Ian Landsman

Founder & Dev. HelpSpot / Larajobs

It's pretty cool to checkout the main URL for your product on del.icio.us. So far there's 20 links to HelpSpot only a few have comments but those are interesting and I think a nifty way to peak inside what potential customers are thinking about your product.

Here's the one for HelpSpot:

http://del.icio.us/url/ad2c1e68e90e20c46bc8275793237760

My fav comment: "Amazing new IT Help Desk software"

I'm going to dig around on this a bit longer. I think there's probably alot of good market research that can be drawn out of the comments attached to del.icio.us bookmarks along of course with where they're linking to.

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Ben is looking for some help figuring out which direction to take is application. He's looking for input from ISV's, so if you have a chance help him out.

My 2 cents is to try and provide support for all of them. It doesn't have to be all at once but you should have the major guys in there like share-it. Maybe them, Authroize, esellerate and another CC gateway or two. You need to have these because (in my mind) these are just necessary evils. They're aren't why someone like me would buy your product. It's the other features that are the "killer" features. Follow up emails, advanced license management, customer self service. Those are the problem you're solving for me not the gateway. You need to support whatever gateway I want to use so that I can purchase your product to solve my real problems which are excessive customer emails about licenses, manually creating email reminders, etc.

I wouldn't worry about them being a competitor. There's lots of room in that market, plus being a small biz yourself you'll have alot more "street cred" if you market things right than they will. They'll still outsell you 10000 to 1 but that doesn't matter because that's still more money than you need. Hey, HelpSpot competes with Intuit and their CEO owns a stinking Basketball team! There's plenty of money for everyone.

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I've been getting back to work this past week. Since releasing HelpSpot I've been having a blast mostly working on support, talking to customers, and just generally relaxing a bit. The final push to get HelpSpot out nearly killed me, but now after getting into the business side a bit, hearing tons of great feedback and making some money I'm ready to do some coding!

It's going to be fun to get the first bug fix release out next week. Several important bugs in there as well as a few new features. I'd normally like to keep features out of the bug releases, but being very early in the game I'm going to sneak a few in rather than wait for 1.1.

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So I'm going to be making the plunge into AJAX for HelpSpot. Now that I've been using HelpSpot myself for about 4 months I can see some very useful spots for it. I'm really glad I waited BTW and not just threw some in just to say I had it. I've managed to sell plenty of installations without it (can you believe it!) but also I'm going to be adding it where it will really improve the experience based on facts not on speculation. I think it's important to note that before launch I would have added it in different places and in a different way then I plan to now and I would have been wrong, it would have detracted from the experience IMHO.

Now, I'm going to be rolling it into the 1.1 feature release (I think) probably sometime in Jan/Feb. I'm currently researching libraries and am curious what you all have used and if you have any suggestions. HTML_AJAX seems to be making some progress, but it's still early and I know they keep changing some of the API. I'm not a big fan of most of the bigger libraries I've looked at because they seem to do to much. Most of the features they add I will never use. My current thinking is to use the prototype.js library directly. This way it's light weight and it's only JS I have to worry about. No other foreign PHP code is added to "help" me. Plus I can easily layer script.olicio.us on top if I need more fancy effects down the line. I don't really give a hoot about convenience (though prototype does make things pretty convenient), I care about speed and stability only. Thoughts?

Oh, if anyone was looking, there is some OK documentation on prototype here. That's probably my biggest concern with it is that the developer provides no docs at all.

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Interesting new website editor for OSX. In beta now, very very interesting.

*[This image was lost to time in my blog transition]*

They're also trying out something interesting to spur development in the open source web kit.

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Ben over at BRK Studio just opened up the website for the isvManage product he's developing, which is an integrated CRM/Licensing/Payment gateway solution for ISV's. I wish I had this thing so I didn't have to build mine myself.

Ben was a huge help in the HelpSpot beta providing many good ideas and pointing out bugs.

His new sites support is I believe the first publicly available HelpSpot portal that's been customized. He did a great job customizing it and fully integrating it into the look and feel of his website. Great job Ben!

*[This image was lost to time in my blog transition]*

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This is pretty insane. The integration is cool and the overlay technology is very cool.

http://www.google.com/analytics/feature_fast.html

I'll be switching over shortly.

Update: I won't be moving over too shortly because the site seems to be down. Probably being crushed under the load. I'm getting a "Currently Undergoing Maintenance" page. I should probably wait anyway until some of the reviews come in.

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Dimitris has a good article on internationalizing your web based application. He's also a HelpSpot user and has given a bunch of great feedback on internationalizing HelpSpot.

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There's one questions I get alot from small ISV's about HelpSpot, it goes something like this: "Do I really need help desk software? There's only me/two/three of us and I'm not sure it's worthwhile"

I'll pass on extolling the more obvious benefits of organizing requests, historical tracking and so on. Instead I'm going to go through some of the more subtle benefits you can take advantage of when you implement a help desk solution. Specifically, how the reporting features can make you more efficient.

The two reports I'll highlight here are the 'hour of the day' and 'day of the week' reports. These reports show you the busiest hours of the day and days of the week for your help desk. This isn't just information that's nice to know, it can have a real impact on your productivity. It's also information which is practically impossible to determine if you're just using a basic email account for support.

If you're a small shop every hour of your day is critical. In most cases you're doing the coding, answering the support, paying the bills and mowing the lawn. The above reports can help you manage your time. Let's take my own case as an example.

I've been using HelpSpot in 'production' since the beta started in early September. I now have about 2 months of solid data and let me tell you it's interesting stuff. The biggest impact on my business has been the 'day of the week' report. Through this report I can see that fully 47% of all support inquires are on Monday. This tappers down to just 5% on Friday.

Using this I've been able to reorganize my weeks to take this into account. Generally I avoid coding and serious writing on Mondays since I know the day will be disjointed. Instead I focus on support and smaller tasks. On Fridays I'm able to focus completely on writing code or other mentally intensive tasks, since I know there will be few disruptions.

I'm also able to make use of the 'hour of the day' report, which indicates most requests come in after noon and stay strong until 5pm or so. Again, I can make better use of morning hours and leave disjointed tasks until the afternoon.

Of course this is just a small example and I could go on, but it's something to consider for your ISV.

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I'm just going to run a daily post where I link over to the WSP. OK this will be the last time for a few days, promise.

"But there is one reason we can say 'kiss my ass' to those of you staying at home...we get to go on our weekly Friday night post-work booze-fest. "

I'm a Social Drinker

My wife just asked me why I'm "humping" this guy so much. Here's why. He's the first NYC blogger I've read in almost 3 years of following blogs who delivers the texture, the feel, the flavor of NYC. He's not some geek hiding in his apartment. He's slinging code down on The Street in a suit!

Keep it up man!

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