I've taken most of the last couple of weeks off. I figured things would be slow and for the most part they were, which was great. I basically haven't taken off a solid block of time since March. I checked in each day and answered support questions, but I didn't do any other work. Spent time with my wife, played video games, watched movies and just chilled out. I'm ready to get back to work!
A new software directory site just crossed my radar and thought it might be interesting to other software folks out there. It's called SplashPool. It's kind of an interesting take on a directory, because they build a custom dossier for each piece of software. Also the directories are mapped to problems more than to software type. Mike who runs the site seems very responsive and got right back to me when I emailed him. If you have a software product you may want to get listed in there. My understanding is that they select relevant software for the problems they're currently working on so your software may or may not get in based on what they're currently searching for.
Here's a description from the site:
"SplashPool is a search engine that aggregates software capabilities under the criteria of specific casefiles. Because the task of finding answers to specific criteria is too complex for a computer, our software helps automate the process for human researchers. We spend time evaluating casefiles and building a comparison matrix directly from vendor websites, so that our users don't need to."
Mike did a nice job on the entry for HelpSpot:
http://www.splashpool.org/dossier.php?dossierid=a0bb219044f127a90cbf9b897d0d8df3
Here's the help desk software section.
Phil has a great post about the intersection of marketing and programming and which is more important to a startup.
I would also add that making a great product does not mean making a feature complete one. HelpSpot isn't feature complete by any means. It's about making what you will launch with work very well at what it does. Get things rolling, then layer on the functionality you left out over time.
Nice job Phil!
Mike has a new
ISV blog you may want to keep an eye on. We've emailed back and forth a bit and he's got some interesting ideas for his first product.
Welcome Mike!
There are two types of entrepreneurs in this world, visionary and practical. The visionary entrepreneur has a grand vision for a product. They most likely found this vision while climbing in Huascaran National Park (Peru) or shopping in Calcutta. This type of entrepreneur needs no advice other than follow the dream. They'll doggedly chase it until they succeed or they end up in the gutter.
The practical entrepreneur is a much different beast. This article is for you! Most likely you know you want to do "something". You long to be your own boss and determine your own fate, but you don't have a grand vision to pursue. Instead, your looking to put your skills to work in a project that has a good chance at success. Millions would be great, but replacing your salary is just as appealing at least as a first step.
This description fits me completely. Before I came up with the idea for HelpSpot I looked everywhere for ideas on what I could do. I had the talent to succeed, but I didn't have any good ideas. Even worse, I wanted to give myself the best chance to succeed, but how do I find a good market to enter?
With HelpSpot off to a good start I thought it might be a good time to share the criteria I developed for picking my product. These 4 rules have done well by me and would be a good basis for other practical entrepreneurs looking to figure out a focus for a new venture.
1. Fragmented Market This is my most critical factor and something I almost never see discussed anywhere else. A fragmented market is the practical entrepreneurs best friend. It's simple the most important thing to look for in your market research.
A fragmented market is one where there are lots of small to mid size companies and where even the big players have stiff competition. There should be no dominant company. No company should have a double digit percentage of the market or at worst low double digits.
The reason this is the most critical factor is because of what it represents. First, it indicates that there are customers for this type of product. If you want to give yourself the best chance to succeed you need to enter a market where there are already customers looking for a solution. You don't want to have to spend a lot of time and money explaining to potential customers why they need a solution for problem X. You want a market where they already know they have a problem and are looking for solutions. Creating markets is the province of the visionary entrepreneur not the practical one.
Second, while there is lots of competition there is no competitor who is dominant. There is no competitor who you will always be compared against and have to stand up to. For example, building a piece of presentation software means you will always be compared to PowerPoint, building an image editor means going up against Photoshop, building a search engine means being compared with Google. These comparisons put you in a severe disadvantage. Those are dominant companies with dominant positions in the market. Potential customers already have a clear idea in their head about what those products do and why they're the best which means you'll need to do a lot more work to explain why yours is better/different.
Third, lots of other companies talking about the market and advertising in the market helps you. It creates awareness for potential customers all without you having to spend a cent. A rising tide raises all ships, etc.
Finally, in a varied market there's sure to be several companies which you compare very favorably against. Hence, you become a best of breed product when compared to these lesser alternatives. Since there's no obvious product to choose, potential customers will end up taking a somewhat random sampling of the market and you'll have a better chance at being seen as a best of breed option when compared to a random set of alternatives.
2. Business Before Consumer In general, I would lean towards a B2B model over B2C. Primarily because I think early success is easier in a B2B market. When selling to businesses you're free to charge more for your product this means you need to attract less potential customers early on to start being profitable. Business customers also have more opportunity for future growth. For example if a business buys 5 licenses to your product and in 6 months they've expanded their operations and now need 5 more these additional 5 licenses cost you exactly $0 to acquire and are pure profit. These scenarios are very common in business and much less common in consumer products.
Consumer products are also much more dependent on "being a hit". If you make a utility that sells for $20 then you need to sell at least 4000 licenses to cover your previous $80,000 year salary. While not a huge number it's still 4000 individuals you need to reach and convert. There's also little chance of hitting a home run by finding someone who wants 500 licenses at once, which is very possible in a corporate scenario.
3. Clear and Simple Revenue Model You should be able to explain your revenue model in a sentence. "We're going to sell per seat licenses for $100 a seat and a 15% yearly maintenance fee". If the product you're researching would require special pricing then you need to avoid that market. Micro-transactions and the like are the domain of the visionary not the practical.
Beyond just being simple to explain you should have a complete understanding of how you would sell the product and your gross margins before you write one line of code. If it's unclear what approximate price you could charge or what your costs would be in this market then it's not a good market to enter. It doesn't have to be down to the dollar but you should know if you can charge $50 a person or $150.
Clear and simple revenue models can also provide a competitive advantage over your competition. Older companies tend to have their pricing "evolve" over time into multiple tiers often separated by versions with unclear definitions like "pro" vs "enterprise". Making your pricing simpler to understand means customers can figure out your pricing at a glance rather than using a calculator and reading 5 pages of marketing hype to figure out the differences between versions. That's a lot of extra work for the consumer and we all know how people feel about extra work.
4. Dog Food When you're a small shop there's not a lot of time for all the functions you need to perform. There's programming, marketing, testing,PR, and so on. One part that often gets left out is product research. Not just does the product work, but how can it be better. What features would make the experience of using this product superior. When your time is tight, avoiding these issues is an easy way to free up more time.
One way to help ensure that at least some of this gets done is to make sure you build a product you'll actually use on a daily basis ("eat your own dog food"). This way there's at least some time built right in to your normal day. What features frustrate you, where could you do something better. Because you're getting the true customer experience you'll gain more insight into the product than if you just sat down and brainstormed about a product you don't use yourself.
Gavin is doing a great job each week or so pointing to top MicroISV stories each week. Nice job Gavin.
Congratulations to Kevin on getting a book deal from Prentice Hall for his open source behemoth, TurboGears. That's fantastic news. Perhaps he'll be able to make a career of TurboGears. I wonder if Zesty will ever hit the street?
On a side note PH is my old employer. I worked with technology in higher ed. It's a pretty wacky place, but I hear the tech books are run a little better than higher ed so hopefully it will be a smooth process for Kevin.
A little sneak peak at the mobile version of HelpSpot coming in the next release. There's so many compromises when doing a mobile version and I expect to have to make adjustments over time, but for the first rev of it I'm keeping it simple. Just basic functionality and keeping it optimized for small cellphone screens. If I find more people are interested in PDA use I could perhaps change things a bit to take advantage of the increased space, but for now keeping it small will work well on PDA's and phones.
*[This image was lost to time in my blog transition]*
Scoble links over to more insanity on the demise of Microsoft Office from Steve Gillmore. These articles actually make me mad. Why you say? It's not because I loooove Office or because I hate Google or because I have something against Steve Gillmore (never meet him). It's because the article is obviously written by someone who's never, ever, ever been inside a real IT department (or at least not in a looong time). Not some silicon valley venture backed startup IT department. I'm talking about the guys keeping the exchange server running in Boise.
Guess what, the guys in Boise don't give two hoots about an Office Like system that can pulling in graphics from Riya or even Gmail for that matter. They just want to be able to help you when email "doesn't work". Or explain to you what the Big E is (internet explorer).
Hey you know what. Microsoft sold 11 BILLION dollars worth of Office last year. Not bad eh for something that's dead. That's 11 billion dollars worth of users who aren't switching anytime soon just because they might be able to post to their del.icio.us accounts if they use some other startup alternative.
At the end of the day you have to train employees, you have to build systems, you have to build support. These things are simply not possible with Google's solutions (or any other new wave office products I've seen). Gmail doesn't always work, I've gotten errors and I barely use it. But guess what there's nobody to call when it doesn't work. Training? How? Google makes changes on the fly. You can't manage your IT department like that. You're going to come into work one day and have 9000 messages because Google changed a buttons location and now nobody knows what's going on or perhaps they change how archives work and nobody can find their messages.
Everyone isn't tech savvy, heck MOST of the world isn't tech savvy. Who's going to pay for retraining my entire company? Is the benefits of using Gmail and Gcalendar really worth the cost of retraining my entire company?
OK this rants gone out of control. I think you get my point. Perhaps I've just read one to many of these articles. Hey I'm not saying the world isn't changing, but I think we're a long way from Office being dead. They've got time built in because of a huge user base and they've got plenty of $$$ so just because Gmail is snazzy doesn't mean MS is going anywhere. And for everyone out there who writes these types of articles please please please, I don't care about what your friends think and if they're "influential" or not. Take a day and go visit some real IT people in the trenches. I think you'll be glad you did.
The other day HelpSpot passed $10,000 in sales so it seems like a good time to catch everyone up one how things are going. While I won't be regularly sharing sales data I've been pretty happy with my success so far and I think it may be good inspiration for aspiring ISV's.
It's been a pretty amazing start especially considering the $10,000 number includes beta users who purchased at a 50% discount. It also included a 30 day period with basically no sales. This was expected because free trials only started when I launched the product on October 24th. Hence, there was a big space between the beta group purchases right at launch and the first trial user purchases usually 30 days or so after signing up for the trial.
Overall I'm on pace with my "optimistic" estimates (as opposed to my worst case ones). Actually a bit ahead of my estimates since it's only about 50 days in. Best of all I've spent no money on advertising, it's all organic search engine traffic and word of mouth. I think this method has actually produced the "right" kind of 1.0 customers. For the most part all of my customers have been great about providing feedback and working through 1.0 type issues. I'm very much in the JOS camp of not trying to grow too much in the early stages because your product needs time to mature. Between the first release and the upcoming one the product is already way better than when I released it.
I continue to have strong sales overseas. More than half my customers are outside the US with a big chunk of that being the UK where the last several large sales have come from.
I've learned a bunch about making sure the security settings on your credit card gateway aren't too high, especially the address matching stuff. I've also done several PO's already so I can confirm that you need to handle these from the start if you're selling B2B. I only mention it because I see that question come up all the time.
Finally, trial downloads are really strong and I expect sales to stay strong. Just today 6 companies downloaded the trial and it's like that most days. It doesn't sound like alot but when you sell software which retails for $180/user and almost all installations are multi-user then 6 solid companies is a nice number :-)