Introduction

The ideas behind Purebiz come from many places. I will talk about these below but first a few historic details. The first verion of Purebiz was written in 2004 in Visual Basic. The next version came in 2008 and was written in C#. Most of the ideas in these early versions were roughly the same. This current version was laid down on the 4th of July 2018. The program has always been a platform on which custom software can be built. I wanted to avoid writing the same stuff over and over again as I had done in the past. But the philosophy behind this version has shifted way from the Associate Management System to speed. The time it takes to get the customer's ideas into code has greatly decreased. I am not as fixed on doing things a certain way as I once was and flexibiliy has become very important. I have been using Purebiz in house since version 1 and I am always looking for ways to improve it. Many ideas come from customers.

Helping Customers Overcome their Pain

We see alot of pain. Sometimes a business will be trying to use as many as 5 different systems to get the job done. Lots of manual transfer from one data silo to another. Information that does not fit into any of them so we have a few spreadsheets on the side. Problems of scale are also common. What you can do when you had say 50 customers or 100 orders per week don't work when you have 1000. You can't go on hiring people to move information around so they look for a better solution. These people are often the most difficult to help. They are often unfamiliar with the under lying technology and it takes awhile for them to understand what is possible. But we are still able to help them, and once they get into the swing of it they are very enthusiastic.

Customers Who Are Visionaries

We like people with big ideas. Business owners who can visualise how they want their business to work and don't want to be constrained by the software that they use. I like learning about how they want to change there current sometimes convoluted data systems into ones that flow with there business. They are progressive, sometimes even aggressive, but that makes them exciting and I like working for them.

The Future

I have been forced to recognise that marketing is a valid business activity. I have always favored function over prettiness. But I was having a conversation with a friend whose judgement I trust about a piece of software he was trying out for his business and he spoke alot about how good it looked. I asked him if it worked and he replied 'I suppose so'. After this conversation and a few others my thinking has shifted. The supermarket is full of brightly coloured boxes that have the same food in them. The word 'new' is everywhere. So one of the things that we are going to do is to make Purebiz look better and easier to use.

I also have some other plans that will be much more useful and give benefit to new and existing customers of Business Information Associates. But I will let you know more about these in blog posts in the future. Thanks for taking the time to read this far.