ISV Kaizen

This post is written by our special guest, Nikolay Tyushkov.
Nikolay is an owner of Softvoile. The most known software titles by Softvoile are Flashpaste - an utility for managing and quick pasting text templates, and Clipdiary - a free utility for keeping the clipboard history.

As a veteran of ISV business, Nikolay has great practical experience he would like to share with colleagues. Today he unveils 7 steps to speed up software technical support tasks.

If you develop and sell your products then you are sure to have a lot of users, and … a huge number of questions to your technical support.

It’s an infinite chain of similar questions and standard answers - “Why didn’t I get my registration key?”, “How do I move my data to another computer?”, “What button should I press to get this thing I see in the picture?”, and many others repetitive inquiries.

Regardless you have FAQ section in your help file or on your website you have to answer the same questions every day. Unfortunately, it is impossible to get rid of boring mechanical work, but you can considerably speed it up. Similar questions mean standard answers. Let’s see what can be done about it.

1. Start creating a database of your standard answers. It is the first thing you should do. For example, if you are telling a user how to register a program then enter the answer into the database at once. When you are writing an instruction on some feature in the program, add it to the database as well. Believe me you will have to answer the same things more than once.
2. Write in the most general way. Write not as if you were answering a specific question from this particular user, but as if this answer satisfied everyone who would ask similar questions.
3. Make the description as detailed as possible. If you want to tell a user how to select a checkbox in options, also write how to open the dialog with these options, how to find the necessary checkbox and what it will result in. It will reduce the number of clarification requests and will save you lots of time.
4. If you have several products, try to avoid product names in common phrases. For instance, in a message about resending the registration key, write the answer template so that it can be used for any of your programs. Or you can better use a program that allows you to insert text macros.
5. Organize your answer templates. Put the general phrases in one category, registration questions in another category, problem solutions in still another one …
6. Store your answer templates in a special program developed for this purpose that can paste the template text into the any application practically easily.
7. Use Hot Keys to quickly insert the template text in the answer. Using hot keys rather then clicking through many menus will bring your productivity to a new level. You will be able to easily reply to message with one hand. What can be easier?

All these important points can be easily achieved with a special tool for pasting text snippets, Flashpaste (www.flashpaste.com ).
Flashpaste offers the complete set of features you need to reply your support messages quickly: text categories, hot keys support, plain and formatted text with full Unicode support, macros for inserting timestamps, substitution macros, database sharing among several employees and a lot of other useful functions. Also, Flashpaste will be useful for everyone who works with texts a lot: software developers, web designers, technical writers and translators.

Thanks for sharing this list, Nikolay!

The software improvement advice, techniques and ideas that I post here are taken from our real practice. I try to keep this blog practical and hype free. This post is a rare case (the previous one was about 9 months ago) when I’d like to tell a little about our own products.
During the recent months we have been working actively to make new versions of our existing products and to develop a new product as well. Recently we have released two new products.

Dr.Explain 3.0

Dr.Explain v.3.0 ( http://www.drexplain.com ) is an innovative software documentation tool. Thanks to unique technology, with Dr.Explain you can produce attractive and professional looking help files just in a few hours, not in days.

The Dr.Explain captures windows, dialogs, and forms from live application and web pages, makes screenshots, and automatically adds interactive references to all controls. You have not to spend hours annotating your software GUI. Focus on your content - Dr.Explain will do all the tedious work for you. The program can produce CHM, RTF and HTML help files with annotated screenshots, live menus, cross-references, and navigation from a single source file.

What’s new in v.3.0

• The new capturing engine captures and automatically documents windows, menus, GUI elements, web pages, and even flash applications
• Revamped text editor allows pictures, tables, lists, fonts, multibyte encoding, RTL mode, etc…
• Enhanced topic management supports topic statuses, marking and locking\unlocking
• Lots of other improvements including optimized export routines, Google sitemap generator, predefined macro variables, and many more improvements and tweaks.

The new version download: http://www.drexplain.com/download

TBS Cover Editor

TBS Cover Editor ( http://www.trueboxshot.com ) is a full featured software box cover creator with 3D rendering and template library. We accomplished the project in partnership with True BoxShot Software.

With the TBS Cover Editor you can create your 3D box shot design in a single flat worksheet. Say goodbye to separate designs for each side; no more design slices in many image files. The single-sheet concept of the TBS Cover Editor allows you editing of all box sides on a single screen. The real time 3D preview immediately shows how your 3D box shot output image looks like without switching between different windows or applications.

With the TBS Cover Editor no additional expensive third party tools are required. The program supports all the steps of box shot creation: from drafting and design, to 3D scene setting and image rendering. You can create professional-quality 3D box shots with no extra expense in a single program. The TBS Cover Editor comes with a brilliant collection of software cover design templates for various types of software. You can make a box cover in less than two minutes.

The TBS Cover Editor has a powerful rendering engine that produces realistic 3D box shots by applying original 3D rendering and ray casting algorithms. Your every box shot will look as if it is made by a studio.

More details: http://www.trueboxshot.com

Both these products will automate the most tedious and time consuming routines of your software business – software help and documentation writing, and graphical design. The Dr.Explain and TBS Cover Editor will help you present your software product in a professional manner with minimal efforts. As a software vendor you may focus on your business growth and leave the dull operations to the specialized systems.

Bob Walsh has recently written “Email one customer a day” post in his 47hats blog.

Here is the post’s summary:

Try emailing one customer a day. Pick a customer who bought your product or who signed up for your Web 2.0 service some time back and send them a friendly, short email:

“Dear Bill,

Just a quick email to see how you are doing with MasterList Professional. Any issues or sticking points or suggestions?

Regards,
Bob Walsh”

This is really simple and may be very effective for gathering feedback from your software users. I know many ISVs who use this approach and I use it too for some products.

But if you use this method why to e-mail only ONE customer?
Automate it! Write a simple script\app that once a day will pick all customers who bought from you e.g. 7 or 14 days ago and will send them the personalized messages “Dear [name], … ”.

Everything will remain the same but you will save your valuable time and you will cover all your user database, not only one customer.

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 :-).

During the last months I tried not to aggressively promote our flagship application Dr.Explain in this blog. I’d like the ISV Kaizen Blog to be not an advertorial but a collection of simple tips and tricks useful for most of ISV and mISV.

This post is an exception because today we have a good news. Indigo Byte Systems officially released Dr.Explain 2.6. There are about 25 new features and enhancements in the new version. So, I’d like to tell you a bit more about the Dr.Explain today.

What is Dr.Explain:
Dr.Explain v.2.6 is an innovative software documentation tool.
It sounds boring, doesn’t it? So …

What benefits will Dr.Explain bring to your ISV business process:
Thanks to unique technology, with Dr.Explain you can produce attractive and professional looking help files just in a few hours. That would otherwise take days to create them manually.

The Dr.Explain captures windows, dialogs, and forms from live application, makes screenshots, and automatically adds interactive references to all controls. You have not to spend hours annotating your screenshots. Focus on your content - Dr.Explain will do all the tedious work for you.

The program can produce CHM, RTF and HTML help files with annotated screenshots, live menus, cross-references, and navigation from a single source file.

You can read more about Dr.Explain and download a free trial on http://www.drexplain.com

What new benefits does the version 2.6 bring to users:
Let’s name just the most important:
* Better recognition of Delphi and other programming languages controls
* Many usability improvements
* More Hot Keys
* Better keywords management
* Optimized output routines
There are 25 new features in the update.

I think you may also be interested in the Dr.Explain featured reviews and user testimonials.

One more good news from Dr.Explain
Nowadays, Dr.Explain and True BoxShot run the mutual discount program. If you order either Dr.Explain or True BoxShot software you will receive $15 discount for the second product. Now you may add two useful products to your ISV toolbox and save money.
More info: http://www.drexplain.com/order

From Kaizen point of view, Dr.Explain will save many hours of your valuable time that you may better spend on product development and promotion rather than on boring documentation writing. The tool will easily pay for itself on the first project.

Likely, you may be aware of Google Alerts.

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic.

For mISV, Google Alerts is one of most useful tools. It’s free and it saves much time when monitoring your market niche. You must just specify the search query, your e-mail and the alert frequency. Google Alerts will notify you by e-mail when it finds something new for you.

The most handy uses of Google Alerts for mISV are the following:

Backlinks monitoring
Add ‘link:http://www.yourproduct.com’ query to your alert list to know who put a link to your website.

Competitor’s backlinks monitoring
Add ‘link:http://www.yourcompetitorproduct.com’ query to your alert list to know who put a link to your competitor’s website.

Product mentioning monitoring
Add ‘your product name’ query to your alert list to know who has mentioned or reviewed your software.

Competitor’s product mentioning monitoring
Add ‘your competitor product name’ query to your alert list to know who has mentioned or reviewed your competitor’s software.

Web site content protection
Add ‘a specific phrase from your article’ query to your alert list to know who has republished or has stolen (depending on license) your content.

Monitoring your target keyword
Add ‘your keywords’ query to your alert list to know what new resources have appeared in the relevant search results.

Keeping track of the industry events
Add ‘industry name conference’, ‘industry name trade show’, or other similar queries to your alert list to know about upcoming industry events.

Finding link exchange partners
Add ‘industry name “exchange links with us”‘ query to your alert list to find new partners in your industry to trade links.

Finding on-topic forums
Add ‘industry name “post new message”‘ query to your alert list to know what new forums about your industry have recently appeared.

Of course, there are many more possible uses of Google Alerts for ISV. Feel free to post your uses in the comments.