Why Bloom?

We found ourselves frustrated when we went looking for a great tool to share proposals, track leads, and manage a sales team. Every option seemed to have some fatal flaw. One was too expensive and suffered from some "abrasive" customer service; others were open-source and free, but had confusing user interfaces; and still others lived "offline" on the desktop, far away from the Internet. To boil it down to just one word: yuck.

So we asked ourselves, how do you make this thing better? We set out to answer that question, and here's what we found.

The app of our dreams wants to live online.
The very first decision we made was that this app would be web-based. Selling these days is all about connections, so it would be crazy to disconnect the app from the Internet. At the same time, we also established an important principle: you shouldn't have to trade access for connectivity. That is, I need to get to my sales data wherever I am. So we built Google Gears support right into the app, letting you access the app in a browser even without an Internet connection.

A great user experience.
Using one of our competitors' product, we were floored by how many clicks it took just to add a new sales opportunity. And when we finally did add the data, we found ourselves leafing through the manual trying to figure out the difference between a lead, contact, account, and all the stages in between. Let's face it, the user experience in most of these products is abysmal. So we decided to obsess over every pixel, color, and widget. In fact, just before the launch of our private beta, while our senior developer fretted over some last-minute bugs, our principle designer was sweating the precise hue and saturation of the app's main color. User experience matters -- most of all in a web app.

Sometimes, say no.
While I was impressed with how feature-packed some software was, we also found we rarely used most of those features. In fact, often time those fancy gadgets just got in our way, and in one case, meant the software was full of bugs and warnings in the administrative error. At Bloom Apps, we think long and hard about the features that make it into the app. It's not just about making the software appear fancy and packed full of things. No, it's about understanding how you use the application, how our customers' businesses run, and putting only what you need right in front of you.