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Bill had been working on his ERP/Payroll package for some time, and claimed that all it needed was a front end. Steve and I created templates for a Web front end, and kept bugging Bill about the back-end integration. It gradually became obvious that Bill wasn't producing, nor was he likely to. Steve and I kicked Bill out of the company and regrouped. I took one of the applications I had developed earlier, spend many weeks expanding it, Steve made it look pretty, and we announced it as QM - Question Manager.
Question Manager was a Notes-based online survey tool. It could be fully Browser-administered. Its strength and weakness was the fundamental paradigm of presenting one question per screen. This made it open-ended and simple to set up and administer. However, users found it somewhat tedious to use, being accustomed to multi-questions-per-page "free" online surveys. Furthermore, the "free" surveys made it difficult to convince potential customers that they should pay for an online survey application.
I used the basic reporting structure I had developed for QM to create several other web-based applications built on Notes. One was the GAT - Gap Analysis Tool. This was a glorified employee survey aimed at sales teams. It allowed pretty sophisticated statistical analysis of productivity between teams within the same organisation. There were several other related applications, all aimed at productivity analysis or Quality Assurance.
While we had several small clients, there never developed a significant revenue stream. Steve became increasingly busy with his SCUBA training business, http://www.techdiver.com and I gradually lost interest in doing development with no clear revenue opportunities in sight. In 2003 I was invited by my former business partner, Dave Ryan, to help him in a long-term ASP project. I figured that ASP couldn't be that much different from some of the other things I had done, and the money was good, so I said 'Yes'. I joined Dave in Kinetic Synergy Inc, we bought out the Ergus equipment leases, and spent a lot of time in Minneapolis. Steve and I let Ergus die by neglect.
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