Category Archives: Business
Measuring the success of your landing page
Some weeks ago I wrote about the importance of landing pages of a website. To summarize, I basically stated that it’s important to choose two, maybe three actions you want visitors to perform when entering a page. Examples for those actions are downloading a trial version or taking the tour of your product. This time, [...]
Also posted in Websites Comments closed
Using VMware Player as a marketing tool
The new free VMware Player could be a great tool for ISVs to help prospective customers evaluate their software easier and faster (just as I noted in my last posting). ISVs could offer fully preconfigured virtual machines with their trial software and interested users could get the software up and running in just a minute. [...]
Also posted in Virtualization Comments closed
Adding a newsletter to your marketing concept
We finally setup a newsletter last week. We originally intended to offer a newsletter from the beginning, but we never got around to do it. This has been a mistake I guess, since newsletters are a great way to keep in touch with potential customers and interested parties. Once they subscribe, you can always inform [...]
Also posted in Websites Comments closed
Random product idea
I’m currently evaluating some CRM applications (Customer Relationship Management) to allow us to store a history of customer emails, addresses, licenses etc in a searchable and organized way. As we use Mozilla Thunderbird as our email application of choice and really like the interface, we need a CRM that integrates nicely with Thunderbird. At the [...]
Posted in Business Comments closed
Software piracy
It hit us too. Since Sunday, there’s a crack for the SmartInspect trial which removes the time limit. We noticed the crack due to increased website traffic and suspicious referers in our web statistics. It has only been a matter of time, since our protection isn’t very strong. We decided to focus on quality and [...]
Also posted in SmartInspect Comments closed
Our experiences with Google AdWords
Just like Eric Sink, we have been quite disappointed with Google AdWords so far. We have a lot of ads running on Google for SmartInspect, but we either get almost no impressions for the selected keywords or the keywords are so popular that Google instantly disables our ads, even when we get good click through [...]
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Preparing a software release
Today we started to prepare the release of the upcoming SmartInspect 1.1 version. We originally intended to release it a week earlier, but due to two annoying showstoppers and an illness of Dennis (just a heavy cold, nothing dramatic), we were forced to delay it. Since the beginning of the development of the 1.1 version, [...]
Also posted in SmartInspect Comments closed
Keeping a product idea secret
Over at CodeSnipers, Gavin Bowman started a series about common micro ISV mistakes. In his first post of this series, he talks about the mistake of keeping a product idea secret until you release it. Very interesting read and so true. Here at Gurock Software, we’ve done exactly the same mistake. We kept SmartInspect secret [...]
Also posted in SmartInspect Comments closed
Getting Microsoft dev and test licenses almost for free
“This means that for a software shop with five developers, it would cost USD $12,500 per year to get all the required development and testing licenses – and this doesn’t even include production licenses for a workgroup server or something similar. This is quite expensive for an early-stage ISV. But since Microsoft really wants you [...]
Also posted in Programming Comments closed
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