We’re one year old today and are proud to have failed to win a single award
It's Moneyscope's first birthday today and, while an award would have been a nice gift, for the second time this year, we haven't quite cut it as far as official gongs and plaudits are concerned.
In last night's Aberdeen UK Platform Awards, we spectacularly failed to scoop a gong (although we were chuffed to bits to hear - in this morning's article at IFA Online - that the judging panel said that Moneyscope 'works beautifully').
And in Money Marketing's e-Excellence survey of Financial Planning Tools for investments earlier this year, Moneyscope only warranted a rating in three out of 45 possible categories of features.
So you'd be forgiven for thinking that we should be sulking in a corner (and we'll admit that we did think about sulking momentarily) but - do you know what? - it turns out that we're actually quite proud of ourselves. And the reason lies in the wisdom of the 'works beautifully' words of the Aberdeen UK Platform Awards' judgement.
After all, the big idea when we set out was to create a refreshingly straightforward way for financial advice professionals to calculate client's lifetime cash flow; an invaluable asset for great financial advice that is swift, simple and easy to use.
In other words, we wanted to see if we could establish a new standard for lifetime cash-flow analysis software, so we asked ourselves: "What's the least we need to do to deliver the most useful forecasting tool for both advice professionals and their clients alike?"
So the e-Excellence survey proved that we'd stripped out at least 42 nice-to-have features that might otherwise take up Moneyscope users' time.
And the Aberdeen UK Platform Awards judgement underlined the fact that Moneyscope's stuck firmly to its principle of swift, simple and easy to use, and avoided the temptation to add more and more features.
So we're taking our complete failure to win an award as a compliment.
We believe users want stuff to work beautifully and, if that means falling short of the criteria required to win an award or official stamp of approval, then that's fine by us.
If, on the other hand, we fell short of the criteria that our users demand, we'd worry.
As it is, we may be gong-less but, on our first birthday, we're happy to know that we work beautifully for Moneyscope users like these.