Archive for the 'Business' Category

Neil Davidson, organizer of the Business of Software conference, created a MicroISV survey and just announced the first results in Joel’s Business of Software Forum. I was very surprised when I saw that only 12% of the MicroISVs who participated in the survey develop and sell web applications. I was under the impression that most of the new MicroISVs that announce their software on BoS are into web applications, but I guess I have been wrong. Anyway, the most interesting part of the survey, the download and revenue numbers of participating MicroISVs, will be published in another blog posting next week.

Just like Ian we have noticed that the MicroISV scene has become quiet over time and that there aren’t many MicroISV blog postings written or ideas exchanged anymore. Ian mentions one of the possible reasons that the MicroISV movement isn’t as visible anymore as it was a few years ago. He thinks that the MicroISV idea is often confused with the strong startup movement going on at the moment. I think it’s a very good point, but there are other reasons why the MicroISV scene has become quiet in my opinion:

Time is money
I think many of the initial MircoISVs that shared business, marketing and MicroISV ideas on their blogs realized that blogging about their products and target markets is often more effective than blogging about their businesses. Although there are many benefits of blogging about your business (customer loyality, SEO, exchanging ideas with others), a day has only so many hours. And because we all wear many hats as a MicroISV, we have to think about how we spend our time. Sometimes other things than blogging about your business or participating in business communities feel more appropriate.

Learning by doing
Although I learn new things every day, I have learned the most about starting a MicroISV in the first 2 years or so. All the little details you have to care about in the beginning lead to blog postings, asking questions, giving tips and just exchanging ideas (registering a business, creating a website, building a shop, beta testing your product, researching additional marketing ideas, getting the first customers, providing customer support, price finding and 500 other things). Now that many MicroISVs either managed all the initial tasks or failed with their business, a lot of MicroISVs are now concentrating more on their products and customers.

Fear of competition
I noticed that more and more new and established MicroISVs in the Business of Software forum are posting anonymously because of fear of competition. Transparently blogging about their business and exchanging ideas in context (i.e. with their name and website address) would probably be the last thing they would do and this is another point why the MicroISV scene isn’t as active/visible as it used to be. Although there are really some new competitors who have been inspired by our .NET logging tool (we know of at least 2 products that were developed because the vendors saw that we have success with our product), blogging has been much more useful than harmful for us. And I’m sure there are new help desk software products that were inspired by HelpSpot, but I believe Ian has benefited a lot from his blog as well.

We have been guilty of not blogging about the MicroISV life and business in the last months, but we intent to change this to play our small role in making this community more active again.

I found this interesting article by Andrew Binstock on Larry O’Brien’s blog. It explains how the judges of the Jolt Award rate development tools and what vendors can do to make their products look better and easier to evaluate.

This post, however, focuses on a common query from vendors whose products did not advance to the final round: what more could we have done to advance? The answer frequently is: plenty.

In case you don’t know what the Jolt Award is: this award is presented annually by the Software Development magazine and is given to software development tools vendors and book authors. The award looks like a nice way to get some publicity and I will make sure that we participate next year with SmartInspect.

ComponentSource is the first official Gurock Software reseller. Although we had quite a few sales through other resellers in the past, ComponentSource is the first reseller to include us directly in their online catalog and who is now listed on our website in the new Resellers section.

I know all the caveats about resellers that are discussed in the forums (BoS, SoftwareCEO etc). Most people who have tried partnering with a reseller say that they only fill the demand, but do not create it. This might be true, but I believe that a reseller like ComponentSource might have access to customers and can reach corporate clients that we cannot target with our limited marketing budget.

We will see how it works out and I will make sure to post our experience with ComponentSource either when the agreement ends or when we renew it for a second year. Time will tell.

The news is out, Borland doesn’t sell Delphi to an independent investor after all, but separates the Developer Tools Group into a wholly-owned sub company of Borland called CodeGear. I’m not sure if this is a good or bad thing for Delphi, but it’s clearly not what Borland or the Developer Tools Group, the people behind Delphi and BDS, wanted in the first place.

You can read more about the new company behind Delphi and all the different opinions about it on DelphiFeeds.com. The one thing I noticed is that the name of the new company is very similar to SourceGear. Eric won’t be amused I guess.

Huw Collingbourne just started a new article series about starting your own software company in the Bitwise Magazine. Huw interviewed me and Jud Cole, founder of SOCK Software, as part of the series and asked us about our biggest business mistakes, software protection strategies and other things. You can read the interview with me here:

Selling Your Software - Gurock Software Interview

Am I the only one really hating the Yahoo Search Marketing web interface with a passion? The Google Adwords interface is quite good, MSN’s interface is OK, but Yahoo’s web interface to configure search advertising is really really bad (and from the three big search engines, Yahoo has the worst advertising results for us, by the way).

I really can’t figure out how to download, view or generate an invoice from Yahoo’s web interface. I tried contacting the support and received a report of our advertising clicks and costs, but no invoice. I haven’t received an answer of my reply, yet, but it’s kind of funny how hard such normally simple things are with Yahoo.

Am I the only one who can’t figure out such simple things with Yahoo’s interface or is it really that bad?

I’m not sure what kind of regulations the different countries around the world have regarding accounting and invoices, but at least here in Germany we have quite strict rules on what information have to be included in an invoice (especially if they contain VAT statements). I noticed that many companies generate/send very amateurish looking and almost useless invoices. Many invoices lack basic information like invoice date, invoice number or recipient.

I’m really wondering what’s so hard in generating complete invoices. Please add at least the following information to an invoice, especially if you accept international customers:

• Vendor name and complete address
• Recipient name and complete address
• Invoice number
• Invoice date
• Ordered products / services and their price(s)
• Total price

Companies invest so much time and money in getting their website, product design, letterhead and business cards right, but many absolutely ignore things like invoices. Such documents should use the corporate design and branding just like all other items that are visible to the customer. No, a simple Excel file with some numbers is not enough.

We were looking around for another antivirus solution in the last weeks. We have been using Symantec Antivirus Small Business Edition or whatever it’s called and we had to renew the subscription. This was a good time to look around for some alternatives, because frankly, Symantec Antivirus isn’t great. In fact, it’s slow, doesn’t have as frequent antivirus updates as other vendors and the server software to configure all clients on the network isn’t very usable.

Why we used it in the first place? Well, first it was very cheap (you get what you pay for). The Small Business Edition allows you to install the software on up to 5 clients OR servers for $200 if I recall correctly. This means that you can protect 2 workstations, 2 notebooks and a workgroup/file server with it, for example. All other vendors I looked at had different licenses for clients and servers back then and server licenses started at around $300-$500/year. Since the last virus I saw live was Parity.B in DOS 10 years ago, I just refuse to pay a $700 Windows tax each year. But since we need to have an antivirus solution to protect our customers and our data, just in case, we just bought Symantec Antivirus. The other reason we bought Symantec’s solution was because we didn’t really have the time to look at the different options in detail. We worked on SmartInspect 1.0 and had a million other things in mind.

Well, since the last time we were shopping around for an antivirus solution, TrendMicro added it’s own small business pack called Client Server Security for Small and Medium Busines. It costs $147 for the first year and just 20% for renewals. We have been using it for some weeks now and the client software is much faster and the web management interface is nice (although it’s IE only). So if you are looking for an antivirus solution for your small software business network, I can really recommend it.

In case you are not subscribed to J’s The growing pains of NGEDIT blog (which you should be!), you may have missed a smart marketing move from him: He designed a graphical key overview and tutorial for vi/vim.

What’s so smart about it you may ask? Well, he submitted the link to delicious and reddit and is listed on the front page. He is probably getting a lot of traffic now and can promote his .. vim emulation software for Visual Studio!

With just a simple and good idea and a bit of work, he drives highly targeted traffic to his site (vim users), offers something useful to his visitors and can promote his product. This is a win-win situation. That’s why this is very smart, in my opinion.