ISV Kaizen

During the last weeks I saw several posts on various ISV and shareware forums where people complained that their sales had decreased and that summer is the worse period for software business.

Overall, I have to agree that in summer the business activity goes down. Nevertheless, summer offers a good chance to boost your software business in the long run. Let me explain …

This is not only the number of orders that is decreased in summer. The volume of support requests usually goes down also.
While you have less support job you may focus on your projects solely. Devote this time to planing, software development and improvement, market research and trends analysis. Summer is a good time to leisurely prepare and test a new product or a new release of your existing product to launch it in September or October when the business activity rises again.

Like Christmas, summer is a time for savings
As many businesses (And what about you?) try to keep their falling sales on a certain level they often setup special discount offers for summer months. Thus, it’s a good chance to buy business tools (software, SDKs, scripts, libraries, etc.) or to order some professional services (design, testing, copy writing) with significant discounts. Think about tools that you will need in future but it might be cheaper to buy them now.

Your news seem more significant against the summer lull.
If you have a news that might be interesting to your potential customers then don’t wait till Fall. Send your press release now. Because the flow of corporate news is not so big in summer your press release will more likely get in front of an editor than in any other period. Even a message about a minor version release may appear in the top news section of a huge portal or a magazine.

Announce in summer to reach your market on the peak.
Big paper magazines have a long publishing cycle. If editor picks your news for publishing or for a featured article writing then it will be printed in several months, usually 3-6. Therefore, if your send your press release in summer then it may appear in October or December issue of the magazine. Your message will reach the market right in the most active period. That will be great.

These are just a few evidences for the idea that summer is not a bad time for software business. Try to use the summer slack with the most possible effectiveness for your ISV business but don’t forget about the rest :-).

Recently I’ve read a couple of books by Masaaki Imai about Kaizen, the philosophy of ongoing improvement without spending much money. I think the Kaizen model perfectly describes the business of small independent software vendor.

Due to lack of resources a small ISV is usually unable to make big investments into innovations to quickly expand its business. It’s a long way to go by small steps. This blog is about these small steps. There are lots of areas for continuous improvement: software development, sales and support processes, product web site maintenance, SEO, dealing with affiliates and resellers, product marketing and promotion, etc.

You must improve something in your business every day. Each improvement will enhance your business by just a tiny factor, but when multiplied those tiny factors will give the impressive growth results.

You can’t do kaizen just once or twice and expect immediate results. You have to be in it for the long haul.

Masaaki Imai