Why do we exist (the company, not humanity).
We exist because the industry needs us. When Oliver Nassar founded Clearmix, he did so because of his research of the competitive landscape for enterprise level Social Media Solutions.
Oliver spent the last 6 years working and consulting with a variety of companies. Some were larger corporations like Viacom, MTV, and BET. Others were smaller development shops where he'd work on product planning, product development, and Client Care.
He found that a common theme kept repeating itself; the request for a more interactive and social website for organizations. Video, photos, music, and user profiles were among the most popular requests. However, developing and deploying some kind of solution can be very time consuming and very expensive. A common solution is to use existing products for a fee, or open source products. While open source can sometimes be a viable solution, it has high technical requirements; most notably, an organization would have to have someone on staff to integrate, deploy and maintain that solution full time. This would then bind the organization to that individual very closely, limiting the organizations flexibility. If that employee were sick one day, the work would not get done.
After having worked with many of the leading Community Media Application providers, Oliver broke down his criticisms into the following 5 topics, and ended up with the idea to form Clearmix; a company that aimed for, and has achieved, a solution to the following problems.
Client Care.
We place a high degree of importance on Client Care because of our experience in the industry. Client Care is always the first standard to be compromised when working in the web development industry. This is because developing a large scale platform and set of applications take a long time. It takes careful planning and careful execution by an experienced team.
At this point, a client's financial resources are normally spent, and for this reason Client Care suffers. A development firm receives, develops the product, and the professional relationship ceases.
This is, however, the time when the development firm's experience is required most; to gauge feedback, and alter the product accordingly. We've been able to circumvent this natural problem by spending our own financial resources to produce the highest quality architecture, and spending any time with the client on the finished product. We work with our clients under a subscription model, which allows them to get any help they want, any time, without having to create a new financial contract.
Product.
When a product has deficiencies, it's very obvious to the intended market. If you work with a development firm to create a video sharing application or network, but the product they develop has bugs in it, then your visitors will notice them, and place the blame on your organization.
After researching the competition, the most evident problem was found in the product. Products were shipping with little extensibility options, general bugs and UI mistakes, along with serious optimization and security holes.
That's why we've spent over 12 months developing our product before deploying it. We wanted to get it perfect. While it would be idealistic and naive to say that our software does not have a single bug in it, it's valid to say we have focused seriously on security and optimization to make sure your data is secure, and fast. Our system can be extended in a number of ways, and it is up to your imagination as to how you want to use it.
Cost.
Cost is one of the most important factors in making any decisions. There should be a proportional balance between cost and Client Care.. The lower the cost, the lower the Client Care. The higher the cost, the higher the Client Care. In our research, however, there was a vast disconnect between getting Premier Client Care and acceptable product cost.
Most companies would only offer premier service for contracts that started between $50,000 and $100,000/year. Even worse, these contracts required 2-3 year commitments. This cost structure is unacceptable, and inadequate, and we knew we could do better.
Security.
Security is our most serious concern. When a user registers for a site, whether they're using it to comment on a video, send a message to a colleague, or download a private document, they should be doing so under an assumption of complete security and privacy.
In order for us to address this concern, we have developed a unique solution that partitions your content separately from all other clients. Your content is then secured through a private gateway, and encrypted with a government appointed encryption scheme. Finally, your database can be moved to your own server, as well as having all outgoing emails be propagated through your own SMTP server. We give you all of these options to show how serious we are about your security.
Speed.
Finally, in combination with the product and it’s deficiencies, the intended market will notice speed problems almost immediately. Many competitors have taken the approach of developing a quality product with little thought being given to the optimization and speed of the product they've developed. Engineers often get stuck in a bubble, forgetting how a product works for average users.
This is where our UI Engineering work has been invaluable. Our system has been developed to be as fast as possible. Both our server side and client side architectures have been developed with caching and optimization at their core. We follow every rule stipulated by the Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site, put forward by the Yahoo! Developer Network, and boast a 90+ YSlow rating on the average page.
In Summary.
The 5 analyses above, developed based on our research of competitors, are a short summary of why we've spent so long and so much work developing the Clearmix PlatformTM. We believe strongly and passionately in what we are doing, and legitimately believe we surpass every competitor in each of these areas.
If you want to know a little more about the motivation behind founding Clearmix, contact us, and we'll get back to you shortly.
