MicroISV Digest - 05/26/2010 - 47hats.com47hats.com

MicroISV Digest – 05/26/2010

Bob Walsh May 26, 2010

(Apologies to all for the six-week hiatus the MicroISV Digest took while I was working to get out StartupToDo.com Version 2 and start marketing.)

Community News:

BP and the feds may not be able to turn off the Gulf Oil Spill disaster, but maybe you can code a mobile app that will help. At least that’s the approach Jeff Haynie and the rest of the Appcelerator team is taking. Two open source apps – Oil Reporter and Oil Tracker – are in use, and the company that developed these two apps is working to connect other volunteer developers with government agencies and animal rescue organizations. More info here and especially here.
Chet Karella of Dangerous Decisions has created the perfect high school graduation gift for parents worried about their speeding sons and daughters: Save Driver Program uses the iPhone GPS and accelerometers to email you when an iPhone toting driver exceeds whatever speed or acceleration set points you want them to stay below.
Richard Nichols has released Draw 5 (iPad version). What caught my eye was when he said, “Imagine, it actually took me less time to write a full featured Draw 5 Video Poker game that it did for the iTunes reviewers to review and pass it! This was all from scratch and is fully animated with voice prompts and detailed score history. I say this because someone actually accused me of using a 3rd party game framework!” I think I’m in the wrong business. Details here.
Need to be willing to share. Besides all of the cool apps for adults coming out for the iPad (remember a mere two months ago when it was all the rage to diss the iPad? I do.), there’s plenty of goodness for the wee ones. Case in point: School Zone was among the first companies to launch titles, which parents and teachers can download for $9.99 each: “On-Track Time, Money & Fractions,” “Flash Action Multiplication & Division” and “Flash Action Addition & Subtraction.” More info.
Steve Cholerton, Arten Science, have recently released the Multi-User MySQL Edition of their popular ContaxCRM software. Further information on ContaxCRM Cross Platform Contact Relationship Management Software can be found here.
The conference schedule for the 20th annual Software Industry Conference (SIC) has been posted. Join your fellow MicroISVs in Dallas, Texas July 15-17, 2010. Special topics include: Selling Your Product on Amazon.com, Code Signing and Authenticode, 25 Ways to Get Google AdWords Wrong, Software Update Strategies, Conversion Optimization, Essentials in Successful Software Promotions, and e-Commerce 3.0. Network with MicroISV pioneers and hundreds of your peers. See the full conference schedule at: http://sic.org/fullsched.asp. Hope to see you there!
Speaking of conferences, I’ll be giving the keynote for Deploy 2010 June 24th in Seattle – more info here. Early bird pricing ends Friday, so now’s a good time to hop on it.

Interesting Answers.Onstartups.com questions with useful answers:

News/posts for microISVs and Startups:

Leon Bambrick does great lists: 24 things to do, and 100 things *not* to do (yet) for building a MicroISV. Good luck on your new microISV Leon!
Good reading: Paul Graham on Organic Startup Ideas.
Crowdsourcing is changing the ways to launch and build a microISV or startup: The lazy CEO’s 10-step guide to crowdsourcing every business task.
Here’s ten things I need to do. How about you? 10 Marketing Resources Every App Should Provide
After reading umpteen posts saying the same thing about social media, here’s a breath of fresh air: 5 Surprising Social Media Business Success Stories
And not to bang the I-told-you-so about the iPad drum too loudly, here’s a post about the effect it’s had on one IT family: What iPads Did To My Family

StartupToDo.com, The Startup Success Podcast and other plugs:

Seven new Guides at StartupToDo.com (StartupToDo.com is a subscription-based community of startup founders; if you’re not already a member, you will need to start your free 30 day trial membership for these links to work.):
- Recording audio guidelines for videos, podcasts or Skype. By Corey Maass, dubfiler.com
- Improving your copywriting. By Pietro Polsinelli, patapage.com
- Managing your testimonials with Propadoo.com. By Jim Mueller, propadoo.com
- A better way to build your startup: the Lean Startup approach.
- Demoing your startup with Dimdim.
- Learn How to Conduct Competitive Research for Your Startup. By Daniel Kehoe,
- Getting the most out of attending a conference/event.
Five new Shows at the Startup Success Podcast:
- Show #64 [link] [iTunes]. Bob and Pat interview Maria Ly, co-founder of Skimble, an iPhone app for tracking and sharing all your sports activities (from rockclimbing to yoga and everything in between). Maria shares her experience as an Apple iPhone developer, how she and her partner and co-founder Gabriel Vanrenen make a business and personal relationship work, and lots more.
- Show #65 [link] [iTunes]. Bob and Pat interview two key players in the Startup Visa Act – Eric Ries (see show 59) and Representative Jared Polis (CO-D) who is sponsoring this bill in the House. Eric is also the organizer of the Startup Lessons Learned Conference on April 23rd about the lean startups methodology.
- Show #66 [link] [iTunes]. Bob and Pat interview Tom Foremski, one of the foremost journalists covering Silicon Valley, the world of startups and the shifting sands under the feet of traditional media. Tom was one of the first top rank journalists to go solo and leave the sinking mainstream media ship. You’ll find his analysis of the coming media tsunami and why every company – including your startup – is now a media company nourishing food for thought.
- Show #67 [link] [iTunes]. This week, Bob and Pat talk with Steven Rodin, President of StoragePipe Solutions, one of the first companies to provide online enterprise backup in North America about the changing face of business backup needs in the age of cloud computing. And we talk (starting about 19:20) with Marsh Sutherland and Ken Herron, 2 of the three co-founders of SocialGrow, a still-in-alpha New England startup that holds the promise of restructuring our social media relationships with business peers and personal friends.
- Show #68 [link] [iTunes]. This week, Bob and Pat interview friend of the show David Schenberg, CEO and cofounder of BusyEvent.com about new events technologies that change the equation both for organizers and attendees. David shares his insights on why being first matters, not being afraid of creating a hardware-based barrier to entry for potential competitors and choosing a business that can scale.
Four active Scholarships at StartupToDo.com:
- Details on the first 3: (OnStartups.com, Atomic Object and Microsoft Website Spark)
- Details on #4 can be found at the Seattle 2.0 blog, the organizers of Deploy 2010 here and here.

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(If you have an announcement of interest to your fellow microISV, indies or startups, please email me atbob.walsh@47hats.com with the word digest in the subject.)

MicroISV Digest Appcelerator, microISVs, startups

1 comment

Join the conversation

Anne Gunn - June 5, 2010

Leon Bambrick link is broken. Would love to see the list.

Comments are closed.

[This is a free sample from my ebook, Startup Sites that Sell! – Creating and Marketing your Unique Selling Proposition. You can get the rest of this ebook designed to substantially improve your startup web site for $24.95 USD, or, you can take advantage of tomorrow’s Bits du Jour Sale and grab it for a mere $12.47, including The Developer’s <code> ,a 50-lesson ebook by Ka Wai Cheung, of Chicago-based web development shop We Are Mammoth.]

Startup Sites that Sell! is a re-release of my popular MicroISV sites that Sell! ebook with much better formatting for iPads, tablets and printing.
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Before we can get to the good stuff, we need to do a bit of garbage collection. We need to take a look at six mistakes startups often make. These are mistakes for one simple reason: they turn off sales.

Mistake 1: Where’s your Hook?

We will talk about the Hook in much more detail in the next section, but the lack of a Hook is easily the number one mistake I see developers who sell software make. Simply put, the Hook answers the question, “Why should I spend another second on this web site?”

You have to put yourself in the mind of someone who for the very first time arrives at your site. They may be coming from Google search results, your Google Adwords campaign, your signature line in a forum posting, a blog post that mentions your product and three others or who knows where.

The first time visitor has no emotional investment in staying on your home page or landing page whatsoever. Yet. What you sell is completely irrelevant to them. For now. They have no reason to believe you actually sell something, let alone something that they want.

The Hook is your initial statement which answers why your product is relevant to them, why you might be credible as a solution provider and how exactly your solution is in one or more ways better than either continuing to have the problem or whatever they are doing or using right now.

Note: Initial means just that. It not everything about your product; it’s just enough to get them to read the next paragraph of your copy on your home page.

Second Note – it has to be the very first thing on the page that gets their attention – because if it’s not, either because it isn’t concise enough, compelling enough, big enough – most first time visitors will leave right then and there.

Best of, Marketing 47hats, ebooks, microISVs

Make a big deal out of it

Bob Walsh December 16, 2010

Sometimes when it comes to marketing your startup, it’s not what you do but how you do it. You probably give away a few free licenses a week to people you meet, but do you do it with style and make a remarkable, positive, experience out of it?

Here’s how: create some individually unique minicards at MOO. Besides doing an awesome job of business card printing – their paper stock is the best I’ve seen for cards -this US/UK firm lets you can customize each card.

For example, before doing a recent keynote up at Seattle, I made a simple minicard at MOO; on one side is my name, email and “This is a free six month Scholarship to StartupToDo.com! Enjoy! (email me to activate)”

On the other side I created 50 different backgrounds – in 5 solid colors I like, numbered 1 to 50. The result? Two sets of 50 cards each that actually feel like you are giving something of value. Cost? $20 plus shipping.

For your first 2011 tech conference, meetup or event, why not go a little further and make the free licenses you market with something they will remember?

Marketing microISV, startups

We don’t get lost anymore. Or do we?

Bob Walsh October 26, 2010

Pat and I were interviewing Jeff Haynie, founder of Appcelerator yesterday and something he said in passing stuck in my mind: “We don’t get lost anymore.”

It’s true – between maps on our phones, GPS, everyone a cellphone call away, when’s the last time you relied on a published printed map to move spatially from point A to point B?

Where we do get lost – hopelessly, totally, don’t-know-where-the-hell-I-am kind of lost – is navigating all the opportunities, data, services, communities, news, and noise on the web. A couple of examples: do you know what you’re going to read or watch or listen to online next? At least in the real ocean when you surf there’s a beach.

Here’s another example closer to home: how many programming tools have you found online which could have significantly improved your skills and abilities, but instead got lost in your daily info avalanche? Over a year ago Jeff told me (and you if you listen to our podcast) about Appcelerator. Now there’s over 6,000 apps in the iPhone App Store built with it. That’s 6,000 more apps than I ever found my way to writing with Objective C. How about you?

And not so incidentally, Jeff announced today $9 million in series B funding for Appcelerator, and a new serious partnership with PayPal to build out and scale the first real ubiquitous cross-mobile commerce platform. Kudos to Jeff for drawing his map and sticking to it.

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Photo by mikeyashworth.

Ideas Appcelerator