UNCW is having “Business Week” this week. Each year the Business School cancels classes for two days so their students can attend various sessions held by members of the business community.
I’ll be one of many speakers. My session is called “Every Small Business Needs a Great Database (and What To Do With It).” It’s at 9 AM on Wednesday in CH231.
Thanks to Dr. Doug Kline for the invite!
Quintify Database Solutions creates custom databases for small- and medium-sized businesses. Our web databases are used to run entire companies — CRM, marketing and sales, project/task management, order fulfillment, invoicing and payments, HR, time clock, and more. Our clients love having one system for everything instead of having to log into different systems for different functions, systems that don’t “talk to” each other.
In particular, we offer standard turn-key web database products that can then be customized to exactly meet our customers’ needs. In addition to our primary product, Quintify::Complete, we are also developing products for multiple niches, starting with business coaches.
The Value We Offer
Way too many small businesses encounter significant inefficiency and ineffectiveness due to lack of a proper information system. They try to keep things in MS Excel, or sticky notes, or file folders, or simply in their heads, and in so doing information and things-to-do fall through the cracks, and communication with their customers is problematic enough that they just don’t do it. Even those who realize they need a database shrink back from their own ignorance of such things or their fear that a proper database for their company would cost much, much more than they can afford.
Quintify’s primary product provides incredible database functionality to its customers for the cost of $55/month. Then, for those customers desiring customization, for an additional fee we can enhance their system to do whatever they’d like it to do.
For our “mass niche” products, we will provide (for example) business coaches a system that has been “pre-customized” based on best practices from close input from other business coaches. Then, again, these systems can be further customized according to each customer’s desires.
Our databases have already revolutionized organizations, and as we roll out to the masses, I believe we can revolutionize small business itself.
On Being Entrepreneurial
Quintify is committed to creating innovative new products and services to small- and medium-sized businesses in Wilmington and beyond. By providing a low-cost solution with an incredible amount of functionality built-in, and then allowing customers to request enhancements in whatever ways they can imagine, we can offer phenomenal value at a cost structure that provides us a nice profit as well.
Our databases are web-based and have a sophisticated role-based permissions system built in, which will allow our customers to connect with their vendors, team members, and customers in new ways by allowing their partners to have log-in access to their systems, with them only being able to see what our customer wants them to be able to see and to be able to do only what our customer wants them to do. As the world becomes ever more connected through the power of the internet, our customers’ Quintify databases will be there to enable them to make the most of this.
Our Competitive Advantage
Our “secret sauce” provides us a significant competitive advantage.
Over the past several years I have built a “code generator”, a “program that writes programs”, that we call “wm”. Instead of creating a new database system from scratch, or even starting with something done in the past and having to rework it to meet new specs, we instead describe the database application in a set of config files. For example, a system’s “customer” config file tells what fields are used to describe a customer along with various behaviors for those fields, what other tables are linked to customers, any startup values that are needed, etc. Once all of the config files are ready, wm then uses those config files to build the entire system. Config files are reusable from one project/database instance to another, and many customization requests can be fulfilled by simply modifying the config file and then regenerating the code for that “thing”.
While I started working on code generation years ago to abstract out the repetitive aspects of web development, the main guts of wm were created during a massive project in which I did all of the programming migrating a 25-year-old, multi-million-dollar company off of its complete legacy system to a web-based one. (They subsequently entered their golden age.) There is a lot of blood, sweat, and tears in wm in addition to the functionality that allows us to offer fully customizable, feature-rich, inexpensive products that should thrive even more during economic downturns due to the efficiency and effectiveness we increase.
wm has been used to create many different kinds of databases and is an incredibly flexible platform to build on. In a nutshell, Quintify exists to use the power of wm to revolutionize small businesses everywhere.
Quintify Database Solutions is looking for a Customer Education Specialist to join our growing team. This person will be able to work at least 50% of the workweek from home.
For now the pay isn’t great, but it is be an awesome opportunity for the right person, with lots of growth potential for the future.
I would love to have this position for myself!
I don’t do the normal social scene that well, but here are three evenings I’d LOVE to spend with my business-minded friends.
Now that I think about it, here’s a fourth:
Like I said, I don’t do the normal social scene that well…
Pecha-Kucha, anyone?