One of the keys to my success if not the primary key has been this blog. While I don’t write as much as I used to, the early years of UserScape and it’s success were almost completely dependent on this blog and the traffic it generated. Without this blog I’d almost certainly be working “For the Man”, filed away in some cubical farm.

While blogs are no longer “new” as they were when I started, I still think they’re a key component to any startups business, especially a MicroISV. Now, one problem with blogs is that it’s often hard to find concise advice on how to blog well. Even just figuring out where to start looking for advice is difficult. Sure there’s lots of “how to blog” links in Google, but few get into the subtle details that make a truly successful blogger. Blog Blazers does just that. If you’re starting out in blogging or want to grow your blogging presence this book is where to start.

Now, Stephane has been kind enough to offer my readers an amazing opportunity. He’s given me 10 copies of Blog Blazers to give away free on this here blog. I’ve thought a lot about how I might give these away. I don’t want to do anything cheesy nor do I have time for a very complicated give away. So here’s what I’ve decided:

To receive a free copy of Blog Blazers be one of the first 10 people to agree to write up a complete review of Blog Blazers on their own blog. That’s it. This is on the honor system. If you’re not going to write up a review about it then please don’t ask for a copy and let someone else have it. You must have a blog to be eligible.

If you’re ready to commit to doing a review then just do the following:

* Post a comment below stating you’d like to review Blog Blazers and include your blog URL
* Include your real email in the email field

I’ll email the 10 people to get their address information and ship off the books, probably next week.

If you have a blog and think your readers might be interested in this giveaway please link them over.

Thanks!

Update: We’re at 10. Thanks everyone!

Today Peldi had a post every MicroISV dreams of, reaching $100,000 in sales. It’s a good read and I suggest you read it before you read the rest of my post.

So in his post he has a few questions and observations. Since his experience seems to mirror mine very very closely (leaving his job, revenue growth, B2B, fantastic wife that’s a key part of the company) I thought I’d post my perspective on some of his questions/comments being 3 years farther down the road than him. So Peldi here’s some notes, they may or may not be very helpful

Congrats on the success!

Product Versions
I think you’ve made a great move having the Jira and Confluence versions. I bet they pay off handsomely over time as those customers are likely to upgrade at a high percentage in the future and are also more rich sales initially. My advice here is not to spend too much time on Balsamiq for open source. There’s very little upside there, especially if the market tightens. It’s also another version to support long term. Everything you add increases support, don’t underestimate that. I’d stick with building versions which are add-ons to existing server products people already pay for. That’s a great angle, run with it!

Adding Staff
No no no. I think it’s a really bad move to add anyone. $100,000 isn’t that much money. You can spend that money in much better ways. Before you hire anyone you should do the following (note to self:I need to write this up into a bigger post)

• Payoff ALL credit cards
• Payoff any student loans
• Payoff any personal loans
• Buy a house (if you don’t already own one)
• Payoff your cars if possible
• Save at least $50,000 in savings, more if possible. Not stock, not an IRA/401K, straight cash in an account.

Other benefits of waiting are that you’ll be very clear about what areas you need to add staff in. It’s so early for you that you don’t want to make a bad hire. Also hiring someone greatly increases headaches on multiple fronts. Trust me just dealing with getting health insurance is a multi-week process. These are distractions you don’t need.

The “Oh Crap” Question (what if you’re hit by a bus)
This question is not a concern. It feels scary, but it really isn’t a problem. It wasn’t a problem for me and my application is the type where companies depend completely on it, staff live in it 10 hours a day, all day, all week. Many companies LIKE dealing with a smaller company. This is an advantage, you can provide support on a level larger competitors can only dream about.

Here’s a few tips:

• Emphasize your size as a strength
• Superior support (Question, when was the last time a vendor replied to you within an hour?)
• Faster release cycles
• Direct developer contact means customer feature requests are often implemented and implemented fast
• Emphasize the money back guarantee (I assume you have one), this IS the best product of it’s type on the market and you stand behind it in a way others don’t.
• Your product is successful. If you disappear there will be no shortage of companies looking to purchase the source and continue development

I’ve found these to be enough, but if you wanted to take it one step further you could also provide an agreement that you’ll be releasing the source code in full should you be hit by a bus. You’d want a lawyer to do this since you wouldn’t want it to apply once you reached a certain size, etc.

You said everything you need to know about this in your post: “I don’t really feel like I have reached my limits in terms of how much I can do by myself”. Until you are there’s nothing more to discuss. You shouldn’t add staff until you are working crazy hours, until you are going crazy, until you are in a great financial position to ensure the survival of the company. This is the best way to support your customers. 90% of small business go out of business. You’re much more likely to leave them high and dry because you go out of business than because you get hit by a bus. That needs to be your primary concern.

Investors
Under no circumstances should you take money!! I’m glad to hear you don’t want to. You’ve proved the concept and now make enough to live comfortably. That’s it, there’s no reason you need one penny at this point. You’ve taken all the risk and it’s paid off. No need to let someone else in now that you’ve proven the product.

That’s my 2 cents. Hopefully it’s been useful. Keep up the great work and interesting blog!

http://www.blueskyonmars.com/2008/10/29/in-the-market-for-a-job/

Fear and/or true financial need is almost certainly going to affect business and consumer software spending. However, there are some bits of software that companies (and to a lesser extent consumers) can’t or won’t do without. If you sell a product like that you may have just hit the lottery. Your product is now “right priced”, “the cost effect solution”.

This is not about being cheapest. In fact I think the cheapest software could be hurt. Junk is junk. However, many people purchasing software are going to take a closer look at mid tier when they may have previously only been interested in premium.

As I’ve been thinking about this it’s struck me that this could be a great time to start a business, especially a MicroISV or small partnership. Here’s why:

1. The large or medium software companies are likely to feel an impact from the downturn. They have the most money out in advertising, payroll, etc. Some may not make it at all, others will certainly be cutting back to try to limit expenses. They’re likely to cut in places MicroISV’s can excel such as customer service.

2. #1 gives you a chance to get into an existing strong niche where the other competitors may have their guard down and generally be more focused on staying in business than providing great service and products. However, the niche itself still has the upside of these companies prior advertising and marketing. So customers are out there still needing this service which is the type of need that MicroISV’s can never create on their own.

3. Yes, customers will still need software. We’ll, certain types of software anyway. I wouldn’t go near consumer software with a 10 foot pole. Businesses, however, still need to run. And if anything they’ll be looking to run more efficiently than ever. If you can create a product that saves companies money you should be OK.

4. A small ISV can run on almost no money. Basically just the salary of the founder and a few bucks for hosting and computers. You probably only need to make 50-100K to do alright which is all you need to do in your first year. Meanwhile the competition must make many times that number to turn a profit and they’ll be distracted while they’re trying to do it. Perhaps a few competitors even disappear making it even easier to pick up market share.

5. Getting in at the bottom is often how you make the most money. Warren Buffet knows that, it’s why he’s buying up all these great companies. Getting in at the bottom means you can do things even cheaper than you’d expect. Server companies are discounting heavy to get sales, ad space will get cheaper, it may be cheaper to find high quality full time and part time employees or contractors if needed.

None of this means you still don’t need a great plan and a good idea for a product. All those things I’ve discussed before still apply, but if you’re on the sidelines and have some savings, it could be a good time to jump in.

This is the Poughkeepsie Rail Bridge (no longer active). It actually passes next to our house inland.

Poughkeepsie, NY

Me and the Boy

The best deli in town, Rossi’s

Down river

It’s a long way down

I like this picture a lot

We’re putting the finishing touches on v1 of the framework, if you’re interested in working with it please let me know and I can get you a copy of it when it’s ready. I’d like to get a few people kicking the tires a bit before releasing it to the general public.

A PHP library is also in the works, more on that when it’s a bit closer. It’s under development by CaseySoftware.

The ads were a little rushed, but I don’t think they’re bad. Ads are going to be very much trial and error anyway. We can swap them out at any time so if one or both bomb we can make an adjustment.

The Deck certainly puts HelpSpot on some interesting sites. I wouldn’t say it’s a perfect match in terms of sites that people search for help desk software on, but I think the audience it reaches are certainly people who directly or indirectly deal with customer service a fair amount.

We’re going to run for 2 months as a started to see how it does and go from there.

Over the past few months I’ve thought of bringing it back and after asking around a bit I’ve decided to do so. I still don’t have much time, but HelpSpot is in a much more established position than it was then, so is the business and so is my ability to bring on help if needed.

The thing that keeps bringing me back to this idea is that there’s simply nothing else like it out there. Help desk related forums are always buried deep within general IT sites where they don’t belong. The help desk organizations have forums, but those are usually buried below white papers and conference announcements. There simply has to be room for a forum dedicated just to help desk professionals.

So this will be my last, best attempt at it. As often is the case I’m really going to lean on the support system that’s been built up on this blog and elsewhere online. If you have a blog, a link would be insanely appreciated. If you work on a help desk, tell your co-workers. Little things make all the difference in this type of venture and your support is truly appreciated!

Visit Help Desk Talk

Important to note is that the support costs remain unchanged. So it’s still $49 per user per year for ongoing support.

There are a number of factors that went into making this decision. As always I thought it’d be nice to share, so in no particular order here’s some of my thinking:

1 - In September it will be 3 years (Wow!) since the first HelpSpot beta launched. The final release was in late October. During the past three years HelpSpot’s price has remained unchanged, while our competitors continued to increase their prices. Currently HelpSpot is less than half the price of many major competitors and many times less than others.

That said, HelpSpot does have a unique place I think in this market. It’s very accessible price wise and I didn’t want to put it out of reach for smaller companies, departments, and non-profits.

2 - Probably my favorite pricing article is Product Pricing Primer by Eric Sink. One of my favorite lines is “In fact, if nobody is complaining about your price, then it is probably too low. The trick is to tune your pricing until the volume of the whining is just right.”. For the past year or so we pretty much get no feedback on the price being too high and a great deal of “Wow, you’re giving this away, I’d pay $350/user”. Now, I’m not going to jump to charging $350/user, but I think Eric has a great observation here and it’s been a big consideration as to the timing of the increase.

3 - As with most businesses increased growth leads to increased costs. So far I’ve done a pretty good job of keeping those costs down, but I think over the next year we’ll be taking on some new costs and this increase is going to help offset those.

4 - One thing I don’t want to lose is the perception of HelpSpot as a high quality product (which it is). A products price unfortunately does have an impact on that perception. As with most companies I’m trying to find the right balance and I certainly don’t want to fall down into the “cheap” bin. This one is a little more fuzzy I know, but it just felt like time to nudge up a bit.

5 - A price increase helps to bring our support cost percentage inline with customer expectations. Many customers like to see maintenance costs at 20-25% of the license costs. I personally find this a little unfortunate for us as most companies are buying only support for that percentage and are not receiving major versions as part of it. So they’re paying that and then paying more license fees when the next major release comes out, where that’s not the case with our plan. In any event, this will be one positive side effect of the increase.

That’s pretty much all the hard facts. So much of pricing is just feel, so this is my first chance in three years at testing my feel. Given how conservative the increase is I don’t think they’ll be much controversy, it’s probably going to come down to deciding if I’ve left too much on the table. My initial reaction was to go for something like $229, but I’m very hesitant to move over $200 especially given the economy.

Time will tell and I’ll try and report back towards the end of the year when I’ll know a bit about how it’s worked out. If you’re interested you can see the new pricing for the various packs here: http://www.userscape.com/products/helpspot/pricing.php