John O’Rourke

After building an e-Commerce system in 2003, I was introduced to the Promotional Merchandise sector, and built one of its first large-scale e-Commerce platforms, in use by over 1500 distributors at its peak – bought out by its now-owner, and still in use twenty years later.  Understanding that and related industries in depth allowed me to clearly understand and communicate with everyone who makes it work, from machinists to warehouse staff to IT to buyers to sales teams.

Clear and effective communication has always fascinated me – after struggling with that as a child, and learning (still!) how to improve it as an adult, it’s a problem that software and the Internet can be an enormous help with.  Specifically, clearly communicating between product buyers and sellers has driven almost all of the software projects that I’ve enjoyed working on.

Think about what “clear communication” means for a second – it covers everything from data quality through to website imagery, through to invoices and purchase orders that mean the same thing to both parties – and that’s where it gets really interesting.  Many people in software focus on “technical correctness”, but when we account for human beings – different cultures, languages, emotions, and abilities, we find that there’s no such thing as “technically correct”.  Our software and our data has to account for all our human qualities in order to communicate clearly, and bringing that element to a culture driven by numbers – more profit, more information, more power, is a problem I think worthy of working on.

GetConnect was founded to work on these problems, and over the past few years we made a conscious shift to turning twenty years of expertise into a product, helping businesses of all sizes to communicate clearly.