Sales by Country

I haven't run this report yet so I thought it might be interesting. I guess it's pretty much what I expected. International sales were very strong during the first few months and have since been overtaken by US sales. An interesting note though is that several of the largest sales have been to international customers.

NextNY - Startup 101

I'll be participating in a round table discussion called 'Startup 101' being put on by the nextNY organization. If you're in the NY area and thinking of starting a business or just getting started with one then you should signup on the wiki. I'm the MicroISV representative if you will, but they'll be some VC/Angel guys as well as other slightly larger startups.

Specs and Happy Clients

"I know that "no specs" is very big right now, with high-profile designers insisting that you don't need to do any kind of documenting or specs, that you just need to make a few sketches and then start writing HTML prototypes, re-writing it until the customer likes it. This sounds suspiciously like the code-and-fix model, which we all know is garbage. Even worse, it sounds like undisciplined, hippy-dippy, egocentric, "I am an artiste" thinking. In fact, I dare say that it is non-design. For God's sake, people, we're in a pseudo-engineering profession. Act like it. Plan your work ahead of time, at least the important parts of it."

http://www.christopherhawkins.com

I'd also add that the no spec folks tend to generally be talking about in house projects with very small teams. I've done no spec work with consulting clients and it's a total nightmare.

TurboGears DVD

Our buddy Kevin is selling a TurboGears DVD full of screencasts to help support his continued work on TurboGears. If you're a Python guy you should throw him a little support. I've already purchased the supporter level package so I get my name and logo on the DVD AND a free toolbox. Pretty cool!
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The Wedding Space

I love the wedding space for ISV apps. Lots of money spent there and very few good solutions. The new http://www.weddingsbyadam.com/ site is a great idea. Wish I thought of it! My other favorite wedding app is the mighty http://www.perfecttableplan.com/

An Old Domain, A Great Idea

We all have a few old domains sitting around (don't we?). I was looking at mine and thought it may be interesting to share a story of a business that never was and may never be.

One of the first ideas I had years ago for a startup was to build a small business intranet application. I have two domains for this idea, sbintranet.com and smallbusinessintranet.com. I came up with this after having developed a few intranets for my job and clients. The intranets were immediately useful and I think a no brainer for any small business.

I even started coding this, but eventually lost steam. It was the end of the dotcom era and with so many intranet companies going under I figured it may be the wrong time. It was the wrong time in my life to take it on anyway so it's probably better off.

Looking back though I understand even better why it wouldn't have worked. The problem with intranets for a small business is that small businesses don't know about intranets and what they can do for you. Hence they're not looking for intranets. Hence it's damn hard to get sales! Especially in a bootstrapping scenario where finances for advertising would be limited to none.

I always keep this idea on the back burner though. I think the communication possibilities in a small business are huge, especially now with the rise of wiki's and ajax based chats. Perhaps in a few years the time will be right.

Congrats to LibraryThing

LibraryThing nails down a big investment by Abebooks. The LibraryThing blog has been the best MicroISV reading around the last few months. I hope he keeps it up.

A great take away for aspiring ISV's out there is that his site is not for geeks. Unbelievably there's actually money in other software niche's!

Corporate Identity Design Services

Mike Rohde the infamous designer of the UserScape and HelpSpot logos points out that his company has added a page about their identity design service. I was Mike's first client for this type of service and I couldn't be happier. Definitely check him out if you're in the market.

BackupMyBlog Gets Crunched

Doug dropped me a nice note today about HelpSpot. His site, BackupMyBlog, got featured on TechCrunch which sent him a huge amount of traffic and new clients. Of course with new clients comes new questions and he wanted to let me know that the RSS features of HelpSpot helped him make short work of the new requests. I love getting those kinds of emails, makes it all worthwhile.

On a side note, Doug is here on the east coast with me and we're thinking of building an Ark if anyone else wants in. As I noted to him I can't swim so I truly need one
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Big Ideas

"As I evaluate new startups these days I’m finding it harder and harder to see the big ideas that will appeal to a large, non-geek consumer audience." - Redeye VC

I couldn't agree more. The problem is they're building products which don't solve problems. They're just "cool". Worse yet is that many of them are simply poor copies of other "cool" sites that had only the thinest purpose to being with.

via Dave

Nukes in your Trunk

I'd have more of a problem with the guy with nukes in his trunk than with a petty thief.
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Your Customers MUST Come Before Everything Else

I've always had a very strong customer service focus. I attribute this to the time I spent working in retail. My first jobs were all in retail and even my first job out of college.

Retail is a terrible way to make a living. The hours stink, wearing the little outfit stinks, the pay stinks. But if there's one thing they teach you in retail it's how to take care of a customer. That the customer is truly the only reason you're there, that the customer is a precious flower to be cared for, respected and nurtured.

The customer is the one thing you can least afford to put off when you start a business. Yet, I see so many articles talking about getting things done. Often recommending only checking your email in the morning and once in the afternoon. Only doing support at one set time a day.

I think this is horrible advice. See by doing that you're doing what everyone else is doing. You're providing the same mediocre service customers expect to get.

Why not be different? Why not be memorable? Why not answer emails right when they come in?

That's one of the things I try to do if it's at all possible. Most of the time I am able to respond within 10 minutes or so. Not always, but very often. Because of that my service stands out. I can't count how many times customers have responded and the first thing they note is how impressive that is.

The reason I'm thinking of this is that I had several large sales today and both mentioned the speed an quality of support as major factors in their purchase decision. I can't help but think that may not have factored so highly if support had not been faster than timely.

I say let the programming wait. Is that new class you're writing really more important than a prospective customers question? I don't think so and neither should you.

Tips For Keeping Your Help Desk Running During an Absence

Cyndy with a really nice set of procedures for making sure things don't fall apart while you're gone:

" I don't know what your network "looks like"; mine is a law firm network (about 18 attorneys and 35 staff). I take the position that, barring something really unusual, the office should be able to function without my babysitting for a couple of weeks (what if I were hit by a bus!?), and that it's part of my job to make sure that works."


http://www.helpdesktalk.com/index.php?pg=forums.posts&id=6&pc=4
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Gone Living

This is an interesting blog by this fellow who used to work at Yahoo but has quit and is now taking a year to tour around the world. I'd love to do that someday.

HelpSpot in the Wild: Atrixware

Atrixware is a provider of a wide variety of eLearning solutions. They just recently purchased HelpSpot and have really gone to town on portal customizations as you'll see below. They also were able to get me kick started on a script I've wanted to write for a long time. In their old support desk they used phpBB and wanted to transfer the old discussions to HelpSpot's forums. This lead to the development of the phpBB_to_HelpSpot script now available in the hacks section of the documentation.

They're also hosted by the good guys over at ValiantHost.



Converted forums:

Popular Help Desks

HelpSpot is now #3 on the del.icio.us popular helpdesk tag list. Only 2 large open source help desks are ahead of it. Thanks all!

I’m Loving Code Igniter

I'm upgrading some of the behind the scenes systems at UserScape to support customer logins, hosted trials, update mailing lists and a few other goodies. Since I have about 4 minutes to actually spend on all this I've been looking around for a good PHP framework to help me out with the heavy lifting.

In the past I've had very very bad experiences with frameworks, finding them just about useless. One thing I think Rails really got right is that it was pulled from a real product. This gave it a huge leg up where things are just naturally in the right place. It's very subtle, but it's obviously hard to replicate as most frameworks that start as dude's just thinking about the 'best' way to do it stink.

That's why I made sure to note the URL with Rick Ellis (pMachine guy) released http://www.codeigniter.com/ a while back. Code Igniter was pulled from his Expression Engine product and in my first day with it I'm extremely impressed.

It's super quick to get started, even faster than Rails if you ask me. It's actually making PHP fun again! I even had an evil thought pass through my mind of rebuilding HelpSpot on top of it. Of course that's insane, but it's just that good.

The other HUGE plus is that it's PHP4 compatible. I don't use PHP 4 in any production work, but HelpSpot is 4 compatible and most of the PHP install base is 4 so this should be a big plus in the frameworks uptake.

It's not perfect, it could use a few more docs in some places and I'd like to see a bit better way to handle global header/footer type includes but overall it's a very nice package which I'm looking forward to working more with over the next few months.

Betrayed by BOS Forums

The Business of Software forums hosted over on www.joelonsoftware.com have been a great resource for me. I've participated there for about 2 years and I've learned a bunch from the group of ISV's who participate on that forum. I also feel I've added a good deal to the quality of the discussion there and with it's rise as a top resource for small ISV's. That's why I feel betrayed by the moderators of BOS today.

Over the past few months the quality of BOS has gone down as ISV spammers have taken to posting links for their half finished products. These links are almost always by people who don't otherwise participate and are pretty transparent attempts to simply drive traffic to their sites.

I wondered if I was the only one feeling this way, so I posted a thread (cached version) asking for these spam posts to stop so that the forum could return to it's previous quality discussion without all the spam noise. I wasn't ranting, but in fact offered several suggestions including moving the "review" posts to a new forum on BOS or to an existing link site which joelonsoftware is affiliated with. An energetic discussion ensued where most people agreed with my position. Even Eric Sink a forum moderator and ISV guru agreed.

So I was surprised this morning when the thread, which had 22 posts on saturday still had 22 today. I remembered that the BOS forums will hide moderated posts from all but those who originally posted so I headed over to proxify to check the site from a remote server. I was extremely saddened to find that it had in fact been removed. You can see the image below, the post should be between 'Formal Documention Process Document Templates' and (ironically) 'uISV Needs Review of Revamped Site'.




It appears that the spammers have more rights on the BOS forums than someone who has actively participate for several years and who was simply posting a comment to improve the experience.

I'm not sure where to go from here. BOS feels like a part of my business having been such an important part of my learning process. Perhaps it's time to move on or start a new forum where the spammers don't have more rights than the true participants.

Update: Wow, looks like the stars must be aligned. Dharmesh comments below that he's started a new forum which is an alternative to BOS. Especially attractive is that he'll be approving all posters. While I normally don't like that feature in general, I think in this particular case it's exactly the type of thing I'm looking for. A slightly more exclusive forum where everyone knows everyone. If you're interested you can check it out here: http://onstartups.com/

Update 2: Thread is live again... Thanks Bob/Eric. I think it's the right thing. As I've been saying all along I just want BOS to be the best it can be. I truly am too lazy to find someplace else to congregate if I can help it