Scratching an itch

AffinityLive was initially developed as an internal business management system for Internetrix, an award-winning web consulting and development agency.

As a fast growing business with clients and staff spread across Australia and Asia, Internetrix needed a system for managing clients, projects, service, billing, timesheets and staff, which was easy to use, automated and flexible enough to deal with projects ranging from hundreds of dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Existing solutions - such as a package for CRM, and then another package for project management, and then yet another package for client service/support, with something different for timesheets and manual offline processes for invoicing - had two major drawbacks. 

1. they weren't designed for the needs of professional services (we didn't need inventory, but we did need time billing and resource utilization)
2. they weren't integrated, so while we'd benefit from having something, we'd inherit a big extra management overhead trying to tie everything together to see how the business was tracking, and staff would have to use multiple, sometimes overlapping systems.

To solve this problem, we started developing what we later called Affinity as a web-based but independently installed platform for internal use only.

First clients

In 2007, an early version of what we were then calling Affinity was licenced successfully to a number of clients, who immediately saw the benefits of having a flexible, scalable and easy to use system to manage their business processes. 

The NSW Department of Planning is charged with assessing of the largest and most economically significant projects in the largest state in Australia. Processing tens of billions of dollars of complex development proposals each year, the Department was previously managing their work and business processes using only spreadsheets after the earlier failure of a multi-million dollar tracking system implementation. For less than 10% of the cost of the failed system, Affinity was licenced and implemented in the Department over the course of a few months, and has been an outstanding success ever since.

Other early clients ranged from publically listed finance companies, down to many other smaller clients more firmly in the traditional professional services sector - IT services, recruiting, medical, accounting and the like.

However, after successfully selling Affinity to more than two dozen clients, we realised that the economics of a traditional enterprise sales approach - sales pitches in person, responding to tenders, exhaustive proposal and follow up processes, and then expensive, services led implementations - weren't going to allow us to scale the business. This was because our target sector, professional services, is mostly small and medium businesses without the deep pockets to afford the expensive up-front licences and implementation services, and without these high fees we couldn't afford to sell, implement and support Affinity the way we had been.

We needed to make a big change to our business, the product and our sales, licencing and support model.

Refocusing and going global

While the success of working with our initial clients validated our product, we realized we needed to have a very different approach to succeed at scale in a global market selling to small and medium businesses. 

As a result, in early 2009 we spun the Affinity product out of Internetrix, into a new company called Hiive Systems. For the first few months we continued on our old sales and marketing track, however, in May 2009 after participating in the CeBIT trade show we realized that a dramatic shift was required.

Between mid 2009 and mid 2010, our team concentrated almost entirely on development, and working with a few trusted alpha users we gave the product a major overhaul so that it was able to be deployed and configured at scale. We focused on solving the resource scheduling and utilization problem that the market kept telling us was their biggest challenge and frustration, and in September 2010 we entered a private beta phase and started working with select partners to further refine the product.

Then, in late February 2011, we were ready (or as ready as you'll ever be) to go into public beta, allowing direct signups as well as listing in the Google Apps Marketplace. 

Within a month we had signed up clients in over 86 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Singapore, Canda, New Zealand, Croatia, Mexico, China as well as Australia.

In August 2011 the company reformed and is now headquartered in the SOMA District of San Francisco.