HelpSpotted is a blog where we can talk about and focus on HelpSpot. To be honest I'm not sure exactly what we're going to do here yet, but I have a few ideas. The first is that information on the beta releases of HelpSpot version 2 will be posted here. They'll likely be a semi-monthly newsletter which we'll email and post here as well. Along side those things we'll be mixing in tips and tricks, highlighting some of our customers with unique uses for HelpSpot and more.
If you have any ideas you'd like to see explored in this space please contact us using the contact button above.
Interesting post by Alex asking why more software doesn't support non English languages. I think what he's leaving out is the significant cost of doing it. HelpSpot for instance is setup to handle different language packs, but it just doesn't make financial sense to do it (yet). Hiring translators, keeping the translations up to date with changes and so on. Most importantly is the increased costs of marketing in these other languages. There's not much point in having language packs unless you start marketing to those countries.
To take it one step further, what about support? If I'm offering a Spanish version and marketing to Spanish users won't I need Spanish speaking support? I think the cost of all these things is really the reason more software companies don't support multiple languages, at least until they reach a certain size where hiring more people to manage it makes financial sense.
Andy Brice with a really interesting post which will tell you exactly how much you'll make on your software product.
On a side note, I didn't realize Andy had a blog. I'm really excited that he does, he's a top notch ISV.
On a second side note, Andy is perhaps a bit older than I expected him to be (just going by this photo). It's always fascinating to me how you build an image of someone in your head from virtual correspondence with them and they're almost always different than you imagined.
After too many complaints about the readability of the blog design I've reverted to a very simple layout. I've actually stolen the layout of Jakob Nielson's site. Note that he encourages this so I'm not actually stealing.
I really like the layout and I won't be changing it again anytime soon. It's nice and clean and I'm really enjoying having no sidebar. Those of you looking for archives and popular articles can find them at the bottom of the page.
I recently stumbled across this really cool PHP class for working with the Google map API. Being bored on Saturday I figured it would be fun to map all of the HelpSpot customers. While I've looked at this data before, I've never plotted it on a map. It turns out to be very interesting. It's cool to see the little dots all over, but it's even more interesting to see how many customers are near each other and how just about every major city in the US has at least one HelpSpot customer.
One disappointing note is that I'd say only about half the customers are actually on the map. While most of the addresses work fine in Google maps directly, they don't seem to work using the Google web service for finding the coordinates. It misses some US and many international addresses, which I guess is to be expected. Most disappointing though is that it fails to return any coordinates for customers in the UK. Since 15-20% of HelpSpot sales are there that takes a good chunk of the customers out right off the top. It also leaves Europe looking slimmer than it should.
You'll also see that no Asian countries have icons at all, which is also incorrect, but I'm not surprised that the API couldn't plot the addresses. Australia is under represented and on and on. Never the less, it's cool and actually a bit informative.
The World:
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The USA:
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San Fransisco (we've got the bay surrounded):
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Seattle:
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Paris (2 customers in walking distance):
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The hosting partner we use for HelpSpot, http://www.valianthost.com/ has just been acquired. While the partnership was informal, it was overall a very good experience and I'm a bit sad to see ValiantHost get absorbed into a larger entity. It sounds like Giorgio, the found of ValiantHost, will be moving on to other opportunities so this leaves the HelpSpot hosting service a bit up in the air. I'm currently trying to get in touch with Server Intellect about the future of that service.
If they choose not to continue it I'll be on the search for a new partner. I'm also kicking the idea around of offering a solution ourselves. Not normal hosting, not really enough money in that for me, but rather a leased license option. Perhaps a flat $20 per user per month option that includes the hosting. I'm not sure though, even if I partner up with a big hosting provider I'm still worried about sleepless nights tracking down hackers and general badness. I don't know if any amount of money can properly offset the added stress of offering the hosted solution.
I was charting some numbers and thought this was interesting because it was unremarkable. The chart shows the times of day when people sign up for trials. These numbers are all time. Seems pretty much like you'd expect. Mostly done during US business hours with a few overnight and I suspect that's mostly non-US companies during their business hours.
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If you have a web app that's not SaaS I have to say that I highly recommend setting up a hosted trial environment. It's a bit of a pain and has some costs since a dedicated server is probably required, but so far it's been well worth it for us.
I have the entire thing setup so I can convert a regular trial to a hosted trial in a click. I've thought of making it totally automated and I probably will at some point, but I wanted to make sure the system I put in place could handle the load before making it wide open.
It's only been an option for a few months, but the numbers are great. The average HelpSpot sale is $721.46, but the average sale from a customer who did a hosted trial is $1,727.61. It's a bit early to know if these numbers will hold up, but I think they will. The main reason I wanted the hosted trial option was for larger companies where dealing with IT can be a pain. They want to know the solution is for them before bothering with IT to setup a test environment, etc. So far it's worked like a charm and we're reaching the audience we wanted to reach with it.
So if you're building a downloadable web app you should definitely keep this in mind for some point in your development. I think it's also worth noting that a hosted trial is not the same as an online demo. Online demo's are OK for less expensive applications, but in general customers can't really get a good idea how it's going to work for them in a demo. A hosted trial lets the customer really customize the entire system to get a feel for it. In HelpSpot's case we even setup an email account for them so they can see the email integration without having to setup a test account.
The hosted trial option has really helped remove at least one big barrier to purchase from the process. Hopefully I can find a few more to remove which work this well!