about building a SaaS business –
Three simple steps to success:
1) Get a great idea – we can share some of our research on what Small businesses are telling us they need – but your entrepreneurial inspiration is critical
2) Build your great idea on a solid platform – IPP gives you robust hosting, a database with prebuilt functionality, a UI layer with Adobe Flex, integration with QuickBooks data, integrated billing service, etc. etc.
3) Get lots and lots of customers – Even the best application, built on the best technology, won’t get you very far if no one comes to buy it. What makes the Intuit Partner Platform truly unique is access to our channels of Small Business customers. We have about 25 million employees within our 4 million QuickBooks customers alone – and we want to drive them to buy your apps.
In listening to our customers, they are demanding applications that solve their business needs – “right for me” applications. We can’t build all of those ourselves – but we can build a great platform and a great channel for you to build lots of great apps that solve for our customer’s needs. So what you see today is V1 – open for business. There is a lot more to come, but we’re ready for prime-time now. We have a few developers that we’ve been working with for a while that have apps in the marketplace – try them out – play around with the materials we have on the website – download the SDK – then get your idea ready and give us a call. We’ll help you refine that idea and design a killer app for the small business world – We’re open for business and ready to drive users to your app – give us an app and let’s get started!
Alex Chriss
Business Leader, Intuit Partner Platform
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