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.

As with any online business, something I spend a lot of my time trying to do is increase the volume of highly targeted traffic hitting my sites. One of the latest things I’m in the process of developing is a microsite. Here’s why:

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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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?