Repositioning Skyward - Custom Internal Software for Enterprise Teams

I’ve been building up Skyward for the past few years but one thing I’ve always struggled with is positioning.

I LOVE building for the web (my team constantly tell me off for doing too much) and I want to experiment in as many areas as possible. As I went from freelancer to business owner, I didn’t want to limit myself.

But that notion in itself is limiting. “We do a bit of everything” isn’t a great sales pitch. How are our clients supposed to know who we help? Or what we do well?

So I’ve spent the last few months thinking extremely hard about what we do best and putting it into words.

Here’s my thought process.

We build Custom Applications for the web

Custom builds are where we’ve specialised since we started. We love creating solutions that work for you (vs ones which work for as many people as possible). This is the closest statement to what we already do.

• Custom: Solutions that are tailored to your specific needs

• Applications: Our focus is more on tools you engage with, rather than sales funnels

• Web: We focus on cloud solutions. If it has a website, we can build it.

We develop Enterprise Applications

This statement focuses a little more on who we work with. It’s no surprise that highly customised solutions are better targeted at larger businesses.

Choosing to work with enterprise applications allow us to focus on specific types of solutions. This makes our position weaker in other markets, like SaaS for example, but allows us to specialise in the enterprise space.

We work with big teams regularly. We know how to find the problems that are holding you back, and remove them.

We focus on Internal Tooling

With the focus shifting to enterprise solutions, it’s now easier to see where we can add value. We’ve been working with enterprise clients for over a year now, and in our experience they always struggle with their internally facing software.

Internal software being an application that’s designed for the team to use on a day-to-day basis.

We’ve seen poorly designed internal software waste hours of time firsthand:

1. Team members have to spend weeks being trained how to use complex systems

2. They’re then required to jump through hoops to achieve their goal

3. Only to get frustrated and make mistakes

We can save businesses thousands every month by improving these systems and reducing wasted effort across their entire staff, reducing mistakes, and reducing opportunity cost (where wasted time could be better utilised).

We work with Modern Technologies

Again, this is something that we’ve offered from the start — we love working with Jamstack/headless solutions but we’ve never really framed that in a way that’s clear for those who aren’t developers.

This is especially relevant for enterprise clients who, in the wrong situation, can get stuck working with tech that’s 10 years old and hasn’t seen a major upgrade in that time.

We’re modern.

Tech changes fast and we’re moving forward with it.

Putting it all together

Now we have clearly defined positioning, it’s easy to see where we can provide value which helps businesses understand when to hire us and why they should.

It also makes it easier for us to focus on targeting the right businesses in our marketing, meaning we can cast a smaller net and use our marketing budget wisely.

And finally, it means we know how we can focus the rest of our teams on expanding services that can help with these specific client needs and allowing us to provide even better solutions in the future.

We still do other things of course

At our core, we’re still going to be a team that experiments. We try out new technologies regularly and find solutions for different problems (even ones we don’t have right now) so we can provide the best solutions to our clients.

We’ve solidified our core offering, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still help in other ways, either for existing clients or for new ones.

“The code is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.” – Captain Barbossa, Pirates of the Caribbean

If you're ready to start your next enterprise software project, get in touch with us today and let's discuss how we can help you achieve your goals.