The Agile Micro ISV Blog

Home Document Manager featured on Bits du Jour yesterday. For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, the BdJ site offers a couple of products at a huge discount for a period of 24 hours. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the offer, but when I finally climbed into bed last night, I had come to the conclusion that it was a phenomenally useful experience – perhaps even essential. Every micro ISV and every micro ISV product should go through the Bits du Jour mill at least once.

One of the most fantastic things is the feedback you get from the BdJ netizens. Ordinarily, when a person with a particular problem appears at your site from Google, they are probably looking for an application to help them, with the deliberate emphasis on “an” – it doesn’t matter if it’s your application or someone elses, so if yours doesn’t fit the bill, they hit the back button and move on.

On BdJ, it’s subtly different – because it’s your application on offer, they are looking for your application to solve their problem, and they are not shy about letting you know if there’s an issue or something they don’t like. Listen to the feedback – it’s invaluable.

Bits du Jour is also a great way to stress test your operation, everything from your installation to your store front – if there’s a problem, there’s nothing like a massive increase in traffic to show it up. It’s worth emphasising that using BdJ is not about the money – it’s about getting a bit of money – but mainly it’s about getting a lot of traffic and customers compressed into a 24 hour period.

Some of my observations:

Installation

I use ClickOnce for all my deployment. I like it primarily because it means I can push out updates and have the clients update themselves with no action required on the part of the user. A few users experienced problems with the installation. After digging through some of the issues, I had one persons installation time out. I had one person whose installation was hanging and one who was inexplicably seeing a 404.

• The installation time out was caused by an ultra slow connection from someone in Tanzania. Whilst I have nothing against people in less well connected countries, my focus is inevitably going to be on countries like the UK, US, Canada, Australia etc. I make the tacit assumption that if you’re on my site you’re using broadband.
• The hanging installation was caused by a machine that refused to install the .Net framework. This persisted even when the framework was downloaded straight from Microsoft, so there’s not much I could do about that. I’m not about to start offering support for the .Net framework.
• Didn’t manage to get to the bottom of the 404, noone else was seeing it.

Runtime Errors

• One user was having a problem because the software couldn’t get write permission to a part of his user profile that he absolutely should have access to. The fact he couldn’t did make me wonder how any other software was working, but I sent him a registry patch to move Home Document Manager’s data folder which got him moving.
• Another user installed the app but it wouldn’t start. I’ve not figured this one out yet, but I suspect there will be a wider problem that I can do nothing about.

Activation

When customers make a purchase, they are emailed a serial number which they enter into the app – the app then calls my licensing server and they are sent a license file. This is one of the parts that I was very pleased with. There were no issues with the activation at all.

One person said they weren’t going to buy because I used online activation, but that’s one person in 14 months so I’m not too worried.

Summary

All in all, a very worthwhile experience and very positive feedback from the vast majority of customers. PDF Scan Pro comes on BdJ in around a week, it’s less mature than Home Document Manager, but seems to have had better traction, so we’ll see how that goes.

Potential customers arrive at your page with a mug full of suspicion. It’s your job as a copy writer to remove that fear. I’m trying something a little different with PDF Scan Pro.

I thought about what might prevent someone from making that initial purchase and becoming a customer. I think some of it is going to be because they’re not sure if your app is the one for them. Is it right? Is there another app out there that is better/faster/cheaper. A traditional approach might operate a little like this:

“Don’t bother checking out the opposition, we’re the best.”

I think people are so used to this approach that they’re immune from it. I’m not going to spend my time developing an application I didn’t believe in – so I know my applications’ USPs, I know there strengths and their weaknesses, I know where they sit in the market. So why not spend a little time telling your customer about your competition, so they can see where your product fits in?

I’ve not tried this before, but I’ve added a section to PDF Scan Pro’s Trial/Moneyback page listing the competition. I’m hoping that this approach might show a little confidence, and might alleviate fears that ‘the perfect product’ might just be a Google search away.

Anyone else tried this or anything similar?

With great interest, I’ve been watching the unfolding drama that kicked off with this post on 37Signals, later followed by this response from GetSatisfaction.

In
case you missed its arrival, GetSatisfaction is a really nice web app
focused on facilitating open conversations between businesses and
customers on a level playing field. The essence of Jason’s complaint on
the 37Signals blog is this:

I’m going to use (everyone’s friend) Bob Walsh as an example. Bob’s awesome task management application, MasterList Professional is sold by his company, Safari Software
Inc. Now, let’s say that Dave, a customer of Bob’s pops across to the
GetSatisfaction website. He searches for Bob’s company but can’t find
it. Now here’s the interesting part; Dave can, without Bob’s knowledge,
set up a support site for Safari Software and MasterList, and ask a
question on it.

So what does Bob do? Nothing. Why? Because he has
no idea that this unofficial support site exists, let alone that one of
his customers is asking for help there. Now that doesn’t seem like a
nice state of affairs does it?

That wasn’t the only (or even the
main) problem. On Bob’s unofficial support site, GetSatisfaction might
use Bob’s company name, even his logo, making it seem quite official.
What really rubbed Jason up the wrong way, was the badge that
GetSatisfaction placed on the GetSatisfaction website.


Clearly the suggestion is that if you’re not signed up for GetSatisfaction, you’re not doing open the open conversation thing.

This
has been something on my mind since I started using the service. I do
use GetSatisfaction for Home Document Manager, and I like it. It’s a
good app, and integrates well with product websites. But there has
always been a subtle undertone of ‘participate here or be excluded’.

To
participate fully on GetSatisfaction, you also need to get a premium
account, and they’re not cheap. In fact, they’re pretty pricey,
especially for a micro ISV.
Their basic plan starts at $99/month. They used to offer a $49/month
starter subscription, but I couldn’t find it just now, there has been a
bit of a redesign, so it may have vanished altogether.

But
whether the price was $49 or $99 per month, it would still be the
single biggest outlay after my office. And that just doesn’t
seem….right. $49/year and I would sign up in a heartbeat, but $49 is
insanely pricey, for what it is. And $99/month is just….silly.

If
GetSatisfaction are truly comitted to facilitating open conversations,
they should offer all companies a free, single user pro account, so
that small companies can compete on the ‘level playing field’ that
GetSatisfcation seems so keen on. If they got the buy in from startups,
they would no doubt make the income as the startups grew.

They
offer a good service, but I think that a single free pro account to
each company would go a long way to losing the “mafioso protection”
image that Jason was writing of.