ISV Kaizen

Recently, I’ve attended ISDEF 2007 conference and now I have new topics to discuss in this blog.

One of the most important resources for software marketing is press. After getting mentioned in a well known magazine or in a vertical newsletter even once, you may receive much more sales in a single day than in several weeks before the publication. If the famous magazines and newspapers mention your product regularly then your brand will get well recognized and your business will be flourishing. There is no secret. Everyone knows this.

Also, everyone knows that the most simple way to get into the press is sending press releases to editors and journalists. Major version update is an excellent reason to send out a press release, but what to do if you release new major versions only once a year? Editors want real news because their readers want real news too. They like to read about problems and new solutions. They don’t want to read every month about a new minor update #2.3.7.3848.x which includes two bug fixes and one typo correction.

You have to find new topics for press releases besides new updates. The topic must be newsworthy and in the same time relevant to your product or service. Here is a few points what your next press release may be about:

• It’s non necessary to write press releases about your product.
• Write about your area of expertise. Become an expert.
• Write regular comments on notable events in your target niche.
• Dig up interesting figures and facts related to your niche and comment on them. Readers like figures.
• Compose analytical reports about tendencies in your sector. Analyze what has happened and what has changed for the past period. Use comparison charts and tables.
• Predict new trends. People like predictions but be careful.
• Publish such reports on regular basis, e.g. weekly, monthly, etc.
• Interview other experts in your niche regarding an interesting topic and add your own thoughts, ideas, and comments.
• Setup polls on hot topics and publish poll results together with your comments.
• Write about really interesting use case and best practices of your software usage. If your clients or partners are well known in the industry then mention them, but make sure you have a permission to disclose this information. Give figures and results. Show how effective your solutions in real practice.

This is just a few ideas to help you get you name or brand into the press. There are many things in your business or niche that may become an excellent topic for interesting and newsworthy press release. Be creative!

If you decided to setup a forum on your company or product website then the most annoying question is likely: “Initially, my forum will be empty and will look silent. This will deter people from joining the community. What to do?” As a moderator of several forums, I’d like to share a tip regarding the question.

Initially, don’t create too many sections. While your forum isn’t very popular each section would contain just a few posts and overall the forum would look inactive.

Create just a couple of general sections and have all posts there. So, these sections will be active and, therefore, the whole forum will look alive. Later, you may create more focused sections and move the appropriate posts there from the general section. Thus, the newly created section will be immediately filled with many posts and will also look active.

This simple trick will help you quickly spin up your forum and build a community around your product with minimal efforts.

This post is written by our special guest, Sergey Petrov.
Sergey is a CEO of SoftLogica. The most known software titles by SoftLogica are Backup Platinum - a powerful backup program for Windows OS, and Handy Recovery - a data recovery software that restores deleted files or files from deleted and formatted partitions.

After many years in ISV business, Sergey knows many secrets of how to succeed in the market. Today he unveils 8 reasons for acquiring a separate domain for each software product.

Separate domain for each product or one general site? I think it’s fair to say that I’ve participated in discussions on this topic several dozens of times.
Now all my considerations should be brought together, so that they can be referred to easily.

Type-in Traffic: If your product becomes somewhat popular, sooner or later some clients (at least, out of mere curiosity) will type in the browser’s address bar www.product.com. So why loose such a “delicious” traffic?

SEO: Firstly, if a product name contains a keyword from its niche, the domain name derived from it will give some added advantage. Secondly, all website pages will targeted to a specific niche.

Design Freedom: Different products may require different market approaches, including differences in site structure, colour spectrum, layout etc. Is a “universal” design worth loosing efficiency?

Anamnesis: It is much easier to keep in mind one entity (a product name) than two (a product name and a company name). As for me, I could hardly recollect vendor names for the heaps of software that I use every so often. It may seem that a user doesn’t need to remember a URL consisting of two entities, that is, it’s enough to remember just a company name. But it is well known that every extra click results in loosing visitors.

Analytics: It is much easier to analyze a separate site than a part of a general one. Any superstructure makes visitors’ behaviour hardly predictable.

Link Building: Sometimes a website allows placing links only to a homepage, and doesn’t allow placing links to other pages. In most cases the problem can be solved, however, it will require additional efforts.

First impression: A man is an emotional being in many respects. Therefore, a good suit and a necktie produce an impression on people even before they get acquainted with you. Thus, imagine a reseller hearing with half an ear a product name and\or catching a glimpse of URL in a printed material: he’s already had the first impression about your product.

Scalability: Perhaps, some day you’ll decide to sell a product and the related stuff “in gross”. Will it be possible to deliver everything to a new owner without loosing some integral parts?

Thanks for sharing this, Sergey!
Here is another interesting article from SoftLogica.

One of the strongest psychological signal for everyone is his or her name. Calling someone by name is a good way to attract his/her attention and to make the conversation more confidential and trustworthy.
So, when you answer support e-mails start and finish your message with a name of the person. This will increase the positive effect of your message. If the message is relatively long then you may address your customer by name in the middle of the text also.

What a simple trick!

I have an idea which I would share. It’s a raw concept but I’m sure that you can polish it and use somehow in your business.

Remember the installers that show slides with software features and benefits during the installation process. I’m sure that some of your applications also have such processes when a long operation performs and user simply has to be watching the progress bar for several minutes.
Why not to show a user something else during this period of time? E.g. you may show a tip of the day, news (e.g. RSS feed), link to your site/blog, a marketing slogan, or even a banner.

How it differs from adware:
1. You don’t bother your user while he actually works.
2. You display the a plug only while the user is bored and awaiting for the end of long process.
3. You may display not only ad, but also something interesting and valuable for user.

Installers have been using this technique for a long time and I wonder if other types of applications can use this trick also. I think this technique may be used in applications that deal with huge data processing, conversion routines, model rendering, compilation, etc., i.e. where there are routines taking up to several minutes. Why to waste those minutes?

Some time ago I heard the gossips that Google doesn’t “like” web sites with newly registered domain names. Google likes old domain names with long history.

But … the domain history is not the only important factor. The future of domain is also important for Google ranking. If your domain registration expires in a couple of months then Google may have doubts if you are serious about your domain name and may slightly lower your web site rank. If your domain’s expiration date is far enough then Google thinks that you have serious long run intentions regarding your business and your web site. So, it may slightly increase your rank.

Most likely it’s just another urban legend. But who knows … This time I’ve renewed my domain names for two years, not for just one year as previously

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.

Tracking is a king in mISV business.

When somebody downloads a file from your website you must log the event. Therefore, you must invoke a script (e.g. download.php) on your server that will write the info about the event in a file or database and then will redirect the visitor to the actual binary file.

In the same time, using script as a download link is not practical because many software archives do not allow links to php/pl/cgi pages, only to the exe or zip.

To overcome this you may use .htaccess file for redirection.

If you use http://www.site.com/download/abcmaker.zip as a public download link then the sample string for .htaccess can be:

Redirect /download/abcmaker.zip http://www.site.com/download/download.php?product=abcmaker

and the download.php must contain something like:

<?
...
//logging info to file or db
...
header("Location: /download/abcmaker_1421.zip"); //link to real file
?>

As you see this approach allows also to change the actual file name on the server while all incoming links may still point to http://www.site.com/download/abcmaker.zip