Cheese

A really nice post by J covering many microISV exploits over the past year and how they've affected him.

"You can tell your non-geek friends or SO if you have one, but you’ll have a hard time just explaining what you’re talking about"

- I feel this one for sure. I can almost never explain help desk software to my non-geek friends. I've started just saying customer service software and just leaving it at that.

ISV Ad Network

I've been thinking about starting a community ad network for small ISV's.

I started some initial discussion on this thread:
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.302077.20

Followed by specific details here:
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.302369.0

Love to hear your thoughts.

Face Time

Christopher Hawkins, "I sat down with a copy of the Yellow Pages and hand-wrote - yes, hand-wrote, the same way your grandmomma hand-wrote letters to your grandpappy way back when he was serving in the Big Red One - a series of personal letters to the principal of every business in town that appeared to be even remotely technology-related."

I’ve DOS’d myself!

Sending out an email about your new version to all your customers and trial users at 3pm is NOT a good idea. Apparently everyone is just sitting there with nothing to do waiting to click the download links in your email! Hopefully everyone will get it soon and it will clear out. I'll be doing this late at night from now on, so there's at least some variance in the download time.

I probably need to tweak Apache, because the server should be up to it. It's dual proc with 2gb of ram. Oh well, perhaps I don't have enough child processes enabled.


Update: hmm. My host was down also so I guess I gave myself too much credit as it appears to have been a larger issue. Seems better now.

Mr. Softy

Jensen Harris does a great job again of showing a simply, nifty feature of the Office 12. More great reasons why Microsoft isn't going anywhere, as we discussed last month. It's certainly going to take more than Writely to do it in any event (not that Writely isn't cool). Beyond just Office, MS had a big day yesterday with rising profits announced. Note the reference to server products. Wasn't that war already lost?

"Microsoft Corp. climbed $1.29 to $27.79 after seeing its quarterly profits grow 5 percent for the quarter. The software company said new server products helped boost sales, and with a new Windows operating system coming later this year, Microsoft increased its full-year earnings outlook."
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Ajax Spellchecking

Another nifty feature of HelpSpot 1.1 is the integrated ajax spellchecker. It's pretty cool stuff. Personally, I use the one Safari has built in or Spellbound in Firefox, but not everyone has that option. Without further ado, exciting ajax spellchecking video!

HelpSpot in the Wild: TextDrive

I've been wanting to formalize my posts that are about customized HelpSpot portals, so this will be the first of hopefully many HelpSpot in the Wild posts.

This first formal post has a fantastic example of how customizable HelpSpots portal is. The great guys over at TextDrive (Web 2.0 hosting company, Ruby on Rails, merged with Joyent, etc) have just went live with their HelpSpot installation (help.textdrive.com). I have to say they've pushed HelpSpots portal even farther than I thought it could go! Here's a few screenshots, but there's alot more than just the look, which I'll talk about below.








While the above is very impressive, what's really impressed me is how they've leveraged the HelpSpot forums into a tool for real time issue tracking with their customers. In the bottom of the right nav there's three links for "current issues", "ongoing issues", and "software updates". What they've done is modify the portal forum templates so that the forums are essentially read only. Hence, their server team can post updates on outages, server down time and other customer issues which their customers can access in one convenient location. Also, since each forum comes with an RSS feed, they can offer their customers an RSS feed to keep track of downtime and other issues which may affect their servers right from their RSS readers. Brilliant guys!!!

BTW TextDrive guys, starting next week with the release of version 1.1 you'll be able to use the mobile interface to the forums to post updates directly from the server floor without even having to go back to a computer to post.

Here you can see the list of current issues (forum topics):


Clicking on an issue brings up the details (topic posts):

ISV’s Cultivate Your Audience

I think I may have been doing some other ISV's a disservice over the past year. I've preached a lot about having to have a blog and how much blogging has done for my business. Unfortunately, I've left off a big piece of the advice and it's getting some of you into trouble (not that you're only listening to me, but I should have been giving proper advice all along).

See the thing is having a blog isn't enough. Having readers isn't enough. You have to cultivate your readers and a large part of that is responding to their comments. Over the past few months I've begun to notice a trend. I'm leaving comments on blogs and never getting a response from the blog owner. I'm not talking about blogs with tons of readers and 40 comments on every post. I'm talking about blogs that have just started and blogs where most posts have 0 comments.

I check back and check back, but nothing. That of course is discouraging and makes me less likely to read, comment or link over. If you don't have time to respond to a comment when you have only a few comments a week then you're not doing it right. You need to rethink if you want a blog. If you don't cultivate your audience, if you don't participate with them then I think it's unlikely your blog will be successful at driving your other goal.

So if you're going to do it then do it right otherwise you're just wasting time which could be devoted to other matters.

HelpSpot Cracks the First Page of a Major Search Engine

Well, I'm happy to report that HelpSpot has finally cracked the first page of MSN for the enormously important 'help desk software' query. While not the huge bonanza that a Google first page listing brings, it's still a great big step forward. Why pay $35 a click when you can get that traffic for free right? Just an fyi for my new readers, I wrote up my SEO techniques a while back if you're interested.

New Prototype Docs

All you Prototype users out there, Sergio has updated his very nice set of docs to cover the 1.4.0 version. Good news, as I was getting tired of poking around the source.

App That Needs Building

I would pay some good money for a screenshot application that worked in conjunction with the browser and could replay scripts. With version 1.1 of HelpSpot on the horizon I'm coming to the terrible realization that I'll need to redo a bunch of screenshots. Wouldn't it be great if I just had a "tour" script which grabbed everything I needed? I think it would be and I'd pay a few hundred dollars for it without a blink. Modern software development is so easy and there are so many new software products coming out every day that I think there's a good market out there for something like this.

Update: Several folks have sent me interesting emails with possible solutions, but they're all Windows! I'm a Mac guy and really insist on doing my shoots on the Mac. What I really want is a great screenshoot tool like SnapZ, but with browser scripting. Sort of if SnapZ and Selenium had a baby

Hosting for HelpSpot

HelpSpot finally has a formal hosting solution. I quickly linked to the new HelpSpot hosting provider the other day, but I wanted to do a more in depth post on the subject.

Over the last several months I've talked to several hosting companies and most either seemed like they wouldn't give my customers the level of service I require or they simply weren't interested in working with a software vendor in depth. Meaning they wouldn't install and maintain the application, which is really the type of offering I wanted to present to my customers.

In truth I was beginning to feel a bit down about the process and had really started to consider offering hosting myself, which I truly wanted to avoid if possible. Luckily, Giorgio of ValiantHost has stepped in and saved the day!

Giorgio has been great to work with over the past few weeks while we worked out the details and got things setup. ValiantHost is a small hosting company, which is exactly the type of shop I wanted to work with. I can already tell that his customer service is top notch. In addition, he's been providing this type of solution for FogBugz for some time now so he's got experience hosting and updating customer applications and working with product vendors.

ValiantHost has put together a great page about their HelpSpot hosting options which you can check out here: http://www.valianthost.com/helpspothosting.html.

The prices are very reasonable, especially considering the service they're providing. I think this is really going to open up some great new markets for HelpSpot. Potential customers without a hosting solution now have any easy option to deploy HelpSpot. Another large market is groups that just don't want to deal with their internal IT organizations. They now have a simple option for using HelpSpot without jumping through a bunch of IT hoops.

So begins another small step forward in the evolution of HelpSpot. Thanks ValiantHost!

Update: Giorgio dropped me a note to let me know that they've already got their first HelpSpot customer. That's a great way to start things off!

Magna CRM 1.0

Congrats to Dimitris on getting Magna CRM out the door!

Hawkins on Meetings

Great stuff from Christopher Hawkins on meetings. Far and away the best idea IMHO is #3, no chairs. I've had some of my best meetings walking back from getting coffee or in a hallway. I love this idea.

My Favorite HelpSpot 1.1 Feature

Of all the new features in the upcoming HelpSpot 1.1 release (mobile interface, better UI in requests page, keyboard shortcuts, and more) my favorite is a small tweak to an existing feature. See when you upload an image to HelpSpot or when one is included as an email attachment, it's imported to the HelpSpot database and when the request is shown the image is automatically embedded into the request history.

This is cool because you can see exactly what the image is without clicking anything, however I quickly realized that there was a huge downside to this. Most people send full size screenshots of their issues. This results in the interface being stretched and becoming much less usable:



1.1 fixes this by automatically resizing the image to an appropriate size. This makes it much easier to see and doesn't stretch the interface. Of course you can still see the full size image by clicking on it. This was remarkably easy to do! PHP's GD library makes quick work of resizing the images. Since the image data is stored in the DB I use the handy imagecreatefromstring() function to build an image object then do a few size checks, create a new thumb image and bing bang boom in a few lines of code I have a nice resized image to send down. Another benefit of actually resizing the image is that the page loads quicker since it's not waiting for a big 1000px wide image to come down.


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Ajax Forum

A fellow I met at BarCamp (Gil, lead technology dude at Squidoo) has started a community forum site for Ajax related questions. It's a cool idea, I know I've had some specific questions which I'd like to ask to a dedicated audience. Check it out.

Looks Like Another New ISV Blog and a Few of My Rules

I like the first post of this new one:
http://pluralvision.com/blog/

So long as you're trying to not disappointment me though, there's a few more of my rules you might want to follow:

1. Use your name, if you can't use your full name then at least use your first name. It makes life much easier, like in the text above I could have said your name which would make more sense.

2. Provide a link to your email address. If you do your blog well then people will want to contact you and right now they can't.

3. Don't be scared that others are going to steal your idea. Get out some details of what you'll be working on. It makes following your blog much more interesting than trying to follow along when the posts are very cloak and dagger.

OK, that's it.

Knowledge Management Systems Growth

I subscribe to Support World (a support rag) just to stay in touch with what the formal support community is up to. Mostly the mag is a bunch of ads for help desk software, but occasionally there's something interesting in there. Today it was some stats about knowledge management systems, or customer self service if you prefer. Apparently a Gartner study found that in 2001 only 1% of service desk contacts were via the web and in 2003 only 2%. Email contact grew from 6% to 17% over that same time period. Most interesting to me however, is that Gartner predicts 65% growth in the knowledge management systems area by 2010 to 58% of all interactions (up from 35% in 2005).

Great news for HelpSpot!

During development I almost dropped the knowledge management features in order to get HelpSpot out faster, but I'm really glad I didn't. It makes so much sense to have your request tracking and self service in the same product and well integrated.

I will note that Gartner's report is hardly ground breaking and is mostly obvious, but it's always nice to have the endorsement of the "pro's"
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Why We Blog?

Our friend Gavin Bowman has a nice post over on CodeSnipers today about why MicroISV's blog.

He does a nice job of laying out the benefits of blogging for your small business. I'd add one more. Basically a good blog can lead to great connections within your industry. Not necessarily sales (though it has for me), but connections with other companies which can reap rewards not envisioned when you started your blog. Just by being "out there" you're giving yourself a big boost over the competition because if some other business is looking to work with a business like yours then you'll be much easier to find then the competition. In addition, they'll be an easy and effective way for the interested parties to find out more about you. Making that process easier lowers the barriers to them approaching you with ideas and that can only be a good thing.


Update: This doesn't really belong in this post and I've linked to it before, but I really love what Gavin does with the MicroISV digest. Great stuff Gavin!

Customer Service

"I think part of the reason i'm such a strong believer in customer support is that my first job ever was at Sears. There you are taught that the customer is ALWAYS right. If the customer tells you he/she saw a $40 pair of jeans under a $19.99 sign, they are right. If a customer brings back a pair of obviously worn clothes for a return, they are right. If a customer wants you to check the stockroom even though there is nothing back there, they are right. "

Phil's Development Journal

I think the same thing Phil. My first "real job" was at Office Depot where they have a similar policy. I think retail is a great training ground for future entrepreneurs because they almost always teach customer service skills.