Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, August 25, 2006:
Philipp’s New Product
Philipp is looking at creating a new product for localizing .NET based software. I don’t know much about that industry in the .NET world, but I can tell you right now that I’d happily pay $1000+ for a PHP solution that was seamless and worked well in a standard PHP system (aka I don’t want to jump through special hoops because it’s PHP). There’s pretty much nothing for this in the PHP world, at least not that’s professional grade and seamless.
If I had decent tools for this I’m sure HS would already be in 3-4 languages. While I’m ranting, if anyone knows of good tools for this please post a link.
Off to LBI
I’m off to Long Beach Island, NJ for the week with the family. Should be a nice time. We’ve got an entire house and high speed internet 
I’ll still be working, but at least I’ll have the sound of the ocean in my ear!
http://www.longbeachisland.com/
UserScape and the Web 2.0 Traffic List
I just read that UserScape is listed on Seth Godins Web 2.0 traffic watch list. It’s currently #412 of #937. This list is interesting, but it’d be much more interesting if you could filter by profitability. I bet UserScape would be in the top 50 if you could.
Kiko and the Google Calendar Thing
SVN had a pretty good take on the Kiko calendar demise. I’d add a bit more. In the SVN analysis they compare Backpack to G calendar but note it’s not a perfect comparison because Backpack does more and isn’t free. I’d say that’s the real problem here. There’s no point in competing with Google on a free product. That’s just stupid. You need to create a value added product that’s worth paying for. If you’re wasting your time hoping to create a product that someone acquires just because it’s cool then it’s easy to get blown out of the water when Google or Yahoo or Microsoft come out with a similar product.
Kiko wasn’t designed as a product, it was designed as cool and that’s a very tenuous model for any industry much less web based applications. In fact the ebay action site says it all: “Kiko currently has no advertising revenue”. Well if you made a product worth paying for you wouldn’t have to worry about advertising revenue.
One other small side rant I have, is why do entrepreneur’s think it’s easier to make money via advertising? Sure it’s easy to add some adwords and make $300 a month, but it ‘s much harder to make a living at it. If you were to get serious about advertising you’d need to hit the streets and really beat down doors. You’d need to work deals with individual companies. All that takes tons of time and man power. I think making an app worth paying for is a lot easier than an advertising based site where you’re beholden to so many other people besides your users.
I Don’t Trust You
The other day I saw a post by Brent about this really nice looking bug tracker called Porchlight. It looks like a pretty nice bug tracker, especially because it seems very simple which is what I want. Here’s the problem. I don’t trust them. I don’t want a hosted version of their product. I want to control my own data. I want it on my own domain, I want it backed up with my own backups, I don’t trust them for $10 a month to take better care of my data then I will. Why should I trust them?
In all the web2 hysteria people have forgotten that most people don’t trust other people. Especially with their very important proprietary data.
Update: Scoble has a post just now that’s tangentially related to this as well.
New HelpSpot Spam Tools Rock
The next version of HelpSpot has spam protection for the portal and it’s really doing a great job. Last night the UserScape installation received a pretty big spam attack and caught 59 spams while allowing 0 through.
Software Trial Limits
"The reason I can limit my software like this is because I know enough about my target market to know what feature I can disable which will keep the software attractive but render it very close to useless.”
http://microisvjournal.wordpress.com/2006/08/16/to-limit-or-not-to-limit/
Did Your Product Get Better Today?
There's a little test I give myself everyday. At the end of the day I ask myself if today my product got a little better. In a small ISV it's hard sometimes to make sure you're making forward progress. There's so many things to do, many of which aren't moving the product forward. While these things have to be done, it's easy for them to eat up an entire week before you know it.So I've found an easy way to test this is the question above. If you've said no more than a few days in a row then it's time to refocus and get back to improving your product.
Terrorists and ISV Ideas
Perhaps a bit crude, but terrorist plots are potential big business for small ISV’s. The world was already heading for an offsite workforce, but these threats will greatly speed up that process. Not because of the fear, but the inconvenience. Is there any doubt we’re heading for a world where no electronic devices are allowed in carry on bags? I think it’s a no brainer. At that point every consultant out there just lost half their productive time as they flip through magazines on 12 hours flights instead of working.
What ideas do you have that might ease that transition?
Vindication
A few months back I did a post on potential markets for new ISV’s. The one which got the most ridicule was celebrity gossip. Looks like I wasn’t so crazy after all:
via JOS
Virtual Windows on the Mac
This is almost enough to make me buy a Mac Pro. I’m going to wait for the second generation though, hopefully they’ll be out by the end of the year.
Update: Looks like VMWare is entering this space as well.
Now Powered by Expression Engine
After much internal debate, I’ve finally moved this blog over to Expression Engine by pMachine. Wordpress served me well, but it was time to move on. I first considered upgrading to wp2 but it seemed like a lot of work so I figured I’d look around and see if anything else caught my eye. EE was first on my list to check out since I had just finished redoing my back end systems using their fine Code Ignitor framework.
EE is far more powerful than WP and I’m looking forward to taking advantage of some of those features down the road. Also I figured it was time to move this blog to something that had more formal support. Some of the posts on this blog have generated 10K+ revenues for HelpSpot and when you have that kind of money riding on a blog post it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy to know there’s somebody to call if it breaks.
There were really only 2 tricky parts. First was converting all my posts. I don’t really understand why but EE can’t convert from WP so you first have to export to Movable Type format and then it can import that. There seem to be 2 scripts out there which do this, though only this one worked for me. The other big hurdle was setting up all the 301 redirects since the URL structures are different and there was no nice way to make the EE ones like WP ones. I’m hopefully that I have all that setup right but we’ll see. If not you won’t be reading this