We’ve been quiet because we’re hard at work on….
SwiftCloud 3.0
It’s early yet, so we can’t say much about it, but rest assured we’re plenty committed to automation for small businesses.
Note SwiftCloud 2.0 is already in “Legacy Mode”, which means we’ll fix any bugs discovered, but no new features on it are being developed, as we have most of our engineering resources on 3.0.
Over the hundreds of conversations and thousands of eDocs we’ve seen, along with changes in the market, the economy, we believe the importance of automation has never been greater.
In short, we expect a recession in 2023. For our clients, this will mean
- More automation is needed. As belts tighten, the need to work efficiently is greater than ever, but consumers and clients of our clients deserve the same great service.
- More video. For communication, for discussion, for lead generation, for training – the world is moving toward rich media.
- Greater connectivity, which is shows up with API connections. SwiftCloud 3.0 will be much faster, and is a ground-up total rebuild we secretly started months ago. It is based on cutting edge “microservices” architecture, which means every single function in the entire app can be interacted with via API. This also paves the way for more offline services, greater scalability, and less latency so that the small business software you need is as fast as installed applications.
- Enterprise level IAM (Identity & Access Management). SwiftCloud 2.0 contained a bunch of features we’d planned, but never implemented. With SwiftCloud 3.0, we’ll have a more solid foundation for sharing and collaboration, along with more advanced permissions hierarchies that company accounts require.
- A culture change: We have changed our workflow, and even some leadership to ensure that we have a new focus on reliability and stability. Now that we have a clear roadmap provided by 2.0, we’ll focus on fewer things, done very very well.
Since 2017 we’ve been focused on Electronic Signature, eDocs, e-Waivers, and this is the next step in our journey. Along the way, we’ve expanded based on real-world needs – payments, scheduling, task management & much more.
All active clients will be migrated starting fall 2022. No action is required. We will begin beta testing of 3.0 in just a few weeks (Aug 2022) and selectively begin deploying clients based on their needs on the new platform.
As I write this, a quick note on recessions:
- Recessions can be a great time to build your business. Every dollar matters more, so it’s a time to trim the fat – to get lean. This helps make your business more effective, more profitable, easier to sell one day. The challenges we all face in the coming 36 months will, speaking candidly, kill off the weak companies, dependent on their fat VC burn rates, or wide margins allowed during flush times. Now is the ideal time to leverage automation, video, chatbots, AI, outsourcing and teamsourcing, customer advocacy – all of which is in our daily focus.
- Some businesses will succeed during the next cycle, while others will suffer. There will be winners and losers – for the next 12 months it’s probably a bad time to be a real estate agent for example (not that good agents can’t succeed – but they’re all fighting a headwind for a while due to lower transaction volume) – but real estate investors are about to have a heyday. Other industries won’t budge – food, staples, boring stuff like paper towels and garbage services. Auto mechanics will do just fine (people repair their existing cars more during a recession vs buy new).
- Market cycles are just one of many. Technology trends – like solar panel efficiency (making solar panels on homes more market-relevant), battery capacity (making electric cars more effective), demographics (baby boomers), disease (Covid, Monkeypox, who knows whatever’s next – which increases remote work, causes people to relocate) – the economy is just one cycle within a sea of forces. What rising tides can you embrace with your business?
How can we automate your business today, to increase efficiency and output with no on-going human hours required? How can we use technology to decrease your expenses while increasing your output – i.e. adding leverage?
These are what keep us going.
We’d love to chat with you. Reach out. We still have about 30% of our projects as semi-custom secret work helping companies do amazing things – data scraping, API “glue / bridges” to get software to talk to each other and more.
