@Last’s SketchUp software raises eyebrows, revenues
BOULDER — The joke around @Last Software is that its entire sales scheme was perhaps best described as the ?Field of Dreams? marketing plan.
?That’s right, ?Build it, and they will come,’? quipped Chief Executive Brad Schell.
But @Last, that’s ?at last,? has pretty much proven that the build-a-better-mousetrap marketing plan still does have a place in a post-bubble software world.
That is, if you build it right.
In the case of @Last’s 3D graphical/architectural design software, SketchUp, it looks to be right on the money.
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@Last ranks No. 1 on The Boulder County Business Report’s Mercury 100 list of fastest-growing private companies. The Boulder-based software company posted a whopping 233 percent increase in revenues last year, growing from $360,000 in 2001 to $1.2 million in 2002. And, as if that’s not enough to raise some eyebrows, it has done it without much in the way of marketing expenses.
?Our marketing budget is pretty small. Pretty much, we’re going to go to a couple of key trade shows, the American Institute of Architects (biggest trade show in North America for architects), and last year we went to Mac World.?
The company wants to form some strategic partnerships, mostly to help it pump up marketing and distribution, said President Andrew Makare. To date, the company sells 85 percent of its software through Internet downloads.
The software already is distributed in most of Europe, Japan, Korea and the Pacific Rim, Schell said. The software also is available in 12 languages, including Croatian, in case you were wondering.
?But this has been mostly through word of mouth,? Schell said.
The Web site is quite extensive, with movies demonstrating the user interface to the product. But certainly there’s something else going on because with only a few thousand copies of the software sold, the Web site’s user forum has more than 15,000 different threads.
Clearly, it’s a pretty cool application in a well-conceived market space.
?It’s a true 3D application, but one of the things we pride ourselves on is: In the beginning our concept was to design something that was fast, fun and kind of captured that creative freedom you have designing something on a napkin,? Schell said. ?I think we’ve done a pretty good job of capturing that kind of feel.?
Most of @Last’s 15 employees are designers, either in software or some architectural field, such as Schell himself, who holds a degree in structural engineering. SketchUp itself was for conceptual, or early stages of design, especially when preparing mock-ups for client approval.
The program isn’t meant to replace CAD-type drafting programs, but to give designers an early alternative to pen-and-paper approaches. As such, it also is designed to interact with a number of different graphical design and publishing programs that offices might employ in presentation.
?If we don’t’ provide good handshakes to a lot of different applications, then you might as well just sketch it on a napkin and hand it to someone,? Schell said. ?They can export to a CAD format, or common architectural rendering programs or to all the raster (graphical) formats,? and even digital movie formats.
@Last is planning to release SketchUp 3.0, its seventh version, in June. So far, the company has secured $2.8 million in angel financing, all of which came from a central group of financiers. Makare and Andrew Currie, who previously ran Email Publishing of Boulder, have been central to that group of financiers, as has Raleigh Ralls. SketchUp is designed to run on most Windows and Mac OSx systems, the latter of which accounts for about 25 percent of sales.
The software retails for $495 a copy, which Schell said should be attractive to a number of consumers. Another frugal part of the software is its sleek software design: Both Mac and Windows versions are less than 10 megabytes in size, easily downloaded even on a dial-up connection, and initial versions ran with a recommended 32 megabytes of random access memory, as well.
That kind of well-conceived software — almost all of the core programming was written in-house — often avails itself to precise updates and upgrades and also makes it attractive as an incorporate element of other graphical or architectural software suites. That possibility has Schell smiling, as well.
?Right now we’ve got the interest of a lot or architects, and we’ll continue to see growth in that area, but what’s surprising is how many different fields we see interest from: film animation, construction, animated (digital) design. There are so many areas that having this ability to create in 3D is attractive that I don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface.?
