Half-time results for AIM-listed digital marketing software and IT services firm dotDigital were presaged last month (see dotDigital reveals a mixed H1), so the only real surprise (actually not) was the announcement in today’s results release that management is looking to offload its ailing search marketing services division, dotAgency, in whole or in part. The company is taking a £1.5m provision for goodwill write-off.
This makes sense as management can then concentrate on the core emailer business (dotMailer) and on its new online survey product (you guessed, dotSurvey). I guess they must have determined there is a gap in the market for another survey engine, given that the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’ (or rather ‘primate in the room’) SurveyMonkey is the name on most people’s lips, with fees starting from, well, nothing. In fact TechMarketView’s content management system has a survey engine built in (we use it for our Little British Battler programme), so I wonder how big that market gap really is.
But meanwhile the core email business seems to be growing nicely – and importantly, profitably – though overseas growth seems to be potentially constrained by ‘management bandwidth and … hiring polices’. It’s not that often we hear of a profitable UK SaaS start-up, so we rather hope that management can keep the wind blowing in the company’s sails.