Software Business in the Middle East

Couple of months ago one of the largest healthcare organizations in the World downloaded the trial version of our product. Since then they asked thousands of questions which was good as we understood more why they’re interested in getting the software.

In one of the last e-mails they asked to add a feature that we already had in our list planned for the near future. Formally, I asked them about how many copies they would need as it would be kind of an indicator for us to decide adding this feature now or wait until its planned time. But it is not so important how many licenses they will finally purchase – that feature is now on the top of our list. Even if they need one license only, we still will do this feature now.

The reason is simple – having such very well known and respectful customer might help us increasing our sales. We would even give away that license to them for free, but it just does not sound to be right

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Today on one of the meetings I was asked if I came from France. They told they heard French accent in my English.

I guess it’s good time to start collecting such funny stories – some people told me I spoke Swedish with Norwegian accent, others told I got German accent in my English, now French accent comes up. One old lady seriously asked me how I managed to learn speaking Russian so well, with only slight accent from Baltic countries

It’s kind of a characteristic of Dubai and UAE – there are people from all over the World and everybody hears his own accent in other people’s English.
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My two weeks vacation has just finished. As usually, I checked my e-mails daily, and even worked from dawn to dusk for couple of days.

During my vacation I asked myself a question about how long I would have fun running my own company. In the past, the longest time on the same job was 4 years, and this is only thanks to the fact that my responsibilities had been changed almost every year. Driving your own business is more interesting as today you might negotiate with the customers and prepare the proposal for them, but tomorrow you might already read the tutorials on Oracle preparing to add its support to your product.

I am far away from thinking that I will do what I do now forever. One day I might wake up and feel I’m fed up with this job. And if I have no fun running my company anymore, the company will die if everything still depends on me. It leads me to another question – if business depends on my desire to work and how much fun I have from it, what’s the difference between this business and freelancing? Today I feel it’s cool, and business moves forward, but tomorrow I get interested in something else, not necessarily related to IT. What will happen to my company then?

So we come to the idea that sooner or later the active management will be delegated to the employed people – CEO, General Manager or however it will be called. Now this thought seems to be scary – how that is possible if I spend all my time now to move forward the company, and then finally step down? But it will happen one day, and it is better to think about it already now.

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