Have you ever gotten stuck on a plateau before? What about a dip? Whatever you call them, they sure are hard to get past. If you really want to be the best in the world at something, you have to be well stocked and willing to sacrifice a great deal in order to struggle through the tough times. If you’re ambitious enough, though, being “the best” is a great place to be.

The idea for our little web app came to us many years ago, albeit in a very different form. Having spent several years perfecting the ultra-efficient technology backbone of ERS, our partner Don’s pre-employment screening agency, we were frustrated at how difficult it was for our clients to place orders with us. When a client was ready to make a hire, they would pull up our web site and manually type the potential employee’s personal data, contact information and entire work and education history into our system in order for us to verify it. It wasn’t really that difficult, but boy was it time consuming (not to mention boring). Data entry ranks right up there with waiting in line at the post office on the list of the top 10 things no one should ever have as part of their job description.

Wait a minute. Why not get the job applicant to enter that information just once, when applying for the job, and build in some simple middleware to redirect that data into the background screening software? When HR is ready to make a hire, the click of a button is all that’s necessary to beam the information from an online job application straight to ERS for verification. Whoa- why just middleware? We could make it even more useful! We could build a really simple way for people to manage job applicants. We could build in fancy tools for scheduling interviews and posting comments and reporting…

Well, it didn’t take long for us to figure out that lots of HR products with these “fancy tools” already existed, and that they already had a name: Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS for short). But at that time not many of them incorporated background screening or other assessment tools. So we did a lot of research on this thing called ATS. We educated ourselves generally on what competing systems were on the market, but we didn’t spend too much time on competitive assessment because we had no interest in modeling our system after our competitors. The bulk of our research involved interviewing HR professionals who used an ATS and wanted a better one, and some who didn’t have one and described their “dream” software to us.

In no time we had a functioning product, dubbed EmployApp. It was simpler, easier to learn, more useful and more cost effective than anything else out there, so we started pitching it like crazy to every medium sized business we could find (we felt companies with 100-2000 employees would benefit the most from a system like EmployApp).

We pitched and pitched and pitched, and pitched some more. We amazed Human Resources departments, presented to countless committees and met with Vice Presidents. But progress was slow, and although we fought long and hard, our client portfolio was astonishingly small. We were a little LLC without a history, and though our product was nearly always favored above all others by the HR folks (the end users), very few company principals were willing to take a chance on us. To make matters worse, we started going head to head with a larger, more established competitor, and we lost almost every time.

When Hurricane Katrina ravaged our hometown of New Orleans, it gave us the chance to reflect on our situation. We slowly began to realize what was holding us back. What we learned was that enterprise software is primarily a sales business. Those companies with the biggest sales staff and the flashiest convention booths and the glossiest direct mail letters are always ahead of the pack, and we didn’t have any of that. We also didn’t have a long-standing reputation like companies such as ADP or Lawson or Oracle. Technology, not sales, is our core strength, and while superior technology sells end-users, it’s savvy salespeople, glossy ads and a reputation (even a bad one!) that sells those individuals with the buying power.

It was a harsh lesson and a terrific opportunity at the same time. It may have taken us a few years to get there, but suddenly we knew not just what wouldn’t work–but what would. Knowing what you do best (and what’s impossible to do best) is half the battle. Over the next few months we crafted a plan that would play to our biggest strength: developing amazingly simple, functional, and useful software– and to our competitors’ greatest weakness: reaching people outside of the standard Human Resources industry echo chamber. At long last we are making it a reality, and we’ll be sharing our experiences along the way.

Today we’re launching the second incarnation of EmployApp, a brand new product called Hirefly. It’s a little tool for people who just hate it when their email inbox gets flooded with resumes, when all they want is to hire someone painlessly while juggling ten other projects at once. It’ll make one of the biggest chores in running a small business a little bit easier, and if we’re lucky it just might save someone’s sanity. That’s all we could ever hope for.

You can read more about Hirefly on the official blog, or sign up for the private beta waiting list to try Hirefly free for the first 90 days.