Cludo

A Greeting From Cludo

Greetings from Cludo! Welcome to the latest site search provider's blog.


This blog post is a meet-and-greet, and will provide you with some thoughts about the pain points and benefits involved in developing a product in a consulting company, and why it made sense to separate Cludo from Netmester.

Why Cludo was separated from Netmester

Cludo might look like a new product, but it has been around for a little while.

Originally the development began in 2013 by the consultancy company Netmester under the name Netmester Search. Netmester is a consulting company that was established in 1999.

Since the official release of Netmester Search at the end of 2014, it has been quite successful, probably more so than first anticipated. This is quite a luxury problem, but it does give you some headaches when both the product and consulting business are going well.

As most consulting companies, Netmester wants to deliver high quality services on time. The issue arises when you are struggling to meet the delivery schedule for a customer: your project managers will scour the company to find additional resources. Often product development ends up as the loser. Products seldom have deadlines towards customers, which makes deadlines much easier to postpone (but nonetheless still as bad).

So even when the product business is booming it will find it hard to keep its product developers from being cannibalized.

There are a few options:

  • Do you try to balance product and consultant development?
  • Do you create new teams that handle the product?
  • Do you create a separate company for the product?
  • Do you simply kill one of your darlings?

Balancing product and consultant development can’t be recommended, since it is much easier for PMs to have the products cannibalized. Creating a new team does help, since it takes a higher level of urgency before the team will be drawn into consulting projects. The last option is to kill your darling (product or consulting business). An example is Basecamp (Previous 37signals), which started as a consulting business, but later became a product-only company.

Netmester’s first solution was to create a separate product team, but when things got really, really busy, even the product team at times got cannibalized. Netmester likes its customers, and definitely didn’t want to stop doing consultancy work, which made the choice of option three much easier. So to give the product the required attention, Netmester decided to move it into a separate company.

By creating Cludo ApS we protect the development resources and make sure we can continue to improve the product.

Why was Cludo created?

All customers need a search engine for their website. All search engines can find results if users know exactly what to search for – which they most often do not. A good search product that lets the customer take charge of the search process while also being easy to setup, just didn’t exist. This meant that a lot of time was spent doing search implementations over and over again. This resulted in higher development cost for each customer implementation.

Meet Cludo

The idea with Cludo is to provide an easy-to-use and intelligent search engine for websites. If you are creating your own website or you are working as a consultant and want a powerful site search without using too much time, then Cludo might be for you.

We believe in a good UX and in hiding all complex features until you are ready and familiar with the system. We think of ourselves as icebergs (not just cold and pale), but as a solution which looks simple, but underneath there is are a ton of ways to improve the relevance of the search results. We believe in providing our customers with insights that they can use to improve their website, which in the end will help them convert more users to customers.

An upcoming blog post will describe just how easy and how powerful Cludo is.

Thank you for reading this far. If you have any questions about Cludo, or if you’d like to request a demo, don’t hesitate to click below!

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