I love when customers link to HelpSpot, you don't get a better reference than that. I'm honored that many of our customers choose to do so, however, I was bowled over by the link from the guys a Sitesquad. It's really above and beyond. I also think it's an interesting business move, laying out the tools like that. Very interesting, and something I need to give some more thought to.
I'm giving twitter a go. Since I don't have as much blogging time as I'd like I thought doing some quick tweets might be a good alternative. I can't promise I'm going to stay with it, but if you want to follow along my account is http://twitter.com/ianlandsman
I thought about cross posting them here, but I think it might be annoying. Also I don't really want the blog to just be a series of daily posts containing my tweets. Thoughts?
The other day the guys over at MakaluMedia (designers of the UserScape site and logo's) launched a new non-profit service to help you stop unwanted paper catalogs. Basically you register for the site, tell it what catalogs you get that you don't want and they take care of contacting them all. If you get a bunch of paper catalogs you just toss you should check it out.
I agree with Ryan on this one, there's way too much emphasis on being a "real" (funded) startup when the smart money with the best chance on a decent return (IMHO) is boot strapping for most web ideas these days.
PS. Yes, I'm back from my apparent hiatus. Hopefully I'll blow the cobwebs off around here and be posting a little more often.
Interesting post by the cdbaby dude about how he tried to convert the entire site to Rails then scrapped the entire effort after 2 years and went back to PHP.
http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7_reasons_i_switched_back_to_p_1.html
I have to say one of the top 2-3 decisions I made regarding HelpSpot was using PHP. It's flexible, fast, ultra reliable, runs everywhere, is already running most places and just great software. And that's with HelpSpots dependencies on some less that common extensions like IMAP (mail handling) and mbstring for character conversions (technically this is optional in HelpSpot, but useful).
Andrey pulls back the curtain a bit and fills us in on what Antair has been up to.
http://www.antair.com/blog/2007/09/13/whats-antair-been-up-to-lately/
As a side note, what frickin genius it was of them to release a call screening app. Genius!!
Update: Gavin throws in his 2 cents on what him and Andrey are up to, http://webhelperbrowser.com/blog/2007/09/whats-happening-here.html
It's been a while since I did a HelpSpot in the Wild post. Here's one I saw recently that was really classy. It's by LexBlog, a company that specializes in creating blogs for lawyers. They've done a fantastic job of creating a very sophisticated looking layout for the HelpSpot portal. I especially like the top red banner which makes it very clear where you need to go if you're looking to submit a request, which is what most visitors are looking for.
Here's the support homepage:
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One of the knowledge book pages:
*[This image was lost to time in my blog transition]*
Here's another that looks promising, we'll see.
PS. Both Tony and Starr (the last one I posted about) hit the secret to getting noticed. Link to me or HelpSpot. I (as most bloggers) watch my referrers, so link and you'll get linked back. And if you have no readers yet make sure to click the link yourself!
Here's some video of a little sample app I built with the new (soon to be released) HelpSpot API. In this video the API looks up all my filters via an ajax json call and loads them all into portlets. I can then drag and drop them around, etc. There's only crude development data in there but you'll get the idea. It took me about 10 minutes to put this together.
Nick Bradbury asks if he sold out? My vote is no way. To be honest he's gone way farther than most developers would in not selling out. Usually when a software product gets sold the founder/developer hangs out for a year (usually because they've agreed to as part of the sale) and then they bail out as soon as contractually possible. In fact I personally think that's a good thing. Having been an employee at a company that was acquired, it's a horrible process for the company getting acquired especially for the founder. Everyone comes in and tells you what to do and changes the product and so on. It's too personal to the founder and staying around usually just makes everything unpleasant for everyone.
In this case Nick has hung in with the products, they seem to be moving forward, and he seems to have maintained control of the product for the most part. Certainly not a sell out, in fact it's a rather masterful handling of the situation if you ask me.