Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, January 24, 2007:
New Help Desk Competitor?
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.
Looks like Ben will be starting a niche competitor to HelpSpot aimed at the Active Directory community. Ben has been a HelpSpot customer from very early on, it should be interesting to see what he comes up with here. Of course creating help desk software is probably one of the top things I see MicroISV’s with an IT background blog about making just after bug trackers so we’ll see if he makes it to completion. I’m wishing him luck (seriously)!
Discussion
Ian, a few weeks ago I asked about your decision to focus HelpSpot on external customer support versus internal support. This is the type of product I would contrast HelpSpot to. A help desk tailored to the typical corporate IT world, with Windows-based servers, Active Directory and the like.
No need for fancy spam filters when you help desk can't receive e-mail from the outside world. 
I'm hoping to have Liberum updated in the next few months with similar features to Ben (rewritten in ASP.NET). We will see how that goes though.
Created by Doug on 01.25.2007 1:09 am
True and I think this may be a good niche for him. I don't totally agree with you though (still) because a pretty good percentage of my customers are using it for internal support in the Windows world. HelpSpot does support Active Directory for authentication and for information via Live Lookup. Indeed it won't limit your portal access by your Windows domain and things like that, but I think it's a minority who will care about such things. Most of the time if they're running it internally it will be behind the firewall anyway so there's no worries about outside access in the portal.
You're right about spam, but other than that the other features are all relevant. Many internal desks support multiple mailboxes, multiple internal groups, and so on.
I think more than anything what makes HelpSpot more an external tool than an internal one is it's "marketing". This blog is the basis in many ways of HelpSpots marketing and it's tendency is to reach other ISV's, programmers and the like. Many internal help desk types get their information from places other than the net or from big IT websites on the net. It's a challenge I'm well aware of and plan to start taking a more aggressive approach with over time.
In any event, I think the help desk space is more than large enough for all of us!
Created by Ian on 01.25.2007 9:14 am
"In any event, I think the help desk space is more than large enough for all of us!"
Okay well me too then!
Actually, this may seem counter-intuitive but I think another potential benefit of being open and sharing information about HelpSpot--as you have--is that it may in effect discourage potential competitors, rather than encourage them to emulate you and "borrow" your ideas.
For example, I wouldn't try to compete in this market because I somewhat view it as "Ian's space," Ian being someone who's been willing to share information and support others in the mISV community (and this presumes the creation of a viable competing product).
Of course no one truly owns the market, but there's something to be said for honor and goodwill. [BTW I'm not pointing a finger at anyone--this is just semi-related to the discussion and offers my perspective and a comment on business blogging in general.]
Created by Beanbrain on 01.25.2007 11:58 am
I see what you're saying Bean. It's probably true, but at the same time I think that if someone is that easily discouraged from a market that it's probably not the best market for them to enter anyway. So in that sense it probably works out for the best.
I tend not to worry that much about competition in my space since I'm already going up against everyone including public companies worth billions of dollars. I also know how long and how much work it takes to get a foot hold in this market and I don't envy anyone starting at the beginning 
It is interesting how blogs and blogging can both encourage and discourage competition at the same time.
Created by Ian on 01.25.2007 12:08 pm
For what its worth, I know HelpSpot can be used in the environment I am targeting, but like Ian has said, the help desk market is very segmented and there are hundreds of thousands of IT departments using poorly designed help desk products. In fact, upon contacting support for an obvious flaw in the program we use at work I was told that it wouldn't be a high priority to fix because they have over 10,000 customers who have not had a problem. Seems like the market is wide open with responses like that.
Created by Ben Kubs on 01.26.2007 12:51 pm