HelpSpot is indirectly mentioned in 37Signals Getting Real book. I was reading it on the plane home from eTech when much to my surprise on page 148 I see a half page quote by David Greiner of Campaign Monitor. The quote is in the customer service chapter of the book and he's talking about how he and the other founder do all the support and how it keeps them close to the customers needs an so on. Of course I know that it's HelpSpot they're using to do it! Pretty cool. Now if I can just get HelpSpot in the book :-)
Mark pretty much sums up my eTech thoughts. Wish I had meet him out there and caught his session, seems like good stuff.
I just found him I think via another blog, I can't remember right now. He apparently runs a conference of his own which seems interesting and it's in NYC which is always a big plus for me. Also he's got some other cool writings. Of particular note is the Uncle Mark gift guide which was pretty cool, especially towards the end. The walking in NYC tip is classic and must read for those of you from outside NYC and coming to town.
Lots to say about eTech later, but one feeling I feel very often here which I didn't expect is sorrow. I feel sorry for many of the people here. Alot of them seem to be so caught up in the Silicon Valley dream that they're wasting their time on apps that have no chance to ever sell. No chance at all.
Half of them are social bookmarking tools. Heck everyone is building one. Maybe they don't know that there's already too many and nobody makes any money with them.
The other big thing seems to be "aggregation" technologies which try to do soo much that they are totally worthless. "See if you just do this, then that, then this other thing and finally push this button, then go over here you can aggregate your presentation slides with related book information along with some emails and a picture of Sting"....... um OK.
The people behind these ideas are really smart, I wish they'd focus their energies on solving problems instead of inventing/copying cool technologies.
There I said it. I really hate being the one to have to tell you this. I don't like being the bearer of bad news, but it's best you come to this realization now while you still have time to fix it.
See if there's one thing I've learned while starting this business it's that first impressions are practically the only thing that matter. A great first impression sucks your clients into your software making it much harder for them to escape. A bad first impression gets them running back to Google.
What comment do I get more than any other? "Wow, HelpSpot is a beautiful product. All the other help desk software we looked at looks like it was designed by a programmer." heh!
It's only later, usually after they've purchased that I hear about specific features they like or how it's helped them become more efficient, etc.
The take away here is that your software sucks in the eyes of the customer if it looks bad. I really believe that. Now don't get me wrong, you don't have to have a perfect looking product. HelpSpot isn't perfect, it's not as nice as Basecamp or other web 2.0 products which are more visually attractive. However, it is much nicer than most of the competition in my market. So after potential customers have looked at 4 flat grey background help desk products and they come to HelpSpot and see some colors and some borders they think it's the best thing they've ever seen.
So before you launch your product think about how the screenshots on your website are going to look, think about how your app will feel if someone installs it after one of your competitors apps, focus on making the design a strategic advantage of your product.
Ben has released his Authorize.net PHP component. Looks like a great piece of code, I wish I had this when I was doing the UserScape store. Heck, I spend nearly half a day just trying the find documentation for the old junky one Authorize gives you(if you can find it on their site). Ben has also done a nifty job customizing his HelpSpot installation and the knowledge books for his documentation.
CF guru Ben Forta has had a very interesting email correspondence with a blog spammer. It's pretty amazing the spammer actually replied to his email. Make sure to read to the end for Ben's interesting solution.
If I had to do it all over again I would change nearly every function call, class, and line of code in HelpSpot. Now that I'm able to see the product as a whole there's so much I would do different. Places where code could have been reused better, code could be faster, code is unnecessary. Sometimes it's hard to let this code be. I thought it was hard before I launched HelpSpot and I knew there were some things I would do different, but it's even worse now. However, I've come to realize that you just have to ignore this code.
At the end of the day it's running well and doing what it's supposed to do. Is it perfect, no. In some places is it not even clean, yes. That's life. The choice is move forward making new features customers need and want or look back and spend months re-factoring code just to see disappointment in your customers eyes when your new releases don't seam any different. Sure, the reports page runs 20 milliseconds faster, but they won't notice.
So my advice is simply to never look back. Now sometimes, you have to re-factor code to move forward or the opportunity presents itself to do so in order to smartly add new features and those opportunities should be taken but re-factoring for it's own sake should be avoided like the plague. All it does is slow down your forward motion, which is something all small ISV's desperately need to cultivate at least in the first year.
It's not just technology companies purchasing HelpSpot. Purple Stork specializes in the design and creation of baby announcements and cards. Over the past month I've been working very closely with the team there as they have some very interesting needs.
Their workflow requires them to accept huge email attachments from their clients, generally full size high resolution baby pictures. They don't use the public portal, in essence they use HelpSpot as a back end for their ecommerce system. In the first two weeks alone their HelpSpot installation imported more than 1.3 GB of images via email. Far and away the largest number of any current HelpSpot customer.
They've had many good ideas for improving HelpSpot several of which will be in the next release, including a very snazzy feature which lets you tie other actions to your predefined requests, such as setting a category, making a note public, changing the status and so on.
It's always interesting to see your product used in a fashion you never envisioned. I'm discovering that is usually the case more often than not.