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Ideas - Apr 18, 2008 15:15 - 0 Comments

What the youngsters are up to and why you need to care.

I unglued my nose from the Project X programming grindstone yesterday to spend 5 hours of quality iPod-enabled drive time to and from a freebie Microsoft event (ReMix08) and I’m glad I did. Not because I learned a more about Microsoft’s Silverlight, although that was what this event was billed as.

ReMix08
Scott Guthrie’s keynote was good - but I’d watched it in March from the comfort of my Aaron chair live from Mix08 and the only new thing I picked up was Microsoft has added a small but important (to MSFT) goal to SilverLight 2’s to do list - being able to upscale code directly to WPF.

And unfortunately, Seema Ramchandani (the Microsoft program manager making sure Silverlight runs well on Macs as Windows boxes) who was supposed to dig deep into Silverlight 2’s code took a detour into Presenter’s Hell when her AV support people apparently forgot how to route video from a Mac between her morning and afternoon sessions.

What really impressed me was the panel discussion, “The Future of Social Networking”.

I know, I know, you as a microISV or a developer working long long days think, “Why would I spend time on Twitter, Pownce, Facebook and get constantly interrupted, poked and distracted? What’s the benefit unless I’m developing yet another social network that might turn into an $850 million impulse buy like Bebo did for AOL?”

While anyone who’s been in this industry a while can see that social networking is well down the dot.bomb road, there is a hard core of realness there for microISVs and non-social networking startups: Internet-enabled social networking has changed how under-30 year olds live/think in a lot of the developed world. Those MySpace teenagers and Facebook college kids continue to get older: in 2.5 years, one half of the U.S. workforce will be under 30 years old.

MicroISVs and startups (except for Paul Graham’s hatchlings and the like) tend to be in their 30’s or older: they’ve had time to develop their technical skills, learn to despise bosses and get some experience in what is laughingly referred to as the Real World. They don’t instinctively get what these youngsters (called customers) are into. But they need to: it won’t be the wrinkly old execs that are going to find new software for their companies to buy, it’s going to be some new hire who’s going to check you out with their network first.

Same issue, different direction: how do you write a desktop app that won’t get cracked or a SaaS that won’t go out of fashion in a matter of weeks? You build it so that it has an organic social network inside of it that connects with the larger mosaic of social networks.

As Dave McClure of 500 Hats (no relation) pointed out yesterday at that panel, ‘online social networking is about real needs and wants: getting laid, finding a job, making the right decisions’. (no relation, really)

While he drove the rest of the panels somewhat nuts, he had a good point: social networks like Facebook are all finding new ways of addressing intrinsic human needs in our physically increasingly unsafe, fragmented, segmented Real World.

MicroISVs who pride themselves in being tone deaf about social networking are missing more than a good non-coding distraction: they may be missing their future.

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Weekly Site Reviews - Mar 10, 2008 10:54 - 4 Comments

Weekly Site Review - PTH Consulting

This week’s Weekly Site Review is of Paul Haddad’s PTH Consulting, a microISV selling PTHPasteboard Pro, a Mac clipboard utility ($24.95 USD).

[Note: Right up front I should note that this review was paid for by Paul, falling somewhere in between the regular volunteer free site reviews I do here and the fixed price confidential site reviews I do for clients. As you’ll see, this does not mean I went easy on Paul, but it does mean he got to see it first, had the option of adding comments (not changes) and that I covered a couple of specific issues re his software with him privately.]

Pth40U

Overview:

Paul Haddad’s an extremely experienced Mac software developer and his microISV product PTHPasteboard 4 Pro has a variety of features differentiating it from other Mac clipboard managers. It’s clear from pth.com’s site that Paul has been successfully developing commercial software for other companies - too clear.

Paul - like many, many microISVs who are breaking out of the contract programming trap - makes a number of key mistakes that need substantial remediation if Pasteboard 4 Pro is going to sell up to its potential. Let’s take a look at these issues, and how they may be affecting your microISV sales.

Before we get to the Hook - or in this case the lack of it - The most glaring issue the site as whole suffers from is that it is a decent site if Paul wants to generate more software development work, but it’s not a microISV site. At some point, you have to bite the bullet - or at least have a site that sells your product first and everything else a distant second.

If you click through to PTHPasteboard Pro 4 real home page - which unfortunately most first time visitors will not do - you get a much better presentation. But there’s a problem here: Paul has a competitor on this page that right now looks nearly as good as what Paul wants to sell you: his Free Edition.

Creating a Free Edition of your for-sale product is a mistake many microISVs make - I made it. A year before I released my pay for product, I did a free edition. Forty thousand downloads later of that free version, with visions of giant yellow dump trucks of money coming to me because so many people were using my Free Edition, I released my Pro version, and I learned the hard way a hard truth: free versions cost more sales than they make.

30 day trial version? Absolutely! Free version you have to support, that pulls attention away from your real product (let alone having a different codebase, a mistake Paul did not make) - No way in hell.

For the rest of this review I’m going to focus on what’s happening on the PTHPasteboard page of Paul’s microISV site because it really should be the home page.

Pth Pro Secondu
Continue…

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Admin, Productivity, Resources - Jan 2, 2008 8:50 - 1 Comment

With a little help from my friends…

If 2007 was the year scarcity of information went to the dustbin of history, 2008 is going to be the year we all become much more sophisticated at living in a world where scarcity of attention rules. Or else.

To that end, I’ve started sharing the items I think have value above and beyond the noise of the day for microISVs from the feeds I monitor in Google Reader (It’s the “47 Hats Shared Feed” in the new center column, and yes it has it’s own feed.)

Google Shared Feeds are yet another way you can take what you already do - keep up with the problem domain your microISV markets to - brand it with your name, URL and hopefully a better pic than what I’ve got, and offer it to your blog readers.

You do have a blog for your company/product, don’t you? Come on, it’s 2008 already! :)

Naggings about blogs aside, I hope that others reading 47hats create shared feeds that we all can tap into: the more people who do these, the more powerful it is.

So if you’re doing a shared feed, or know of one that other readers here would benefit from, or know a good directory of shared feeds, please share!

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