Ian Landsman

how we built besnappy for 317000

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

How we built BeSnappy.com for $317,000

You see a lot of press these days about seed/VC money, 2 million for this and 5 million for that. I thought it would be interesting to add up what it actually cost us to build a sophisticated web application using the latest technologies (BackBone, Laravel, Coffeescript, Less, message queues, email parsing, Facebook integration) and a top notch team. The results are interesting.

I suspect most people who read this will find it either amazingly expensive or remarkably cheap! I think we did a great job and kept the costs within what we could afford. Luckily, we already have a successful product so we could be our own Angel in this endeavor and not rely on any outside funding. In fact, if we were a true startup we could have done it a lot cheaper, more on that farther down.

These numbers are all ballpark, I looked up the figures, but didn’t add it all up to the penny. These costs are for the last half a year or so that we’ve worked on Snappy. Another important note is that we were not working on Snappy that entire period. There was the continuing work on HelpSpot, support on HelpSpot and Taylor was working on Laravel. I’ve taken that into account a bit in the numbers, again ballpark.

Payroll: $198,000

Obviously, this is most software companies largest expense and no exception for us. I couldn’t ask for a better team and wouldn’t trade these guys for anything.

Healthcare: $46,000

I considered rolling this into payroll, but it’s so shockingly huge I decided to break it out!

Other overhead: $20,000

This is just “stuff”. We have a small office, hardware, 401K matches, time off, software, etc.

Design: $50,000: Focus Lab

I spoke previously about my desire to implement a great design and to have a consistent brand experience for Snappy from logo through the app. This was the most (by several times) we ever paid an outside company. I think, if you have the means, it’s money well spent.

Note: this ballpark design cost posted with the permission of Focus Lab

Web services: $1,000: Sendgrid, Pusher, Bugsnag, others

Snappy is wired together with a lot of other great services. The monthly fees for these are shockingly affordable.

Lawyers: $6,000*

This is only an estimate, they haven’t started the work yet on the TOS and privacy policy.

Business Insurance: $1500*

This is also an estimate. We currently pay about $2,000 in errors and omissions insurance. The extra product, extra revenue (hopefully) and being a product where we host the data will add to the cost. This number could be higher, I’m being optimistic!

Servers: $0

So far we’ve spent very little on servers. We already have an existing infrastructure and partnership with EngineHosting. They’ve just been running everything on a custom VM cluster for us during the beta and it’s been very smooth so far.

A note here, that we did initial play with AWS when we thought we may use some of their other infrastructure pieces but it was so complicated, expensive and slow that in the end it just made sense to use a more traditional (I guess if you can call a VM cluster traditional) setup.

Domains $2,000

Yeah, so before Snappy was called Snappy it was going to be called SnapReply. I need to write up that change in direction another time, but the short version of this story is that we paid $2,000 to a domain squatter for a domain we’re not using :)

What’s it all mean?

That its not nearly as expensive to build a top notch product as all this money flying around makes it seem. Sure, with some VC money we could have hired more people but that doesn’t always equate to things getting done faster. In fact, it can have the opposite effect. Especially in a new product where there’s a lot of wandering around. Trying something, seeing if it works, reworking it and so on.

This isn’t to say there’s not a place for VC or even that under some scenarios I might not take some myself. But it’s so affordable to build a great app these days that it just makes sense to build it and get it rolling on your own if at all possible. See if it works, see if people like it and if you then want to take on some investors to scale it, pursue that from a more strategically advantageous position. Or don’t and just be profitable!

Update: The kids have started a Hacker News thread. I’ll follow up on comments over there

maximizing your startup dollars through great design

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Maximizing Your Startup Dollars Through Great Design

Deciding to build a second product is a very difficult decision. Especially when you’re a small bootstrap company. While we do well with our main product, HelpSpot, we don’t have a lot of cash to just throw around.

So in planning Snappy, I knew we had to maximize our dollars. I’d much rather spend money on the top notch developers we’ve hired than other consultants or services.

However, this conflicted with another goal I had for the product. That it have a very refined, strong, fully fleshed out brand. From the logo, to the colors, website, vibe, stickers, everything. One cohesive brand. Not a logo by one person and a website from another.

OK, that’s a reasonable goal but there’s more. I wanted to work with a top tier design firm. One that specialized in branding, but also had the in house chops to do all the other elements we’d need. This time there would be no half measures.

We’ve worked with a lot of great designers in the past, but for this project I felt we needed to look for someone with a very specific design style and set of skills. So I went looking around at what was going on in design right now. That’s when I became addicted to Dribbble.

What Dribbble provides is more than just a way to find designers. The real magic is it gives you insight into what the designers are working on right now. Design is art and people have natural ebbs and flows. Dribbble lets you see not just people who have done great work in the past (like a portfolio), but those who are at the top of their game right now. Today. That is incredibly powerful.

So now we can find great designers, but to maximize their value we need to pick one with a wide reach. This is the key to making an expensive, top tier designer affordable. A designer with incredible reach can turn your design expense into an advertising channel. Letting you apply both your design and advertising budget to this one aspect of your project. This is risky, but also has a huge potential payoff as it did for us.

In our case we ended up choosing Focus Lab. Not only is their work amazing, but the designers have a huge following on Dribbble and Twitter as well as a foothold in the web development community.

So what does finding a team with great reach bring? How can it cover the $25,000 - $75,000 you’re likely to pay for a full boat design project?

Let’s start with this. In 7 years of selling HelpSpot we’ve never generated as much buzz, sign ups or interest with any of dozens of advertising campaigns as our work with Focus Lab has for Snappy. The power of great design to inspire and motivate people is astounding.

The key is to shape this power and focus it. In our case, I was very clear with Focus Lab that I wanted them to speak about Snappy as much as possible from day 1. That the opportunity to leverage their reach was a significant aspect of why I thought they were a good fit. That their amazing work shouldn’t be buried in some project management app, but shared as we went so people could follow our progress.

You can see the results of this collaboration on Dribbble. Note how each image references our landing page and has a call to action to sign up: http://dribbble.com/ianlandsman/buckets/72071-Snappy

The best part about this is it proves to be a truly win/win scenario. With the designers posting on Dribbble and Twitter along with a link to our landing page we get huge prelaunch sign ups while they get increased exposure. Their profile is raised on those networks by showcasing their talents and we get to highlight them and recommend them via our network as we publicly share information on what we’re working on.

This path obviously won’t work if you have a budget of $0 :) but if you have a few more dollars than that this path can be truly transformative. There’s simply no way putting $10,000 into adwords or The Deck could buy you this type of publicity and engagement.

While in our case we had a healthy size budget, I think this can also work at smaller levels. The real key is to find a designer with amazing talent and the desire to share their work. One who gets the power of sharing and is willing to put in the extra effort to do so in a way that provides these additional benefits to all parties.

When we launched HelpSpot 7 years ago we had 80 people on the beta list. Snappy has thousands with little work on our end other than hiring a great team of designers. In fact, we haven’t even announced anything to our existing customer base at all yet.

It’s difficult to estimate the value of this, but acquiring this list via traditional methods would have been many times the cost. Hundreds of thousands of dollars probably and it would have been a much lower quality group compared with the excited (perhaps overly excited!) group we’ve been able to gather.

If you have an exciting and interesting project, this method of collaboration with a design team is some of the best money you can spend, with bang for the buck that’s off the charts. In essence, you’re getting world class design for free and you simply can’t beat that.

laravel 4 pre beta primer

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Laravel 4 Pre-Beta Primer

With the recent release of sneak peek video’s for Laravel 4 there’s been a lot of talk about it lately. It’s still pre-beta and as such there’s very little documentation, but I know a lot of people are excited and would at least like to kick the tires. I’m not an expert myself, but I’ve put together a little quick start guide so you can at least get it installed and be aware of a few important changes from Laravel 3 which should let you build a basic application in just a few minutes.

Note that any and all of this may change! This is written on November 12th, 2012 based on a pre-beta version. Laravel 4 is not currently supported by Taylor or on the forums. Use this at your own risk.

Installing Laravel 4

Laravel 4 now leverages PHP Composer in order to make keeping your application up to date and adding in new functionality a breeze. However, this does change the way we install Laravel. This processes should get you to a working base install.

You now have a basic Laravel 4 app in place.

Laravel 4 Gotcha’s and Changes

There’s a few changes in 4 that might trip up someone coming from V3. Let’s check out a few of the most important ones out.

Routing wildcards

You no longer use the routing wildcards like (:any). Instead, in your routes name your wildcards and they’ll be processed.

Registering Controllers

Laravel 4 uses Composer’s auto loading to load up classes you need. It’s setup to statically build a map of class names to file locations for performance. Issues come up when you create a new controller that the auto loader doesn’t know about. To fix that simply run the following command after creating a controller.

Adding functionality via Composer

One of the really great things about Laravel 4 is you can leverage Composer to include new functionality in your application effortlessly. Let’s say we want to add the powerful HTTP client Guzzle to our application. In composer.json, in the root folder, simply add it to the required section:

Then update composer to pull in the library and rebuild your auto load mappings.

You can now use Guzzle directly via its namespace or shortcut it by including the namespace at the top of the files that need it with the ‘use’ keyword.

You can find more great libraries over on Packagist.

Core File Location

The working name of Laravel 4 is Illuminate. I’m honestly not sure if that will remain in place when Laravel 4 is released, but for now you’ll find all the core framework files in

/vendor/illuminate

You’ll likely need to do some digging in there from time to time until the docs are ready.

Wrap

I’m really excited about Laravel 4. Taylor has done a ridiculous job putting this together in such a short time. Laravel 4 isn’t only going to let us PHP developers do things faster, but also make us better programmers. The future is bright for PHP and especially for Laravel.

building a better human helper

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Building a Better Human Helper

Help desk software is ugly utilitarian stuff. It’s designed to collect data, to manage, to organize, to control. Formal help desks have a lot of demands placed on them as they sit at the center of the organization, between the customers and management. In turn, help desk software tends to be sophisticated and complicated. Designed to perform the functions of what should really be done by 4, 5 or 6 separate applications.

While this creates a complex application, within the structure of a formal help desk it can and does work. Especially with applications that find the right balance (see HelpSpot).

Help desk apps are some of the oldest B2B software applications and have in many ways remained unchanged in concept. But what has changed is the world business is conducted in. Customer service is no longer the job of just a chosen few in the organization. The rise of email and social media as primary contact points means it (should be) easier to include the people with the proper knowledge in the support loop.

Beyond traditional corporate scenarios, the ability of customers to email you or post a private message to your Facebook page has forced customer service upon all types of organizations and the people in them. These accidental agents are often left either unequipped for the task or over equipped with the large heavy tools mentioned above.

This next generation of customer service worker can’t be weighed down by the customer service legacy driving most help desk applications. They don’t need infinite custom fields, complex self service portals, layers and layers of IT type tools such as password resetting for your Active Directory server.

Rather they need a tool that does exactly what they need it to do and nothing more. That connects to other tools and systems seamlessly to extend functionality when needed. One that empowers them to work faster and get back to the other work that inspires them.

Years of creating and supporting a more traditional help desk application has given us a lot of insight into the needs of this new wave of workers. We see the pain they go through in trying to squish themselves into the old model. So we decided to build something new, just for them. That meets their needs and the needs of any organization that wants a simpler, more flexible, more efficient, more affordable help desk experience without a lot of overhead.

Introducing Snappy

Our solution is a tool designed from the ground up to exclusively support email and Facebook Pages. It doesn’t do the other “stuff". it doesn’t have loads of settings, it doesn’t need any configuration at all. Sign up and 30 seconds later you’re answering customer support email faster than ever.

The unique design allows you to see many different tickets at the same time so it’s easy to stay on top of everything without any digging. Nothing falls through the cracks. And since we put the emphasis on waiting tickets, it’s always clear what needs responding to. No more overwhelming lists of tickets or uncertainty about what’s been answered and what hasn’t.

An area all but ignored by other tools is team communication. Snappy’s one-of-a-kind Team Wall provides a unified location to discuss problems, information and even just brag about that customer who sent in an over the top thank you email.

There’s a lot more to share over the coming months, but here’s a few screenshots to give you some idea where we’re headed.

I know so many of you have followed the path of UserScape for the past 7 years with HelpSpot and I’m really excited to have you along on this journey. Snappy is a huge new challenge, but we believe it’s going to empower thousands of people in ways simply not possible with the current generation of tools and raise the bar for the next generation of help desk applications.

If you’re interested in seeing where we go, please sign up for our mailing list at http://www.besnappy.com.

Have a question/comment? Catch us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ianlandsman and http://www.twitter.com/besnappy

PHP

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

PHP

Jeff Atwood has an interesting piece today about PHP and it's horribleness while acknowledging it's greatness :)

Unfortunately Jeff seems to fall into the same trap as many programmers these days. Sure PHP is ugly, it's got some inconsistencies that make it hard to work with, etc. All of this is very well known and documented.

However, those are all minor issues in the big picture. If you're trying to build a commercial product or an open source product with major legs PHP is still usually your best choice. Here's why:

Ubiquitous

Jeff addresses this, but it cannot be understated. It is literally installed on every hosting platform in the world. There are essentially no mainstream hosting companies where you can't use PHP.

Ease of Installation

In the very rare cases where PHP isn't provided for you, getting it up and running is usually about 2 minutes of work. apt-get install php5 and you're done. Done! No messing with 7 different systems, trying to get x to connect to y. 1 command and you're done. Even in crazy cases where you need to setup Apache or if you want to go way out there and do Nginx you're still talking just minutes until you're ready to go.

Great Performance

In addition to being easy to setup, the default setup is most times very performant with no messing around at all. PHP is designed to be fast out of the box by it's very nature. No special techniques required. And when you get big enough to need even greater performance those problems have already been solved. A quick search finds you thousands of answers to your performance questions and finding a consultant to help is also easily done if required.

Great Tools

This I think is an area that Jeff really missed the boat on. It's obvious he hasn't actually been working with PHP much lately as the tools have gotten so much better. Sure, when I built HelpSpot 7 years ago the tools sucked. You had to do everything the long way.

Now though there are a lot of great tools. We contribute a lot to the open source framework Laravel which is my favorite, but if you like more structure there's Symfony and Zend Framework. Want something super light? Try Slim. No matter your need there's a high quality framework that fits it and in most of these cases great documentation and tutorials as well.

Easy for the Newb

"Real" programmers hate this more than running out of Mountain Dew at 4am but PHP is easy for non-programmers. You can get in there and hack around. You can make shit work on your own without asking for a lot of help. That's simply impossible in most languages. My 60 year old father hacks around Wordpress all the time. If it was Python and he had to get all his tabs right it'd never happen, but in PHP you can just go in and "do stuff".

I know you're all cringing out there right now, but this is good! So what, maybe once in a while something breaks or his Wordpress install becomes slightly less secure. It's empowering and enabling people that other languages cast aside.

It's Not About You!

Obviously in recent years certain frameworks and languages that we all know have gotten a lot of props for being programmer friendly. That's great, but the reason PHP is so successful is because in the big scheme of things that doesn't matter. PHP is about the above. It's about being powerful enough for pro's and simple enough for newb's.

The reason it hasn't been supplanted yet is because no languages have attempted to do the above. In fact, most seem focused on becoming programmer friendly while ignoring the above completely.

So Jeff, I hope your new project is going to highlight a lesser known language that accomplishes the above as that's the kind of language we need to replace PHP. Not one only for the Mountain Dew crowd, but one for the people.

starting is fun but finishing is rewarding

Wed, 30 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Starting is fun, Finishing is rewarding

One of the challenges programmers face when making the transition to entrepreneur is controlling the urges that come 4-6-8 months into the process. You see, the start is fun. The start is exciting, a jump into the unknown.

The start is when you get to do what you love to do best which is code. How are we going to architect it? How will it scale? Should I use Laravel, RoR, Django? Postgres or MySQL? Memcache, Varnish, Less, Coffescript, BackBone. As a programmer these are the ideas that get us excited. The opportunity to play with new toys, to design and build new things.

That's all good and an important part of the process, but after those decisions are made, after a big chunk of the code is written you'll usually hit a wall. Your mind wanders and you'll get excited about something new.

Maybe you heard about a new technology that peaked your interest, it could be you thought of a cool domain name and it was actually available. It'll be something small usually, but before you know it you've spent a week thinking and working on this new thing.

That's OK. It happens. I think it's just the way we're wired. Our minds need the break after a period of time of working on only one thing.

This is also the time of greatest danger. The joy of a new start is in your grasp and if you're serious about being an entrepreneur you need to recognize what this is. That you need to put this idea aside and stay focused. It's really really hard. Every bone in your body will say to do the new fun thing, you're sure it's a better idea, you've spent several ~~minutes~~ hours researching it and are absolutely sure!

Chances are though that it's not. Hold strong, because finishing is what's rewarding. Finishing is where the glory is. Finishing is how you build a career. Everything that happens after you code it up is where a business is made.

laravel

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Laravel

The Search

Last November ('11), I ran across a relatively new PHP framework called Laravel. At the time I was researching the various PHP frameworks in order to get a clear picture on the current state of things. I've always used CodeIgniter in the past and was generally very happy with it so I hadn't bothered to keep pace with frameworks over the last few years.

I've used CodeIgniter in several back office systems, but HelpSpot (our main product) doesn't use a framework at all. It was created before any of the major PHP frameworks (crazy!).

However, I was researching what's out there because I wanted to move us onto a framework if it made sense to do so. For HelpSpot, but also for other products we may create in the future (as all entrepreneurs do, I have a mighty list of ideas close at hand).

I went through the usual suspects: CodeIgniter, Zend, Symfony 2, Fuel, Slim, Silex, etc etc. All have their pluses and minuses, none really captured my imagination. Only a few make really great use of PHP 5.3+'s capabilities and those are the ones I liked the least both aesthetically and conceptually for our particular use cases.

Then one day I ran across Laravel. Instantly I was hooked. It had just the right combination of simplicity, power and elegance that I was hoping for. It was young for sure and missing some key elements, but still the core was there. More impressively, there was already a budding and enthusiastic community around it.

Fortunate Circumstances

Now, at the time I was researching frameworks I was also in the process of trying to find and hire our first full time developers at UserScape (besides me). As I researched further, I found out that Laravel was the work of just one person, Taylor Otwell. He was working on it nights and weekends after his day job.

I've come to since find out that Taylor wasn't really a PHP guy, working primarily in .NET before deciding to pickup PHP a few years back. I think a great deal of why Laravel is so unique is due to that fact. He learned PHP at 5.3+. Most people you see working on PHP frameworks have been around since 4 and before.

That rather unique trait (along with those other useful traits like ingenuity, hard work, a knack for making complex things simple) to me is the key. It's why he was able to come at the problem from a new direction with a clean slate. Not just the simple thing of not supporting PHP < 5.3, but not knowing PHP < 5.3 means he was unencumbered by all that mental debt :)

Now even though I'm not that bright, I can put two and two together. What if I tried contacting this fellow and see if he might be interested in joining UserScape where we could continue to develop Laravel and flesh it out for enterprise level development while also working on all the new hotness we have planned for the coming few years. And so he did!

Laravel at UserScape

So for the past few months we've let Taylor have at it working full time on Laravel to add all sorts of nifty new things that you'll be finding in Laravel 3. Our other new dev, Eric Barnes has also been working on Laravel, building out the Laravel Bundles application for sharing all your cool bundles and doing the design implementation for the new Laravel.com website.

It's been an amazing experience working with these two extremely talented guys for the last few months. I'm really proud of all they've accomplished in such a short time.

Our work on Laravel and in building on top of Laravel is also going to provide a mechanism for us to give back to the software development community in a much larger way than we've ever been able to do in the past. I personally find this aspect the most satisfying and am really looking forward to what I consider a whole new chapter in UserScape's evolution.

Laravel 3 is only the beginning.....

Laravel Version 3

I'm sure many of you have checked out Laravel 3 already, but if you haven't here's some of the highlights:

Bundles
- Create compartmentalized bits of functionality for your own applications and when appropriate even share them on the bundle site
Migrations
Database Schema Builder
Command Line Interface
IoC container
Integrated Unit Testing
Events

Laravel's resources have also been improved with the addition of:

An amazing new website design by Fixel
Completely re-written documentation
The bundle sharing application

This is on top of the already great resources in the forums and IRC (#laravel).

Check it out

This is just the tip of the iceberg. There's tons of awesome new features in Laravel 3 and more will be added in the coming months. If you're a PHP dev (or even if you're not!) have a look.

codeigniter license

Sat, 29 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000

CodeIgniter License

Recently CodeIgniter changed it's license to a relatively obscure open source license, OSL3. As I'm in the process of researching frameworks for a new project of sorts (more on that someday) and given that CI is my preferred framework I decided to research this a bit and compare the license with some other popular frameworks. In doing so we can see the additional complexity the new CI license introduces. While it may or may not be a problem for actual commercial development the sheer additional complexity is a big negative for CI, which is unfortunate as I believe it's the best framework out there with the best community.

When comparing the licenses the additional complexity is easily apparent. The Symfony and Zend FW licenses are short and eminetely clear. The CI one is far more complex and leaves IMHO many open questions as to it's actual usability for a commercially distributed product. Of course I can and should contact my lawyer before choosing an open source framework to build on, but again the first two options here are extremely clear (and hence less expensive to analyze).

Symfony

Copyright (c) 2004-2011 Fabien Potencier

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Zend Framework

Copyright (c) 2005-2011, Zend Technologies USA, Inc. All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

Neither the name of Zend Technologies USA, Inc. nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

New CodeIgniter License

Open Software License (“OSL”) v. 3.0 This Open Software License (the "License") applies to any original work of authorship (the "Original Work") whose owner (the "Licensor") has placed the following licensing notice adjacent to the copyright notice for the Original Work:

Licensed under the Open Software License version 3.0

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its twitter time

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000

It's Twitter Time

Hi All,

Sorry for not writing in.... a long time. It's just so busy here that it's hard to find the time, plus the burden of managing the comments makes it all just too much. So I wanted to let you know that I am very active every day over on Twitter. The format and time requirements just fit in better with my life at this point.

I'm not shutting down shop here, but you can expect fairly infrequent posts as it's been for some time.

So if you want to keep the interaction going please follow me at @ianlandsman and you can get HelpSpot related Tweets at @helpspot.

Thanks!

your product is free because youre lazy and scared

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Your Product is Free Because You're Lazy and Scared

David over at 37signals had a nice post today about why startups seem to have abandoned charging customers for goods and services: "How did the web lose faith in charging for stuff?.

Of course, I agree with charging people for a quality product. I make my living doing it. However, I think there's a point he's missing in there. It's a point that people often put aside as not the primary reason, but I think it's a much more prominent factor than people think. What's changed in the past few years is that many startups are founded by programmers and programmers are inherently lazy.

In most cases, this is a good trait for a programmer. It leads to wanting to do things more efficiently, maximize speed, and can even lead to better quality IMHO. However, when it comes to running a business this attribute has some negative consequences. In my work the one I most often see is the total disregard for customer service.

Customer service is almost always viewed as a necessary evil. Annoying customers always poking around looking for answers to things which are right in front of them and causing us to take time out of programming to help them.

So this leads into the great cop-out. Make it beta and hey, make it free. Those 2 tags let the programmer get out of so much. Customer has a problem? Screw off, it's free. Can't find a phone number or email address to contact us by? Screw off, it's free.

It's so much easier to think that Google's going to buy you and that's how you'll get paid or that throwing up a Google ad will make you so much money that you can safely ignore the ~~ad clicking drones~~ users.

Things that are outside your comfort zone are always scary and I think that's the case here. Programming focused startups fear customer service. They'd much rather have a half hidden link to a forum they occasionally check (only after a 36 hour Mountain Dew fueled coding session) than a prominent email address which they answer promptly.

In some ways of course they're not wrong. It does take an incredible amount of time to answer all those emails. On the other hand, if you have more emails than you can handle that's probably a good sign. Also, those people who take the time to email in often end up being your best customers and biggest spokespeople. They have more than just time invested, they have hard cash invested and that's a big difference. They want you to succeed, they're loyal and they are in many ways a new companies biggest asset.

David obviously has a business focused mind and 37 started out as a customer focused company, which is why it seems logical to them to charge for things you create. I think this is very much the exception these days so it'll be interesting to see if David is correct and this starts to swing the other way.

On the upside, us profitable money charging companies can just keep tooling along :-)

how to sell more software by adding 12 characters to your homepage

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

How to Sell More Software by Adding 12 Characters to Your Homepage

Yes, this is the secret to how to sell more software. I'm the first one to break the sacred oath of profitable software companies and reveal the secret of how just 12 characters can make you significantly more money. Are you ready to hear it? Are you sure.....

OK here it is. Put your phone number on your website. Just like this:

It really is that easy, it WILL lead to more sales. If you sell B2B it will lead to bigger sales as generally people making large purchases like to talk to a human.

Now I know all the excuses you people use in not publishing a phone number. It's all BS. I don't care that 37 signals only does email support. I don't care that you only do this part time and you can't be there to answer the phone. I don't care that you hate talking on the phone.

It's time to suck it up, especially in this economy where people are going to be shopping around. Having a phone conversation puts you in a much stronger position with the consumer than just an email. Just having a phone number clearly available improves your product positioning in peoples mind. It implies you're here to stay, you're approachable, if they ever had a problem they could call. The biggest secret of all is that most people don't call. We still only get a call or two a day on average and often no calls at all and we've been in business 4 years, are linked from everywhere and have a sizable customer base at this point.

So let's go through your excuses.

1) 37Signals only does email support, why should I have to do phone support
Of course this one is the easiest. Because you're not them. You will never ever ever ever be them or anything close to them. You're trying to make a solid living. The chance of you hitting the jackpot is slim, don't pretend it isn't. You can't tell customers to go scratch like they can. Every single potential customer is hugely important to you (or should be).

2) I only work on my business part time and am not there to answer the phone
Umm, so what. Get an answering machine or digital voicemail box. You don't have to answer the phone every time it rings. Let it go to voicemail and respond once a day or when you get home from your day job. It's a big myth that if you have a phone number you need to have someone there to answer it every time it rings. Sure that's better, but having a phone number is still way more important than not having one and at this point everyone is comfortable leaving voicemail's as long as you get back to people in a reasonable time (say 1 business day).

3) I'm a programming dork, I don't want to talk on the phone
If you're reading my blog you're likely trying to be in business. In business you have to do stuff you don't like doing, oh... 75% of the time. That's just the way it is. If you want customers you have to understand your customers and the phone is a great way to do that. If you're serious about having a business then working with people is going to be key to your success and the phone is a big part of that.

Listen, the phone is your friend. The phone is the key you making your business approachable to customers. It's also how you're likely to get some of your best customers, so bust out your website code and throw your number up there. The worst case scenario is you get lots of phone calls and if they're not relevant you can always pull it down. On the other hand you may get great calls that lead to sales and happy customers. It's worth a shot.

winter pictures

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Winter Pictures

Here's a few nice winter pictures from the past few days just to change it up. Actually I didn't spend a lot of time framing the pictures nicely, but still I think they're nice. I could do without that house being there, but I'd need a bulldozer for that.

Ice on the Hudson:

Sunset:

Poughkeepsie at Night:

how to start a microisv

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000

How to Start a MicroISV

Andy with a great quick start guide to

starting a MicroISV. This covers all that boring stuff nobody covers in their starting a business articles. Well, maybe not nobody.

how to compete when all you do is solve problems

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

How to Compete When All You Do is Solve Problems

Scoble has an interesting post today. In many ways I think it sums up or represents some of the frustration I've felt working in the tech software world. Getting publicity, links, mentions, any type of reasonable attention when all your product does is solve real world problems is very hard, bordering on impossible. There's simple no market any longer for reporting on hard working, profitable companies.

I've thought about this a lot and I don't have a really good solution for how to bring the conversation back to our side. Short of building in features or even entire products devoted to just getting attention (and not solving real problems) I'm not sure what to do. My current thinking though is to try and ride it out. This environment can't last forever, hopefully when it changes companies that have kept having good results and making real customers happy will be popular again.

On the up side, the impending downturn in 09 could help shake some of this up as there will likely be less ego companies around which should be good news for the rest of us.

help desk priority structure

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Help Desk Priority Structure

Over on HelpSpotted: Creating a Help Desk Priority Structure

helpspot 26 sneak peek

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

HelpSpot 2.6 Sneak Peek

If you're interested in seeing some of the new features in the next HelpSpot release we have a post about it on HelpSpotted. http://helpspotted.userscape.com/2008/12/10/version-26-sneak-peek/

the helpspot blog

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000

HelpSpotted: The HelpSpot Blog

Just a quick post to let you know that we've launched HelpSpotted. The official HelpSpot blog. We're going to be posting tips, tricks, sneak peeks and more there. We already have a lot of good stuff up so take a look.

I'm also trying to setup a blogroll of HelpSpot customer blogs on the site so if you're a customer and have a blog please post your URL on this post: http://helpspotted.userscape.com/2008/12/10/customer-blogroll/

blog blazers book giveaway

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Blog Blazers Book Giveaway!

HelpSpot customer and fellow MicroISV Stephane Grenier just released his work of love, Blog Blazers. The book is a series of interviews Stephane conducted with 40 popular bloggers. I'm honored to be one of the bloggers, though there's a lot more talented bloggers than myself in the book including the likes of Seth Godin, Eric Sink, Jeff Atwood, etc.

One of the keys to my success if not the primary key has been this blog. While I don't write as much as I used to, the early years of UserScape and it's success were almost completely dependent on this blog and the traffic it generated. Without this blog I'd almost certainly be working "For the Man", filed away in some cubical farm.

While blogs are no longer "new" as they were when I started, I still think they're a key component to any startups business, especially a MicroISV. Now, one problem with blogs is that it's often hard to find concise advice on how to blog well. Even just figuring out where to start looking for advice is difficult. Sure there's lots of "how to blog" links in Google, but few get into the subtle details that make a truly successful blogger. Blog Blazers does just that. If you're starting out in blogging or want to grow your blogging presence this book is where to start.

Now, Stephane has been kind enough to offer my readers an amazing opportunity. He's given me 10 copies of Blog Blazers to give away free on this here blog. I've thought a lot about how I might give these away. I don't want to do anything cheesy nor do I have time for a very complicated give away. So here's what I've decided:

To receive a free copy of Blog Blazers be one of the first 10 people to agree to write up a complete review of Blog Blazers on their own blog. That's it. This is on the honor system. If you're not going to write up a review about it then please don't ask for a copy and let someone else have it. You must have a blog to be eligible.

If you're ready to commit to doing a review then just do the following:

Post a comment below stating you'd like to review Blog Blazers and include your blog URL
Include your real email in the email field

I'll email the 10 people to get their address information and ship off the books, probably next week.

If you have a blog and think your readers might be interested in this giveaway please link them over.

Thanks!

Update: We're at 10. Thanks everyone!

are you hiring ive got your man

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Are you Hiring? I've Got Your Man

My friend Kevin Dangoor recently lost his position at a technology company in Michigan. He's looking for new opportunities that can make use of both his project management and development skills. If you're in the Python community you might already know Kevin from the popular TurboGears framework he created. If you or someone you know is hiring please look him up. You can get more details on his background and his contact information here:

http://www.blueskyonmars.com/2008/10/29/in-the-market-for-a-job/

another way your product may benefit in a downturn

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Another Way Your Product May Benefit in a Downturn

Nightly news is mostly doom and gloom these days, but it doesn't have to be this way for some of us ISV's. If you've been smart (lucky?) enough to position your product mid market these could turn out to be boom times for you.

Fear and/or true financial need is almost certainly going to affect business and consumer software spending. However, there are some bits of software that companies (and to a lesser extent consumers) can't or won't do without. If you sell a product like that you may have just hit the lottery. Your product is now "right priced", "the cost effect solution".

This is not about being cheapest. In fact I think the cheapest software could be hurt. Junk is junk. However, many people purchasing software are going to take a closer look at mid tier when they may have previously only been interested in premium.