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.

I’ve done a lot of keyword research recently and have come to really value the Google AdWords Keyword Tool as a way of estimating potential market sizes. For example, Home Document Manager and PDF Scan Pro both feature powerful OCR engines, and OCR related keywords convert well for me.

Whilst researching keywords, I noticed an interesting thing (click for larger version):

These are only approximations, but still…110,000 monthly searches (globally) for ‘free ocr’, and 49,500 for ‘ocr freeware’. I don’t spend a lot of effort targeting keywords with ‘free’ in them, but this looks like an opportunity.

There has been some suggestion in the past that Google favours the .org TLD, so you can imagine how quickly my Visa card came out when GoDaddy tells me that freeocr.org is available. So I spent the weekend developing the FreeOCR microsite. On this single page site (not published yet), you can upload a scanned image, and the web application will OCR it, and convert it to a searchable PDF of formatted text file, and email you the result.

The website will, of course, feature Ads for both Home Document Manager and PDF Scan Pro, and so will the email that is sent with each use of the site. I’m reasonably sure that there aren’t other sites that offer such powerful OCR and searchable PDF creation for free, so hopefully I can get right to the top of the SERPS and drive some highly targeted traffic.

I have always been impressed with the marketing efforts of the NitroPDF guys. They do a similar thing with their PDF to Word converter. I plan to offer Word as an output option too, potentially adding another few tens of thousands of visitors.

I’m really interested in using microsites, and will keep you posted as it progresses.

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The UK’s Digital Economy Bill is designed to give the government the power to control access to the Internet with the aim of protecting the interests of big business.

The music industry is of course very happy with the bill, but a leaked memo showed that they are fully aware that the only way this will get on to the statute books is if it gets rushed through Parliament without proper scrutiny.

As a micro ISVer, I have to think about software piracy, but this bill is fundamentally flawed from the ground up. Please spare 5 minutes to help block it.

http://www.38degrees.org.uk/page/speakout/extremeinternetl

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?

It’s been about 10 months since Home Document Manager made the transition from project to product. Looking back on those 10 months I can level a couple of criticisms at myself; the main one is that I haven’t iterated aggressively enough. The other is that I’ve ignored some customer feedback because it didn’t gel with my vision of where I wanted Home Document Manager to go.

Something happened in the last month that has injected a bit of pace into my development. I started considering a closely related, although entirely seperate product. Where HDM is a desktop document management tool, the new product was an advanced PDF Viewer/Editor/Annotator.

Part of the dance that micro ISV‘ers do when conceiving a new product is to evaluate competition, see what they do, see what they don’t do, see if they alleviate the particular pain that you’re trying address, and why, or why not. In short, we try to find our Unique Selling Proposition. I looked closely at a number of big names in the document imaging and PDF worlds, products like Acrobat Professional, Abbyy Finereader and the like. Not only did I find my USP within minutes, I’ve found a wealth of new user interface ideas and major bits of functionality that would slot right in to Home Document Manager.

I’m already a decent way through coding for the new product and have had so many a-ha moments for version 2 of HDM too.

Choosing WPF was a mistake. I love WPF. I work for Microsoft writing WPF. But for this particular project, it was the wrong call. The new project I’m writing uses Windows Forms. It’s been a while since I did WinForms, but my WPF experience is illuminating my UI architecting in new ways. I also really don’t miss the WPF cold start times. I’m certainly more productive using WPF, but let’s face it, in the B2C world, your customers really don’t care about that. Version 2 of HDM will use WinForms.

I haven’t paid enough attention to minimising the clicks my users have to go through in order to perform common tasks. This was immediately apparent when reviewing the competition for my new product, so version 2 of  HDM will have a much improved UI.

The deployment mechanism I use for HDM (ClickOnce) has its advantages. I can update end user installs easily, but serious B2B is a struggle because of the lack of Proxy support in ClickOnce. I also fell into the self signed ClickOnce bootstrapper trap, which effectively brought iterations of version 1 of HDM to a premature end. Bog standard installers from hereon-in.

One of the things I have to consider is whether or not to bring two such closely related products under the same umbrella on the same website. This has obvious advantages for marketing and SEO, they are both paperless/PDF/document related products.

A lot to mull over, but for me, speccing and developing a second complimentary/related product seems to be a good thing so far. I know the arguments about laser-like focus for micro ISVs, and I’m hoping that I’m not stumbling into a heffalump trap. But having two related products, particularly on the same website, should add credibility, and the 2 products can also have a beneficial effect on each other. Time will tell.

p.s. I’m writing this on Christmas day only because I’m standing in the kitchen with our latest edition (Eli Benjamin, 6 weeks old) strapped to my chest while I wait for the turkey to cook. Happy Christmas everyone.

A year or two ago, trusted Micro ISV‘er Andy Brice posted an article entitled The Great Digital Certificate Ripoff? It’s well worth a read as it underlines some of the apparent anticompetitive aspects of this particular market.

I’m very happy to say that the ground is shifting – something interesting is happening. Internet Explorer is pretty much universally despised by tech-savvy users, but its sheer market slice means that only a fool would ignore it. As of now, Internet Explorer (and by extension, Windows) will have a new root certificate installed. The root certificate will be that of StartCom Ltd. Why is this important?

StartCom is the only public certification authority providing digital certificates for free!

The implications for security on Windows are profound. No longer will SSL and code signing certificates be expensive commodities for the little guy. Firefox and Apple have supported StartCom for some time, but thankfully us Windows developers can now get in on it.

The SLL certificates are free and provide:

• Web server certificates (SSL/TLS)
• Client and mail certificates (S/MIME)
• 128/256-bit encryption
• US $ 10,000 insurance guaranteed
• Valid 365 days (1 year)

The code signing certificates require a verified account, but still cost a measley $39, and boast:

Web server certificates (SSL/TLS)

Wild cards (*.domain.com)

Multiple domains (DNS Alt Names)

128/256-bit encryption

Object Code Signing (beta)

Client and mail certificates (S/MIME)

US $ 10,000 insurance guaranteed

2 Years validity (730 days)

Well done to StartCom, and well done to Microsoft. Check out the certificates on offer here.

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Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.

Sydney Smith
English essayist (1771 – 1845)

Although it didn’t happen by conscious effort, I have managed to steer myself through a decade of software engineering whilst remaining largely ignorant of a great many areas of what many would consider my trade. Although this could be construed as self criticism, it has actually served me rather well. Although I’ve dabbled in various areas, Windows desktop applications have been my main area of focus, and in the freelancer market, this is very much a niche that I am happy to occupy. Being in this niche, and also being one of the most experience WPF freelance developers in the country has not only shielded me (thus far) from the recession, it has also led me to the Mecca of .Net developers: Microsoft itself, where I am a very, *very* happy chappy.

Whilst this laserlike focus is benefiting freelancer-Tim, it might also be hurting micro-ISVer-Tim. I am at the point where Home Document Manager is a solid 1.x product, its traffic share is increasing, as is its customer base. I’ve signed a partnership agreement with a UK startup (the founders of which are friends and ex-colleagues) to rebadge and push Home Document Manager in to document management resellers, and that is starting to get some traction too.

As my main areas of interest revolve around document management in its many forms, my attention has started to shift a little to what I could do in the web-based arena. I have no intention of going up against Google Docs or Zoho (rest easy boys), they aren’t really document management tools; certainly not in the sense that people who work in document management would understand. So when my B2B partners asked if I would develop a web based offering, I was more than a little interested.

Although I toyed briefly with the idea of taking this as an opportunity to play with Ruby on Rails, I put my business head on and decided that I would be far more productive by staying in my comfort zone, i.e. .Net.

Some fantastic things have happened to desktop apps in recent years; Adobe Air and WPF both spring to mind. The web has also seen its fair share of advancements. After considering all, some or fewer of the competition, I’m taking a tentative step towards the ASP.Net MVC framework. Its simplicity, power and convention based strengths were immediately apparent and its inherent unit-testability makes it very appealing to me.

The Model View Controller is not new, but the very mature framework that comes with the download makes for easy development. I like easy development.

Being the methodical soul that I am, I’ve scouted out the best book on the subject and am merrily plodding my way through it. I chose Professional ASP.Net MVC 1.0, by Conery et. al., and can certainly recommend it thus far. The samples and walkthroughs are well thought out and the rate of progress is just right for me and I would certainly recommend it.

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I was mooching around the Home Document Manager wordpress back end today when a thought struck me – I hadn’t seen any core or plugin updates for a while. After a bit of investigation, I noticed that 2 plugins had enabled themselves (or had been enabled by some other actor); namely “Disable Wordpress plugin updates” and “Disable Wordpress core updates”. I have never used these plugins so was understandably perplexed by their presence.

After disabling them, all maner of plugin and core updates appeared. I’m not sure if this represents anything sinister, but it’s certainly odd. Anyone else noticed this behaviour?

I’m learning.

Like a lot of micro ISV‘ers, copywriting is not my strong point, but, I stumbled across an interesting way to boost traffic to the Home Document Manager blog. When I issue an update, which can be as frequently as once a week, I found I was making a series of posts with repetetive, uninspired titles – “Update Released,” “Minor Update Released” etc. Then, for one of my updates, I wrote a small piece explaining some of the issues with TWAIN. The post was entitled “Ne’er the TWAIN shall meet,” an obvious reference to Kipling’s “The Ballad of East and West.”

Suddenly, instead of a dull and uninteresting nuggat about an update, this small, boring post, became the most popular post on the blog. The main traffic sources were people searching for the quote, so it wasn’t highly targetted traffic, but since these kinds of posts would seldom attract traffic anyway, untargetted traffic has to trump no traffic. It can’t hurt my Google standings either, since the post makes a reference to Kipling, as well as the TWAIN specification. The double entendre is an interesting way to get a free traffic boost. Take this post for example, I wonder if it will start ranking for the “Tales of The Unexpected” TV series??

The second unexpected traffic source came from a review I wrote about my new shredder. This too became the hottest post on the blog, and is still pulling in 3 times more traffic than any other post or page. This is different because it is, of course, pretty highly targetted traffic. I’ve gone on to publish a review of one of the Scansnap scanners to see if I can replicate the earlier success. I guess this goes back to one of the first principles of micro ISV blogging – blog about things your customers are interested in.

The Wordtracker SEO Blogging plugin for Firefox is the perfect companion for any SEO conscious blogger. You supply it with search terms or phrases, and it provides you with keywords. You can then add your chosen keywords to a list, and the plugin will monitor how many times these keywords appear in your post.

If like me you struggle with copywrighting, these little free tools can often make a world of difference. I’m using the SEO Bloggin plugin and Zemanta for this post, how am I doing?

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