Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, April 30, 2007:

EllisLab Interview

The EllisLab folks have posted an interview I did with them along with a few thoughts on our new partnership.

HelpSpot Hosting Goes to a New Level

I was sad to see ValiantHost (the former provider of HelpSpot hosting) acquired a month or so back. I’d been working with Giorgio (the founder) for over a year and had a great business relationship with him. Overall he did a great job with the customers. Near the end there was a few hiccups (part of the reason he sold actually), but overall I was very happy with ValiantHost.

Sometimes though you need to turn setbacks into opportunities. One problem with Valiant is that it was essentially a MicroISV in the hosting business. When it comes to hosting, a one person company may not be the safest bet. Also, as HelpSpot has grown and started to reach larger organizations I’ve seen the need to be able to offer larger scale solutions. Solutions at an enterprise level, like dedicated servers, redundant locations and 24/7 hosting support.

As I was pondering all of this, I was surprised and happy to receive an email from Leslie Camacho, VP of EllisLab. EllisLab is the creator of Expression Engine (A great CMS used to run this blog) and the Code Ignitor PHP framework I use here for all the CRMish and ecommerce apps behind UserScape. Part of the EllisLab ecosystem is Engine Hosting. Leslie wanted to discuss Engine Hosting and how we might work together.

After an initial discussion with Leslie and further communication with Nevin Lyne (CTO of Engine Hosting) we decided to move forward with a hosting relationship. After a few weeks of work the collaboration is now live and you can see the HelpSpot options here:

http://www.enginehosting.com/web_hosting/solutions/helpspot/

Engine Hosting actually started out as Pmachine Hosting, back when EllisLab was called Pmachine. Since then they’ve grown out a first rate hosting environment will all the goodies. Up until recently they’ve primarily done Expressine Engine hosting, but recently they’ve started to push their services in all hosting areas.

That’s a major reason to me why Engine Hosting is a beautiful match for HelpSpot. From a hosting perspective HelpSpot is very similar to Expression Engine (also a robust PHP application). Knowing they’ve hosted thousands of expression engine installations over the years gives me a lot of confidence in their service with HelpSpot.

For those of you interested in the business aspects of this, I think it’s going to be a big win all the way around. With their enterprise class service I have a lot of confidence in really pushing the hosting option. Rather than just offering hosting to those who know they want it, I’ll know be actively marketing it including a paragraph on the homepage and notes about hosting in the trial reminder emails.

I think this will really help HelpSpot with customers who are looking for a full on-demand solution. Of course it should also spur growth for Engine Hosting in base level accounts along with more robust and hopefully profitable accounts with the larger organizations HelpSpot is now drawing in.

I can’t believe how quickly this has all came together. I’ve really respected the team at EllisLabs for a long time and to have the opportunity to work together is extremely exciting. I think this is only the beginning of a great partnership and I’m really looking forward to working closely with such a first rate group.

Update:
Leslie just posted an interview I did with him here.

No Market Too Small

Over on the BOS forums there’s an interesting thread by a MicroISV who thinks his market is too small and that’s why he’s not selling enough software. In his post, his two theories for why the sales are slow are:

1) The market size is really, really small
2) My marketing skills are not very good (yet)

I’m here to tell you that in the modern software world there is simple no software market that is too small. It doesn’t exist. If you’re selling your software over the interwebs you’re reaching the entire world. At least a billion people have internet access. Those people have infinite needs. If you’re a MicroISV there is NO market too small to make you at least an decent living (say 100K/year).

In this fellows case he says there are competitors, in that case then you know for sure that the market is there. So the correct reason why he can’t make sales is almost certainly #2 plus any execution problems he may have. If his product doesn’t stack up then that will always be a problem, but it’s not a market problem.

This isn’t to imply that all markets are equal and that some won’t be easier than others, but almost any known market (not something you just invented out of the air) will have enough space for a MicroISV given enough skill and determination.

Heck With Bug Trackers

This is an interesting idea. I wonder if you could make money selling a bug tracker that disposed of bugs that were older than X or when you reached more than X bugs. I must admit that I have a huge list of feature requests and there’s no way many of them will ever (or should ever) be built. It would be interesting if these just disappeared and left my work area nice and clean with only more relevant feature requests.

Case Studies

We launched a new case studies section of the UserScape site today. You can check it out here. Our long time customer, Catalyst, was generous enough to volunteer as our first study. You can see the study here:

http://www.userscape.com/products/helpspot/case-studies/catalyst-repository-systems.php

We tried to keep it short and informative. It’s such a balancing act since there’s so much to day, but I know anything too long will be ignored by potential customers. Feedback/ideas are welcome. Also if you’re currently a HelpSpot customer and would like to be featured in a case study please shot me an email at ian at userscape.com.

Feature Arrogance

Joe has an interesting post about feature arrogance, relating to my post the other day on features. His story is also a good example of poor customer service, especially for a product with a $40,000 price tag. Hey, maybe it’s time to raise my prices....

10 Marketing Questions

Nice post by Andy for those of you starting a software company or thinking of doing so.

Rohde Design Process

Mike has done a nice little presentation on how he goes about designing logos and websites. The UserScape.com website is featured.

Update: Mike has just uploaded the audio of his talk. It’s a really interesting talk, especially since it revolves around my website. I think it’s an interesting listen though for anyone involved in web based software.

The Subway Test

An important post from Ade, check it out. I’d also suggest you first read this post which spurred Ade’s post.

Features vs Ideology

This was really spurred on by a recent post by Michael Sica. Michael has a problem with his new designer collaboration software. There’s a very logical feature which he knows users want, however, he’s trying to resist adding it because the feature goes against his vision of the software. It enables users to do something which is “bad”. Not really bad like hacking, just not what “should” be done, at least in Michael’s view.

This is a quandary every software developer faces. It’s especially difficult to determine the right course when you’re first creating a product. Often with a version 1.0 product you’re trying to make a statement, be different than the competition.

There’s a very fine balance though between being different and confusing or frustrating your users. If you don’t offer a unique perspective in your feature set there won’t be a version 2, on the other hand if you’re too far outside the norm you’ll likely have the same result.

I have hit many of these decisions in the evolution of HelpSpot. One I recall is the deletion of requests. HelpSpot is a help desk application and from the beginning I was opposed to having the ability to delete requests. I felt that any data which entered the system (other than email spam) should always be preserved. There’s a chance that information might be needed down the road, even if that doesn’t appear to be the case now.

Well it turns out that help desk managers are very picky about their reporting. It also turns out that a help desk application gets lots of things which are not at all relevant to the help desk, but which are also not spam. For instance, when training a new user they may enter test requests. They may receive email bounce notifications from automated processes beyond their control. You get the idea.

All these things being sent into the system throw off the reporting capabilities. The reports are essentially wrong because they contain things which are not requests and are not related to the help desk. They also interfere with searching and filtering.

Customers being rather inventive sorts find ways to work around these problems. Customers started deleting these requests as spam since that completely removed them from the system. That though had the undesirable consequence of training the spam filter that these items were spam when they were not. Since these requests often contained “good” words it would throw off the filter and real requests would start being filtered as spam.

In the last release I gave in on this point and added a trash feature. Now there’s a proper way to remove unneeded requests from the system rather than routing around or having inaccurate reporting. My delay in adding such a feature has certainly cost me sales. That’s not always a bad thing if it was for the greater good of the application, but in this case it wasn’t. It was just me being stubborn about a feature. As it turns out I really like this feature myself and find it very useful.

So how can you decide if a feature should be included in spite of your ideological opposition to it?

As the story above points out I’m no expert in this field, but I have a few guidelines which I’m trying to follow going forward. None of these are hard rules, rather if a feature meets one of them all it means is that a little extra thought is required to confirm that the ideological stance against the feature is valid.

Is a feature universally available?:
If you don’t have a feature only because everyone else does have it you may want to revisit it. Sure less can be more, but if all your potential customers expect it to be there it’s only going to cause them to not understand your interface.

Is the missing feature easily routed around?:
Like my example above, is it easy for customers to route around the lack of a feature. If so does the routing around result in a worse overall experience for the customer? In my case it did because the result was an increased percentage of valid requests being filtered as spam.

Is not having the feature a positive differentiator?:
Does not including this feature differentiate your product in a good way? For example, HelpSpot doesn’t allow you to create a title for a request. There’s no concept of that in HelpSpot because we found that titles inevitably turned useless. Titles end up being “printer”, “problem”, “issue” and so on. Instead the interface takes the first line of each request and turns that into what other applications would show as the title. This turns out to be very useful.

Not having a title is a differentiator that increases productivity by removing the need for customer service reps to take time making up meaningless titles. Not all customers like this, but most do.

If the feature isn’t a positive differentiator, a noticeable improvement over the competition, then you may want to include the feature. Not having it could keep customers from buying and not having it doesn’t add anything to the experience.

Is the ideological stance on this feature still relevant?:
As applications evolve it’s not unusual for circumstances to change. What made sense in version 1 doesn’t always make sense in version 3. Perhaps your user base has shifted or the other application features have evolved in unexpected ways. It’s possible the stance is no longer appropriate given the changing circumstances.

These are the type of questions I’ve been asking myself as I continue development on HelpSpot v2. I’m hoping they’ll keep me from getting locked in to one view and missing out on opportunities going forward.

HelpSpot in the Wild: Urban-Rivals

The guys over at Urban-Rivals have been using HelpSpot since last summer. They’ve recently redone their webisite and it’s fantastic. They’ve done a nice job wrapping the HelpSpot UI in an inline frame which made including it in their comic styled website easy. Here’s some screenshots:

Their Homepage (http://www.urban-rivals.com):

Knowledge Books (http://www.urban-rivals.com/staff/kb.php):

Request Page:

It’s ……. Alive!!

UserScape.com version 2.0 is live. As I said in the previous post about the design I think this is Mike’s best work to date. The design looks really great. There are lots of little improvements throughout the site as well. A small sample include:

• Big emphasis on the UI (the banner). We get loads of compliments on it so might as well shake it if you’ve got it
• Trying out the “start a trial” in the banner idea.
• Showing the base price on the homepage.
• Showing a guarantee on the homepage (If you’re not happy I’d always give your money back, might as well note that)
• Much improved call to action buttons with big yellow buttons instead of light colored links in the old design.
• Newsletter sign up (hopefully I’ll actually have time to write one!)
• HelpSpotted the HelpSpot blog. Should be useful for running the beta and building a little more community.
• You can now request a hosted trial from the trial sign up page instead of needing to email separately.
• Consistent side nav calls to action throughout site, including support forums which get lots of search engine traffic.

There’s lots more, but I’m too sleepy to go through it . Poke around if you get a chance and let me know if anything is broken, as I"m sure there must be.

Why There Isn’t More Multilingual Support

Interesting post by Alex asking why more software doesn’t support non English languages. I think what he’s leaving out is the significant cost of doing it. HelpSpot for instance is setup to handle different language packs, but it just doesn’t make financial sense to do it (yet). Hiring translators, keeping the translations up to date with changes and so on. Most importantly is the increased costs of marketing in these other languages. There’s not much point in having language packs unless you start marketing to those countries.

To take it one step further, what about support? If I’m offering a Spanish version and marketing to Spanish users won’t I need Spanish speaking support? I think the cost of all these things is really the reason more software companies don’t support multiple languages, at least until they reach a certain size where hiring more people to manage it makes financial sense.

Ben’s Big Idea

I wonder what Ben’s big real estate idea is? If you recall real estate is my number 1 ”nice market” for potential ISV’s.

The Software Equation

Andy Brice with a really interesting post which will tell you exactly how much you’ll make on your software product.

On a side note, I didn’t realize Andy had a blog. I’m really excited that he does, he’s a top notch ISV.

On a second side note, Andy is perhaps a bit older than I expected him to be (just going by this photo). It’s always fascinating to me how you build an image of someone in your head from virtual correspondence with them and they’re almost always different than you imagined.

Reverted to a Simple Design

After too many complaints about the readability of the blog design I’ve reverted to a very simple layout. I’ve actually stolen the layout of Jakob Nielson’s site. Note that he encourages this so I’m not actually stealing.

I really like the layout and I won’t be changing it again anytime soon. It’s nice and clean and I’m really enjoying having no sidebar. Those of you looking for archives and popular articles can find them at the bottom of the page.

HelpSpot Customer Map

I recently stumbled across this really cool PHP class for working with the Google map API. Being bored on Saturday I figured it would be fun to map all of the HelpSpot customers. While I’ve looked at this data before, I’ve never plotted it on a map. It turns out to be very interesting. It’s cool to see the little dots all over, but it’s even more interesting to see how many customers are near each other and how just about every major city in the US has at least one HelpSpot customer.

One disappointing note is that I’d say only about half the customers are actually on the map. While most of the addresses work fine in Google maps directly, they don’t seem to work using the Google web service for finding the coordinates. It misses some US and many international addresses, which I guess is to be expected. Most disappointing though is that it fails to return any coordinates for customers in the UK. Since 15-20% of HelpSpot sales are there that takes a good chunk of the customers out right off the top. It also leaves Europe looking slimmer than it should.

You’ll also see that no Asian countries have icons at all, which is also incorrect, but I’m not surprised that the API couldn’t plot the addresses. Australia is under represented and on and on. Never the less, it’s cool and actually a bit informative.

The World:

The USA:

San Fransisco (we’ve got the bay surrounded):

Seattle:

Paris (2 customers in walking distance):