About

About dcentralize

About the entity dcentralize:

“We are here to create and operate innovative software services that are meaningful to society.”

These are some of the properties that (when combined) make dcentralize unique:

Technical culture

There’s a highly technical culture. Probably because it started with a techie as founder. To survive as commercial entity you also need promotion, sales and so on, but we rather automate our way out of that too.

Useful software

A useful member of society is described as:

being of use or service; serving some purpose; advantageous, helpful, or of good effect

That sums it up. With that in mind we create SaaS platforms that are useful. Some examples of how usefulness was applied here:

• Pro6PP started because the only player in the market of Dutch geodata was a monopoly and very expensive. First 6PP, later Pro6PP provided an affordable alternative.
• Appsemble started because no/low code was catching on, but there were only proprietary SaaS platforms to choose from. It’d be useful if there was an open source alternative. More on the mission of Appsemble.
• ITSLanguage started out with speech technology helping children speak better. The best way to contribute our knowledge was eventually found in providing tools for speech therapists to save time and improve the quality of their analysis.

No outside investments

There are benefits and drawbacks to accepting outside investments. Biggest benefit would be money to grow quicker. However, that comes at a cost. Typical investors want their money back 10-fold, within 5 years (for good reason too). Requiring fast ROI just takes your mind off the product you’re building and divert it to pitch decks and financial reports. Not to mention pricing usually goes up, potentially conflicting with the initial goals of being useful.

Still, a company needs capital to survive. We obtain it as follows:

• We grow slowly but steadily and focus on what our users need. We charge reasonable prices allowing access to a wide group of users. It’s appreciated as we’ve concluded from the low churn rate the last 10 years.
• Some of the bigger clients fund growth by providing multi-year contracts. Allows us to double down on the product without having to worry if what we build will ever sell.
• The more mature SaaS platforms in the dcentralize group help fund the growth of the newer ones.
• By exporting our knowledge of building and operating SaaS platforms to other companies in need of a better technical team.