FreeAgent and Tactile CRM: interviews at FOWA

While at FOWA I shot a couple of short videos, one with Olly Headey, CTO of FreeAgent Central and another with Jake Stride, CEO of Tactile CRM. Both are designed to take advantage of on-demand computing models and the potential to deliver services to small businesses.

FreeAgent is doing very well, achieving a new sign up conversion rate of around 25%. Most recently, it has developed a ‘file cabinet’ that customers can use for storing receipts and other items. This is useful for professionals who can review expense claims for tax deduction purposes. Olly says the company is doing good business and that signiups are running at 5-10 per day.

Jake Stride’s Tactile CRM is doing good business, finding that the application is proving popular in both Canada and the US as an alternative for the more costly Salesforce.com. Off camera, Jake said that despite thinking the company would struggle to get people to pay for the application, he is seeing significant interestfrom companies looking for 5-10 users.

It is good to see that despite gloomy predictions, small, innovative vendors can survive and thrive.

Disclosure: I have a small holding in FreeAgent

Emily Coltman says:

October 13, 2008 at 11:30 am

Thanks for these Dennis,

Please could I ask what make and model of camera/camcorder you use to shoot these videos?

Thanks,

Dennis Howlett says:

October 13, 2008 at 2:07 pm

I used the Flip Ultra though it has been superceded by the Flip Mino

barking » Blog Archive » FOWA, it’s a wrap says:

October 13, 2008 at 2:50 pm

[...] First of all a big thanks to Stewart at Sun Startup Essentials for our stand at FOWA – it meant we increased our presence from myself, to a total of four of us each day. Not only that – we saw a significant increase in coverage of our Tactile CRM product online, via popular blogs such as Paul Carr, Iain Wallace, a decent amount of Twitter traffic, and a video interview by Dennis Howlett. [...]

October 13, 2008 at 3:56 pm

Thanks Dennis,