A great product strategy: solving other product’s problems

Kryon Systems finds an easy way to discover a big market: Solving bigger vendor’s end users problems

I blogged earlier this year about a very cool software startup that aimed to relieve users of common computer problems – Soluto. Soluto went on to win the TechCrunch Disrupt award, and raised $6.2M in venture capital funding. Clearly, a huge market opportunity exists for companies that address the common issues with software and technology for the end users. Ironically, the advent of newer, more advanced technologies also resulted in more usability problems, software bugs and general user frustrations, which were addressed by the invention of even more sophisticated technologies.

Today, I found yet another company that practices the same product strategy of targeting problems or issues caused by other, more established software products, yet their approach to actually solving these issues differs. The company is Kryon Systems and their flagship product comes by the very friendly name of “Leo”.

The idea of Leo is very simple and is actually quite familiar to any office worker who utilizes remote technical IT Support – it is similar to your average IT support person, except it is always available, it’s a lot more patient, and it’s actually willing to do everything you ask (as long as it knows how to do it), from fixing your spreadsheet formula to reformatting your presentation.

Leo, which I believe is still in some form of open beta, is available for free download from the website www.helpbyleo.com. It is a painless download and the software sits in the background, waiting for your command.

You can use Leo with Mozilla Firefox. For example, instead of inputting a question into the “Help” question box in Microsoft Word or Outlook, you will put the same question into Leo utilizing Firefox. Leo will figure out what you want, and then ask if you want it to show you how to do it, or it will perform the task for you while you watch in wonder.

 

You can say Leo is simply glorified tutorial software that helps dummies learn to use the basic functionalities of Microsoft Office. However, I think, like Soluto, Leo has the potential to become a great tool for millions of consumers, as well as millions of businesses. Leo actually works quite well and very intuitively, which identifies an incredible competitive advantage considering people use Leo, like Soluto, when they are clueless or frustrated with other software tools. While Leo presently only knows how to perform tasks in Microsoft Office 2007, Firefox and ITunes, it is not incredibly hard to imagine a crowd-sourcing effort to teach it to perform tasks in many other software products. It is not farfetched to surmise that the software vendors themselves might be willing to pay people to create such a task database, similar to how they are supporting the crowd-sourced customer service platform GetSatisfaction.com, which is also one of my favorites.

Information systems support at large corporations that house thousands of computers can even create their own specialized tasks and use Leo to enforce those tasks with every single user. I envision Leo teaching complete computer courses, instead of the old media delivery methods of digital texts or instructional videos on a DVD.

Do you know of other companies that practice similar strategies? I would love to try out their products.