A Journey with NXPowerLite: Conversation with Mike Power

Mike Power is the founder and Managing Director of Neuxpower, a software solutions company based in the UK. Neuxpower custom-builds both stand-alone applications and add-ins that enhance existing software such as Microsoft Office. Their commercially-available file optimization software NXPowerLite compresses PDF, Microsoft Office and JPEG files simply and effectively by up to 90%, making them easy to email as attachments.

In this conversation, Mike explores NXPowerLite retrospectively and looks at the near future.

Geetesh: There are several file compression products, but NXPowerLite was the original PowerPoint compression product, and it still works seamlessly with PowerPoint and also other Microsoft Office file formats. Can you reminisce a bit about the journey so far?

Mike: It's been a huge amount of fun!

When we first built NXPowerLite Desktop back in 2001 email bandwidth limits were incredibly tight, so creating a product that quickly made large PowerPoint files small enough to slip under the radar netted us some very excited and appreciative customers. At the time Neuxpower was a digital marketing agency, so the first version of NXPowerLite was a side project. The idea to make PowerPoint compression software came after chatting with a client. He had spent a painful morning hand-optimizing all of the images in his presentation to make it small enough to send to his colleagues in the US. We figured that there must be an easier way… and later that year NXPowerLite was born.

On Launch day we sold a single license to a gentleman called Stewart McKnight from PepsiCo, which was very exciting for us. We were pleasantly surprised a week later when he came back and bought 10, then completely blew us away when he bought 100 licenses the month after! That’s when we realized we were building something that people really wanted, something important. Now we’ve sold roughly 2.5 million licenses of NXPowerLite Desktop, which we are utterly humbled by, it’s a huge number.

The software has evolved dramatically over the years and substantially expanded in scope and capabilities. If you’re interested in seeing what NXPowerLite looked like back in 2001, take a quick look at our blog post charting the first 12-years evolution of the software.

In spite of bandwidth limitations easing over the years, we still find that many people continue to struggle sending large files. Whether it's a restriction at their end or with the recipient - large files continue to cause email problems. It's gratifying to have made such an impact over the years, and exciting to still be able to innovate and develop our solutions further. We have some exciting plans for a major update in 2017 when we release version 8. Improving file reduction remains our primary focus, but we will be making time to completely rework the way files are added, optimized and saved to making the software an even more seamless experience. Watch this space...

Geetesh: Can you share a story about how NXPowerLite made a difference to the way people work?

Mike: We talk to our customers as much as we can, seeing things from their point of view is key when solving problems. The most common thing we hear from them is that sending large files by email can be hard work. They claim other compression tools don’t reduce their files, and they don’t like the inconvenient extra step required to unzip files.

We’ve changed the way these people work by eliminating the time-consuming and often frustrating effort involved with sending large files. Our users don’t even have to think about whether a file is too large. The combination of NXPowerLite’s unique reduction capability and seamless email integration means that people can focus on doing their jobs rather than troubleshooting email delivery. The added bonus is that files reduced with NXPowerLite don’t need to be unzipped, which makes life easier for the recipients too!

See Also: NXPowerLite 6: Conversation with Mike Power

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