Make Your App Pretty

Dave said something interesting at the end of his latest Podcast. It's a political podcast, but at the end he talks for a minute about his Apple computer and he really phrased the process of developing software on a Mac perfectly. He said "It makes you want to make your software pretty" (13:30). I totally agree.
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Don’t Forget About MS SQL Server

This is just a quick note to all of you out there developing B2B apps in PHP (or other languages). Don't forget to give your apps support for SQL Server. If you're all ready doing support for MySQL then having support for MS SQL Server adds almost no extra work. The basic SQL is almost exactly the same.

If you need some motivation here's some. It's now been 1 week since HelpSpot went live and free trials were available. In that time, 45% of all downloads have been for use with MS SQL Server. I'd also note that in talking with these potential customers, most would not be able to use HelpSpot if it did not have SQL Server support because they are MS shops and that is the database they support and use. Throwing PHP on a box someplace is one thing, but adding support/backup for a new database platform is entirely different and in general would preclude them from trying HelpSpot.

PHP Wins Out Over Rails, Oh My!

OK in this previous post (Ecommerce, Rails, Merchant Accounts Oh My!) I detailed how I was going to use Rails for the store of the UserScape website.

Well I'm here to tell you that this may be the first post in history to detail why PHP won out over Rails. Now let me say up front that it's not really Rails fault at all, but mostly my own. I did indeed start it will Rails, but after about a day of working on it I realized something very important. This was the app that every dollar my business made would pass through. Duh! Should I be writing this in a language I don't know? NO! NO! NO! I can hear you yelling at the screen right now.

So I feel back to PHP and it was the best decision I made, because once I really got in there things were a bit more complicated than I had anticipated and if I had been needing to lookup code while I was trying to do the logic it would have been a big mess. I was also able to share templates and other code I already had in the UserScape site rather than duplicating them in the Rails version of the store.

In the end everything turned out fine. The system has successfully processed both credit card and invoice transactions and I was still able to use the merchant account/gateway I signed up for previously. I was also able to sneak in some new technology by using the EZPDO O/R mapper which is very cool.

Congrats to Paul

Congrats to Paul Jones for getting hired by Zend, the big PHP company. Paul develops a bunch of open source tools, my favorite of which is the template engine PHP Savant, which is used throughout the portal aspects of HelpSpot.

Marketing, What Next?

So sales over the first 2 days have been very good. We're getting alot of conversions from the beta group as well as a surprising number of downloads from new visitors for the 45 day free trial. So how do we keep the marketing rolling, or more accurately how to start? I have some ideas for long term marketing efforts, but what about short term?

I found myself in the final screen of building an Adwords campaign this morning, but I just couldn't pull the trigger. The keywords that relate to help desk software are very expensive. Even a tiny campaign would blow through several thousands dollars in a month, easy. It is something I'm sure I'll try at some point, but for right now I just think there's got to be a better way to spend $1,000. I love how everything so far has been grassroots word-of-blog driven.

So I'm opening this up to everyone out there. I'm looking for ideas on how to spend $500-$1000 in the blog world. Maybe it's sponsoring something, buying something, flying somebody someplace, I have no idea. I don't want to pay people to blog about my product, that's just sleazy. Instead, I want ideas on how to facilitate the grassroots growth. Perhaps I'd be better off saving it for a vacation? Let me know what you think.

Back Office Systems

When you build them yourself for your ISV this is what they look like :-(

Spiffy Feature 1: OPML

Every now and again I'm going to post about a HelpSpot feature, why it's cool and how it came about. For at least a little while I'm going to avoid the obvious ones found in most help desk software and stick with the unique stuff. So here we go......


Feature: OPML
HelpSpot features support for exporting all your RSS feeds as OPML. In HelpSpot your personal Queue as well as every custom filter and forum in the system comes with an RSS feed so you can track the progress of requests and discussions. In even a moderate size installation you'll certainly end up with a dozen or more RSS feeds to manage. Of course you have the option of selecting individual feeds to track but more often than not you'll want to track them all, especially once you get used to checking your requests in your RSS reader.

Hence, a simple and standard OPML exporter exists. Simply click the link (pictured) and you get a nice OPML file for importing into your favorite feed reader.



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Fiber to your House

Wow, Verizon has a new service which will run fiber optic cable right to your house. This fellow just got it and it took his speed from 2.7 mb/s to 27 mb/s!!!!! Man, I hope they get that around here soon.

HelpSpot 1.0 Released!

Whew, it's been a long 2 months or so. When you're building a company from nothing there's so much to do. So many things seem far off when you start, but let me tell you they show up fast. Things like running your beta, working with your beta users, building your ecommerce system, buying your SSL certs, setting up backend systems to process customers, payments, invoices ...............

Well after all the hard work the moment is finally here where I can say I have shipped HelpSpot! Man it feels good. I know there's so much still to do, but I'm trying to just enjoy this one moment.

Hopefully I'll now have a little more time to write up what I've learned and get back to blogging at a better pace then I have been. We'll see

If you haven't stopped by the UserScape site in a while you might want to check it out. There's been some changes to the

Homepage: http://www.userscape.com/products/helpspot/

The tour: http://www.userscape.com/products/helpspot/tour/1/

Free 45 day trials: https://www.userscape.com/store/freetrial.php

and a few other things.

Good Luck Ian!

Ian Jones has decided to leave his day job to work on his Case Detective software full time (it's a desktop app to access the mighty FogBugz).

That's really great and apparently I was a little bit of inspiration, which is very cool! He's definitely doing it right by having a year of money saved. I think that's soooooo important, because you need to give your software time to be successful. I see so many new ISV's who appear to be dependent on their software making money from day 1. Of course you want that, but if you've dedicated a year of your life to building your software you owe it at least another year to be successful. It takes time for word to spread, etc.

In regards to his note on my beta release cycle I will say that even doing it full time it did practically kill me! However, since I wanted to keep the beta to 5-6 weeks I really needed to get new builds out fast. Most companies seemed to download every other one, which I think worked out fine. I really do need a vacation though

Good luck Ian!

Exit Interviews Done Right

"First words spoken at an exit interview. Thank you for working here and contributing, all of us appreciate it. And mean it. Say thank you."

Good article about how to treat employees who are leaving your firm and why it makes good business sense to be nice to them: Exit Stage Left - Your last chance
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BarCamp NYC!

Finally something to do on the east coast!!!

http://barcamp.org/index.cgi?BarCampNYC

BarCamp is (from the Wiki):
"BarCamp is an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.

Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn are welcome and invited to join.

When you come, be prepared to share with barcampers. When you leave, be prepared to share it with the world."

It's just getting rolling, so there's no set date yet but it will be before the new year. If you can please spread the word on your own blogs and let's show those Valley guys how we roll in the NYC

Amit Gupta is putting it together, you can see the post here: http://amitgupta.com/blog/shoebox/2005/10/19/barcamp-nyc/. He recently did some work with super hero Seth Godin on http://www.changethis.com/. Should be fun to chat with him about that.

UserScape (my company for all you new readers) is also on board to sponsor something or other. We'll get it figured out once we see how many folks are coming.

Squidoo

Bob has an interesting post about me (!) and the possibilities available with Squidoo, especially for the ISV's out there.
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Interesting New ISV

http://recdesk.blogspot.com/

A good post about conference setups. I probably need to start looking into that a bit.

The product website is here: http://recdesk.com. It's a web solution for community parks. Pretty interesting niche. I find the pricing to be extremely interesting as it's based on the size of the community the parks serve.

He's on the east coast as well, which is cool.

Cool ISV’s

The thread referenced in my last post has brought some cool ISV's to my attention. These two here are actually desktop apps with very specific niches. Really interesting. The first one is the fellow who doesn't seem to think blogging is worthwhile. Ah well, he still has a cool app. It's called Perfect Table Plan and it helps you organize your table plan for events like weddings, etc.:



Maybe if you all go visit he might change his mind about blogging

Another is LandLordMax. It's software for managing your rental properties. Again another very interesting niche market.



Maybe my next product will be in a little niche. It seems like it would be a lot of fun to build something with such a specific target audience.

ISV’s Wasting Their Time Blogging?

I made a post just now over on the Joel on Software forums asking what ISV blogs people were currently following. Basically because I've found that almost all the ones I've been following have been abandoned. I miss reading and learning from others in the same boat as me, so I was hoping to get pointed in some new directions.

Anyway, the first response is from a fellow (who sells interesting software, fyi) saying that maybe it's because they're all too busy working on their products to blog. There was a definite snootiness in his tone if I do say so myself.

So basically this post is simply to say that I think that attitude is very misinformed. Let me break down some of my own experience.

1. My blog has provided me with great insights into my perspective market, mostly from comments left by readers.

2. My blog has given me connections which have already paid dividends and I expect will pay off even more in the coming months.

3. My blog has been my only "advertising". Through this medium I created a mailing list of users for my initial beta and might I add that about 50% of the people on the mailing list turned into beta testers. That's an amazingly high conversion ration from my experience with mailing lists.

4. The beta users who I have firm commitments from will already cover all of my hard expenses (actual money I spent, not lost salary) from right here at the beginning. How many other software companies start with any customers at all much less start profitable?

Perhaps I've taken this too far, but I do feel passionately that having a blog has really helped my business and I think it can help any ISV startup out there who has the guts to be honest.

The thread that started this rant is here:
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.227937.2

Read this to Save $90 on your SSL Cert

No really it's true. A week or two back I had to fill-out a bogus form on the Thawte site to download some product information. A sales guy followed up with me from that. He offered me their "latest offer" which was $90 off a 2 year SSL123 cert. So I got a $259 value for $169. Not bad. I also got the impression that they basically give this to whoever asks so my bet is you could click on the live chat options and get the discount straight away.

I was really going to go with Verisign, but their prices are insane and you have to buy the really expensive one if you want 2 day turn around.

HelpSpot Tour

The HelpSpot tour is live! If you have a chance take a peak and get a closer look at what I've been talking about for the last 8 months

http://www.userscape.com/products/helpspot/tour/1/

ezpdo

ezpdo is a PHP object-relational mapping system. All of these I've ever seen for PHP were garbage, however, this one looks pretty good.
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MySQL InnoDB Engine in Trouble?

Jeremy has the scoop on Oracle purchasing the company who owns the InnoDB engine which powers the MySQL InnoDB table type. Sounds like bad news bears for MySQL AB. I wonder if Oracle tried to buy them first?

I personally don't care for the InnoDB type, at least in downloadable apps. There's no full text search which I think is a huge plus of the MyISAM type. Also, using the InnoDB type means you just upped the knowledge required to maintain the MySQL server properly. You need to understand tablespaces and you also need special tools to do live backups.