Meet Ken and Glen Aspeslagh of Ecamm in Merrimack Valley

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ken and Glen Aspeslagh.

Ken and Glen, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
We started Ecamm in 1999, at a time when buying software online was just beginning to be a thing. We’re twin brothers, and we were sharing a college dorm room at the time. After a computer science professor gave Ken a broken Palm Pilot, which we fixed, we both immediately began to write code for it. The original Ecamm offerings were all Palm Pilot apps, priced at $8 a pop. We were honestly pretty surprised when people around the world started buying our stuff! We were definitely on to something.

After college we both got jobs working at other software companies, but kept working on Ecamm too. We have always been Mac guys, and started selling Mac apps in 2003, also $8 each. By 2005, Ecamm’s Mac software products were popular enough that we were able to go full time on it and hire a full time customer support person. Since then, we’ve continued making high-quality apps at a low price.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
We have been dedicated to writing and selling Mac software for almost 15 years, which ties us closely to Apple’s product line and product cycles. It can be hard to predict what those guys are going to do next. The Mac is still an awesome product, but since 2007 Apple’s iPhone often takes center stage. A lot of folks in the Mac development community jumped over to writing iPhone apps instead, and selling them on the App Store for 99¢. We dabbled in iOS apps, and had some early success, but in the end decided to stick with our roots and keep selling Mac software. Looking back, we think it was the right decision.

For a few years were selling camera hardware. We won a Best in Show award at Macworld Expo in 2009 for a wireless webcam. But nowadays we feel it’s important to stay focused on software. Hardware is hard.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
Ecamm is a three person team headquartered in North Andover, MA. We specialize in Mac apps that solve specific problems. We’re well known by Mac users as the makers of Call Recorder for Skype and for PhoneView.

As a company we’re most proud of the longevity of our products, and continuing to support those products for long-time customers. We still hear from customers who have been using Call Recorder to record their Skype calls for almost 10 years! We only sell life-time licenses, so customers can keep using the latest version of our apps for the life-time of the product. This is a huge differentiator for Ecamm. The reasoning is that we focus on new customers, rather than trying to sell existing customers on an update. Also, we only have to support the most recent version. This makes customers very happy. A customer will find out they bought PhoneView in 2010 and can grab the newest version for free. Sometimes they’re so grateful that they purchase it again just to thank us.

This year we added a new product to our line, Ecamm Live. It’s a Facebook Live streamer for Mac, which means we’re diving into the live video, social media world.

What were you like growing up?
As twins, we shared a single Mac SE. We were very very nerdy kids. When we weren’t writing Hypercard code for the Mac, we were exploring the woods of Groton, MA. We’ve always been entrepreneurial, and in elementary school actually had a business selling rocks and minerals to the other kids. We made good money on that.

Pricing:

• Most of our apps are $30 for life-time license.

Contact Info:

• Address: 1 Johnson St., North Andover, MA 01845
• Website: http://ecamm.com
• Phone: (617) 830-1662
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EcammNetwork/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ecammtweets/

Image Credit:
Lauren Schaller Photography

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