If you're interested in marketing at the microISV level or just like listening to geeks trying to sound professional while talking over Skype, check out the latest installment of The Mac Developer Network Year One podcast hosted by Keith Alperin of Helium Foot Software:
Mac Software Business Year One Episode 3: Marketing
In addition to Keith, Steve "Scotty" Scott and Gus Mueller return for this third installment to discuss their marketing efforts and related microISV wisdom. Of course, I'm in the mix too (probably talking too much) but don't let that stop you from checking it out.
Also while you're there, make sure to join the The Mac Developer Network and support all the wonderful content that Scotty and his crew collect and produce for the Mac developer community. It's great stuff!
Peace.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Friday, November 07, 2008
Fighting the Fear
I have a confession: I'm afraid.
After all my bold statements that the only true failure is quitting and doing nothing, I'm a bit paralyzed by fear trying to ship MoneyWell 1.4. There's the fear that I didn't do enough to make this an amazing release. Fear that the known issues are deal breakers and will cause negative reviews. Fear that there is an unknown issue that will turn out to be a huge bug and cause major support issues.
Insidious fear. Fear that causes my world to feel cold and dark.
Of course this is crazy thinking but because my brain is dealing with it, I have to do something about that. My wife's suggestion was to blog about it, and since she's usually right about these things, here I go.
I do know that the best way to eliminate fear is to expose it to light—fear hates the bright light of truth.
FEAR: I didn't do enough in this release.
FACT: The feedback from beta testers is that 1.4 has so many enhancements and additions that they can't believe this is a free minor upgrade instead of a 2.0 release with an upgrade fee.
FEAR: Known issues (a.k.a. bugs) will be everyone's focus and cause negative reviews.
FACT: Yes, there are a couple of features that I wish worked better, but there are too many great new additions to let these problems stop this release from happening. If these problems keep 10 percent of the customer base from using a feature but 90 percent still benefit, then why shouldn't I ship and help the majority? The truth is, there isn't a good reason.
FEAR: An unknown bug is going to be big enough to hurt customers, cause mass complaints and refund requests, and bring down the company with it.
FACT: Every software product has bugs and historically I have fixed the bugs in our products very quickly with patches. The reason MoneyWell is built with an automatic update service is so customers get the latest and greatest release as soon as it's published. Plus, version 1.4 has had the longest beta cycle of any product release and has had over 200 beta testers actively using it—the most we've ever had!
Being afraid is natural. Letting fear dictate what I do or don't do is just plain nuts. Writing about it makes me wonder why I even gave fear this much time and energy when I have so much productive work to complete.
That said, there are some new toolbar icons being designed by a talented graphic artist to replace my amateur hack job and lots of documentation to finish. It's no longer fear keeping me from pushing the button. Once these two tasks are done, so is MoneyWell 1.4. Glancing out the window, I just noticed it's a beautiful, sunny day. Life's looking pretty good right now.
Peace.
After all my bold statements that the only true failure is quitting and doing nothing, I'm a bit paralyzed by fear trying to ship MoneyWell 1.4. There's the fear that I didn't do enough to make this an amazing release. Fear that the known issues are deal breakers and will cause negative reviews. Fear that there is an unknown issue that will turn out to be a huge bug and cause major support issues.
Insidious fear. Fear that causes my world to feel cold and dark.
Of course this is crazy thinking but because my brain is dealing with it, I have to do something about that. My wife's suggestion was to blog about it, and since she's usually right about these things, here I go.
I do know that the best way to eliminate fear is to expose it to light—fear hates the bright light of truth.
FEAR: I didn't do enough in this release.
FACT: The feedback from beta testers is that 1.4 has so many enhancements and additions that they can't believe this is a free minor upgrade instead of a 2.0 release with an upgrade fee.
FEAR: Known issues (a.k.a. bugs) will be everyone's focus and cause negative reviews.
FACT: Yes, there are a couple of features that I wish worked better, but there are too many great new additions to let these problems stop this release from happening. If these problems keep 10 percent of the customer base from using a feature but 90 percent still benefit, then why shouldn't I ship and help the majority? The truth is, there isn't a good reason.
FEAR: An unknown bug is going to be big enough to hurt customers, cause mass complaints and refund requests, and bring down the company with it.
FACT: Every software product has bugs and historically I have fixed the bugs in our products very quickly with patches. The reason MoneyWell is built with an automatic update service is so customers get the latest and greatest release as soon as it's published. Plus, version 1.4 has had the longest beta cycle of any product release and has had over 200 beta testers actively using it—the most we've ever had!
Being afraid is natural. Letting fear dictate what I do or don't do is just plain nuts. Writing about it makes me wonder why I even gave fear this much time and energy when I have so much productive work to complete.
That said, there are some new toolbar icons being designed by a talented graphic artist to replace my amateur hack job and lots of documentation to finish. It's no longer fear keeping me from pushing the button. Once these two tasks are done, so is MoneyWell 1.4. Glancing out the window, I just noticed it's a beautiful, sunny day. Life's looking pretty good right now.
Peace.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Where'd You Go?
No, I didn't die and I'm not in a coma, per se. I'm trying to finish MoneyWell 1.4 and ship it.
This has been a very difficult release because I started the beta process very early. There was a method to my madness though: I wanted people testing the new direct connect downloads from financial institutions, so I added that feature first and published a beta.
Our beta testers, therefore, have had to put up with several "alpha" cycles of MoneyWell that normally aren't pushed to the public. Normally when I develop software, I try to put all the features in it before beta so that everyone knows what the final release looks like and they are just waiting for the reported bugs to be fixed. This has not been a normal beta test.
If you're a developer and you want to get really sick of looking at your software, just try testing it for over three months straight. I rarely even run the 1.3 release so I've forgotten how much has changed in the new version. I keep thinking, "Did I actually do anything in this release?" Glancing down the new feature list helps me realize that I have and that this will be a very good version of MoneyWell.
I've also been blessed to have a great group of beta testers. Not only is it the biggest I've ever managed (over 200 people have tested 1.4), but they have been very quick with bug reports and have given me great detailed steps and sample data files. If this were a movie, someone would be standing right now starting that slow clap for the MoneyWell beta team while everyone else stood to join in.
I will do a proper blog post after this release is out and try to avoid another coding coma. It will be hard though since I'm already working on the iPhone version of MoneyWell and that will most likely consume my time through the end of the year. And we have lots of video tutorials and web site enhancements planned. And then of course coding will start on MoneyWell 2.0. And there's also…
Let's just say, I don't foresee any boredom in my near future.
Peace.
This has been a very difficult release because I started the beta process very early. There was a method to my madness though: I wanted people testing the new direct connect downloads from financial institutions, so I added that feature first and published a beta.
Our beta testers, therefore, have had to put up with several "alpha" cycles of MoneyWell that normally aren't pushed to the public. Normally when I develop software, I try to put all the features in it before beta so that everyone knows what the final release looks like and they are just waiting for the reported bugs to be fixed. This has not been a normal beta test.
If you're a developer and you want to get really sick of looking at your software, just try testing it for over three months straight. I rarely even run the 1.3 release so I've forgotten how much has changed in the new version. I keep thinking, "Did I actually do anything in this release?" Glancing down the new feature list helps me realize that I have and that this will be a very good version of MoneyWell.
I've also been blessed to have a great group of beta testers. Not only is it the biggest I've ever managed (over 200 people have tested 1.4), but they have been very quick with bug reports and have given me great detailed steps and sample data files. If this were a movie, someone would be standing right now starting that slow clap for the MoneyWell beta team while everyone else stood to join in.
I will do a proper blog post after this release is out and try to avoid another coding coma. It will be hard though since I'm already working on the iPhone version of MoneyWell and that will most likely consume my time through the end of the year. And we have lots of video tutorials and web site enhancements planned. And then of course coding will start on MoneyWell 2.0. And there's also…
Let's just say, I don't foresee any boredom in my near future.
Peace.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
The Secret of Success
So many books are written about how to be successful. There are plenty of webinars and seminars you can attend. Their pitch is that there's a "secret" to success and all you have to do is pay a few dollars to hear it. Trust me, the secret is not that mysterious. In fact, I'll give you the answer for free.
The secret of success is never failing.
Wow! Really Kev? Is that all there is to it? Man, I'm gonna get rich now with that fantastically sage advice!
But seriously, that is the key. Making mistakes isn't failing. Having to change directions isn't failing. Losing battles isn't failing. You only fail by coming to a complete stop.
No matter how bad it gets you can never, never, never stop pushing forward. There can be no option for failure. The problem is that people don't really understand the true meaning of failure. They think that success is getting rich in six months without any pain or problems. They think successful people have some magical skills that keep them from making big mistakes. They think admitting you did something wrong is the same as failing.
Pursuing perfection is great. Requiring perfection is crap. It's an excuse to quit. Successful people fail often, they just don't slow down long enough to let anyone know it. You could say that success is movement.
In a previous company of mine, I had to shut down an online service in which we had invested more than a million dollars of effort and equipment. It was painful and embarrassing but it was not failing. The service was flawed and was bleeding cash. The solution became very obvious to me one day: We had to kill it to keep the company going. In that case, failure would have been hanging on to that boat anchor and continuing to swim with it.
I had a sales trainer who made the analogy of success being similar to a flight from Los Angeles to Honolulu. In the beginning, the pilot and navigator chart a southwestern course to their destination but the runway used required a takeoff facing east. After the plane took off, they make a banking turn and head southwest towards Hawaii. During the flight, they run into wind shears that cause them to head due south for a while and then due west after that. Several more course corrections are made that take them off their exact planned flight path. Should the pilot have given up and shut off the engines because the plane wasn't always facing directly towards Hawaii? Certainly not. I believe stopping in mid flight would definitely qualify as failure.
The same goes for a business. There will always be something that makes you want to shut off the engines and walk out of the cockpit. Sales are lower than projections, milestones are missed, technology gets in the way—all these and more will make you feel like failure is giving you the stink eye. The trick is to flip each and every one of these around and use them to your advantage.
Low sales are a chance to reinvent your marketing or products. Missed milestones give you an opportunity to learn to set more realistic dates the next time. Technology glitches? Yeah, they just suck. But knowing that they happen and will continue to happen gives you an edge over those that will give up when they hit the same wall you did. Think about it. If you know that most people give up and let a business die when things get tough, you can zip past them just by not stopping. You can even crawl and win a race against a corpse.
We hit a small wall this week and it was not fun, but it has only hardened my resolve to charge forward. My first employee was hired away by a large corporation. This was our decision and not some corporate espionage. It takes a lot of cash flow to run our household of three older teens, and even with cost cutting we knew we couldn't continue this burn rate very much longer. Our compromise was to have Judy get a job closer to home with shorter hours so she could continue to help with No Thirst Software and also contribute to our financial needs.
The tough part is that this felt like a failure on my part. Things may have been different if I had stockpiled more cash in the last two years or cut expenses earlier or programmed faster so we were selling MoneyWell 1.4 and an iPhone version. These are all great ideas, but also all in the past. I can't change any of them now and lamenting about what didn't get done will not help us on our success path.
We are successful. We have a great product lineup that is only getting better with each release. We have thousands of customers praising our work and asking for more. And the greatest success: We had a chance to work together for weeks and strategize about how to improve operations and the company in general. What was done and learned in that short period of time has strengthened our microISV beyond any financial investment.
What's the secret to success? Stay positive. Learn from everything you do—and fail to do. And most of all, stay the course. You and your passengers are not going to be any happier if you shut down your engines at 20,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean. Success is simply continuing forward. Never stop.
Peace.
The secret of success is never failing.
Wow! Really Kev? Is that all there is to it? Man, I'm gonna get rich now with that fantastically sage advice!
But seriously, that is the key. Making mistakes isn't failing. Having to change directions isn't failing. Losing battles isn't failing. You only fail by coming to a complete stop.
No matter how bad it gets you can never, never, never stop pushing forward. There can be no option for failure. The problem is that people don't really understand the true meaning of failure. They think that success is getting rich in six months without any pain or problems. They think successful people have some magical skills that keep them from making big mistakes. They think admitting you did something wrong is the same as failing.
Pursuing perfection is great. Requiring perfection is crap. It's an excuse to quit. Successful people fail often, they just don't slow down long enough to let anyone know it. You could say that success is movement.
In a previous company of mine, I had to shut down an online service in which we had invested more than a million dollars of effort and equipment. It was painful and embarrassing but it was not failing. The service was flawed and was bleeding cash. The solution became very obvious to me one day: We had to kill it to keep the company going. In that case, failure would have been hanging on to that boat anchor and continuing to swim with it.
I had a sales trainer who made the analogy of success being similar to a flight from Los Angeles to Honolulu. In the beginning, the pilot and navigator chart a southwestern course to their destination but the runway used required a takeoff facing east. After the plane took off, they make a banking turn and head southwest towards Hawaii. During the flight, they run into wind shears that cause them to head due south for a while and then due west after that. Several more course corrections are made that take them off their exact planned flight path. Should the pilot have given up and shut off the engines because the plane wasn't always facing directly towards Hawaii? Certainly not. I believe stopping in mid flight would definitely qualify as failure.
The same goes for a business. There will always be something that makes you want to shut off the engines and walk out of the cockpit. Sales are lower than projections, milestones are missed, technology gets in the way—all these and more will make you feel like failure is giving you the stink eye. The trick is to flip each and every one of these around and use them to your advantage.
Low sales are a chance to reinvent your marketing or products. Missed milestones give you an opportunity to learn to set more realistic dates the next time. Technology glitches? Yeah, they just suck. But knowing that they happen and will continue to happen gives you an edge over those that will give up when they hit the same wall you did. Think about it. If you know that most people give up and let a business die when things get tough, you can zip past them just by not stopping. You can even crawl and win a race against a corpse.
We hit a small wall this week and it was not fun, but it has only hardened my resolve to charge forward. My first employee was hired away by a large corporation. This was our decision and not some corporate espionage. It takes a lot of cash flow to run our household of three older teens, and even with cost cutting we knew we couldn't continue this burn rate very much longer. Our compromise was to have Judy get a job closer to home with shorter hours so she could continue to help with No Thirst Software and also contribute to our financial needs.
The tough part is that this felt like a failure on my part. Things may have been different if I had stockpiled more cash in the last two years or cut expenses earlier or programmed faster so we were selling MoneyWell 1.4 and an iPhone version. These are all great ideas, but also all in the past. I can't change any of them now and lamenting about what didn't get done will not help us on our success path.
We are successful. We have a great product lineup that is only getting better with each release. We have thousands of customers praising our work and asking for more. And the greatest success: We had a chance to work together for weeks and strategize about how to improve operations and the company in general. What was done and learned in that short period of time has strengthened our microISV beyond any financial investment.
What's the secret to success? Stay positive. Learn from everything you do—and fail to do. And most of all, stay the course. You and your passengers are not going to be any happier if you shut down your engines at 20,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean. Success is simply continuing forward. Never stop.
Peace.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Download a Beta and a Podcast
It feels as long as an iPhone NDA since MoneyWell 1.3 shipped but it's actually only been three months. I guess the feature set for the next release has been in my head for over a year and that's why I"m confused. No matter, I am thrilled to announce the first MoneyWell 1.4 beta build has been released. This is an incredibly important milestone because it implements something that I've wanted since version 1.0: Direct OFX downloading of transactions.
Being able to click a button and have my transactions list updated is the last feature that I've missed from my days as a Quicken user and now I have it—and, as of today, so do all our beta testers! In addition to direct downloads, MoneyWell also will query your bank for all your accounts and automatically create and populate them with transactions when you add a new document. It even automatically calculates the correct starting balance transaction for you. Even though it's the first beta build, it's working smoothly with my accounts. I'm hoping that the people beta testing will have similar good results.
MoneyWell 1.4 also has some dramatic interface changes in the accounts and buckets lists. They are more compact and have a much higher contrast between buckets that have money to spend, are empty, and have been overspent. Several more features are already active and even more are planned for upcoming builds.
This is an open beta right now because I desperately need confirmation that MoneyWell can talk to lots of banks and not just mine.
In addition to getting a beta published, I also had the privilege of being invited back for another Mac Software Business podcast, this time about the tricky matter of pricing software. As usual, Steve Scott, better known as Scotty, leads us and does a wonderful job. Joining in the discussion were Gus Mueller and Alex Lindsay. I learned a few things so I hope others will as well. Head over to Scotty's place and have a listen.
All in all, it's been a pretty good week. I could not have done all this so quickly if it wasn't for Judy's coming on board. Because of her help, the beta builds will appear more quickly as well as the final release. To save me from having to answer the question of when 1.4 will ship, I'll throw out a guess that it will happen in late August. No guarantees of course.
And to answer that other question: Yes, I love working with my wife and we could never spend too much time together. It's been wonderful.
Peace.
Being able to click a button and have my transactions list updated is the last feature that I've missed from my days as a Quicken user and now I have it—and, as of today, so do all our beta testers! In addition to direct downloads, MoneyWell also will query your bank for all your accounts and automatically create and populate them with transactions when you add a new document. It even automatically calculates the correct starting balance transaction for you. Even though it's the first beta build, it's working smoothly with my accounts. I'm hoping that the people beta testing will have similar good results.
MoneyWell 1.4 also has some dramatic interface changes in the accounts and buckets lists. They are more compact and have a much higher contrast between buckets that have money to spend, are empty, and have been overspent. Several more features are already active and even more are planned for upcoming builds.
This is an open beta right now because I desperately need confirmation that MoneyWell can talk to lots of banks and not just mine.
In addition to getting a beta published, I also had the privilege of being invited back for another Mac Software Business podcast, this time about the tricky matter of pricing software. As usual, Steve Scott, better known as Scotty, leads us and does a wonderful job. Joining in the discussion were Gus Mueller and Alex Lindsay. I learned a few things so I hope others will as well. Head over to Scotty's place and have a listen.
All in all, it's been a pretty good week. I could not have done all this so quickly if it wasn't for Judy's coming on board. Because of her help, the beta builds will appear more quickly as well as the final release. To save me from having to answer the question of when 1.4 will ship, I'll throw out a guess that it will happen in late August. No guarantees of course.
And to answer that other question: Yes, I love working with my wife and we could never spend too much time together. It's been wonderful.
Peace.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Over-the-Top Customer Service
I love writing great software, but producing software is only one part of a successful software company. Lots of developers ship software—some of it is pretty good too. When you have a prospect looking at your product and comparing it to half a dozen others, you need to stand out somehow. Features in a product may make headlines, but customers won't hang around if they don't get quality service and support.
I can't blame them. One of my pet peeves is poor service. I knew that I couldn't create perfect software—no one can unless it does little or nothing—so the next best things would be to fix problems quickly and respond to requests promptly. So don't spread it around to the competition, but our secret weapon is over-the-top customer service.
What does it mean to be "over the top" with service? It means that email requests are handled within minutes, when possible, and within a couple of hours during crunch times and off hours. It means that we offer a 60-day money back guarantee without requiring any proof of problems—we do need your feedback though, so please tell us why our products didn't work for you. It means that we won't create ridiculous copy-protection schemes that make you jump through hoops to run our software on your computers. It means that we actually care about our customers and their well-being.
Now this doesn't seem so tricky, but the fact is that many, many companies blow it when it comes to customer service. They don't answer emails, don't give refunds, are suspicious about customers stealing licenses, and frankly, some even see dealing with customers as a burden!
The choice to offer great service or not is pretty simple. As a microISV, we can't afford bad press. Our marketing budget is tiny; therefore, we rely on word of mouth and comments posted on the web and in print. If the comments are negative, then we just bought some lousy advertising with our actions or lack thereof.
When I started developing MoneyWell, the personal finance software market on the Mac was pretty crowded but not so much that I was concerned about MoneyWell standing out. It has a pretty unique design and the envelope budgeting methodology was not widely implemented. By the time MoneyWell shipped, it felt like the competition had doubled and, in the nine months since, it's grown even more packed. To stand out, we needed more than just a great feature set, we needed a great company. Apple gets a ton of free advertising because it has a zealous fan base so why not try to duplicate that marketing method.
In order to balance my time for design and coding with handling support emails, I had to make sure I was very disciplined. First, I made sure my inbox was kept as close to zero emails as possible. I couldn't afford to feel overwhelmed by the sight of hundreds of emails. I became very good at email triage: deleting or filing emails that just didn't need to hang around and answering the short tech support questions quickly.
Next I watched for patterns of tech support questions and looked for solutions that didn't require me to repeat the same answer over and over again. Sometimes this meant changing the software and putting out a quick patch. Other times this meant posting an FAQ or tutorial on the website. I started trying to write detailed step-by-step instructions and then I found that these took up a lot of my time and confused some customers. The solution was to do video tutorials or screencasts.
People love our video tutorials and I love being able to redirect them to these before having to write lengthy email responses. Video tutorials are relatively quick to do. I write a script, record the voiceover and then record the software in action. It helps that my wife, Judy, is a trained voiceover artist, but the bottom line is that customers can watch a tutorial over and over until it sinks in. We produce it once and it get used thousands of times.
As an added bonus, these videos are also used for marketing MoneyWell.
This really is the key to excellent customer service: What can I do to empower my customers instead of making them always reliant on me?
The best service is when we don't have to do anything at all. Just by going to our website, an answer is found. Just by opening our software, the customer is notified of an update. Just by posting a question to our user forum, other customers jump in to offer help.
Service is also about honesty. If I make a mistake, I need to fall on the sword. Most people are going to rush to my defense when I don't try to make excuses and shield myself from criticism. I can't tell you how many times I've immediately apologized for a bug or a missed response only to have a customer write, "Hey that's fine. You're doing a great job. Thanks!" At times, the hardest thing for me to do is swallow my pride and take the blame but I know it's the right thing to do. All I have to think is, "Would I rather be right or have lots of happy customers?" Uh, let's see... yeah, gimme the happy customers.
When I hear other companies complain about their customers, I cringe. Even if those comments don't get back to your customer base, your bad attitude will seep through during your conversations with them. If you don't deal with people well, then you'd better hire someone who does. You can't afford to play the part of the "Soup Nazi" unless you have a product that has no competition.
I have built companies with 40 or more employees and it is difficult to keep the quality of service high as the layers between me and the customers increase, but I'm very determined this time to keep any loss of service to a minimum. Judy starting full time with No Thirst Software on July 1 will help immensely and we won't hire our first tech support person unless he or she is passionate about our products.
By focusing on our customers' happiness and well-being, everything we do is affected. We can't control our incoming cash flow directly because we can't force people to buy our software and affect sales directly. What we can do is take excellent care of our existing customers and optimize how we spend our time. I believe creating great software and supporting it with over-the-top customer service is the best way to grow this company.
Let me know if you see us dropping the ball on this and we'll get to test out how well I fall on the sword.
Peace.
I can't blame them. One of my pet peeves is poor service. I knew that I couldn't create perfect software—no one can unless it does little or nothing—so the next best things would be to fix problems quickly and respond to requests promptly. So don't spread it around to the competition, but our secret weapon is over-the-top customer service.
What does it mean to be "over the top" with service? It means that email requests are handled within minutes, when possible, and within a couple of hours during crunch times and off hours. It means that we offer a 60-day money back guarantee without requiring any proof of problems—we do need your feedback though, so please tell us why our products didn't work for you. It means that we won't create ridiculous copy-protection schemes that make you jump through hoops to run our software on your computers. It means that we actually care about our customers and their well-being.
Now this doesn't seem so tricky, but the fact is that many, many companies blow it when it comes to customer service. They don't answer emails, don't give refunds, are suspicious about customers stealing licenses, and frankly, some even see dealing with customers as a burden!
The choice to offer great service or not is pretty simple. As a microISV, we can't afford bad press. Our marketing budget is tiny; therefore, we rely on word of mouth and comments posted on the web and in print. If the comments are negative, then we just bought some lousy advertising with our actions or lack thereof.
When I started developing MoneyWell, the personal finance software market on the Mac was pretty crowded but not so much that I was concerned about MoneyWell standing out. It has a pretty unique design and the envelope budgeting methodology was not widely implemented. By the time MoneyWell shipped, it felt like the competition had doubled and, in the nine months since, it's grown even more packed. To stand out, we needed more than just a great feature set, we needed a great company. Apple gets a ton of free advertising because it has a zealous fan base so why not try to duplicate that marketing method.
In order to balance my time for design and coding with handling support emails, I had to make sure I was very disciplined. First, I made sure my inbox was kept as close to zero emails as possible. I couldn't afford to feel overwhelmed by the sight of hundreds of emails. I became very good at email triage: deleting or filing emails that just didn't need to hang around and answering the short tech support questions quickly.
Next I watched for patterns of tech support questions and looked for solutions that didn't require me to repeat the same answer over and over again. Sometimes this meant changing the software and putting out a quick patch. Other times this meant posting an FAQ or tutorial on the website. I started trying to write detailed step-by-step instructions and then I found that these took up a lot of my time and confused some customers. The solution was to do video tutorials or screencasts.
People love our video tutorials and I love being able to redirect them to these before having to write lengthy email responses. Video tutorials are relatively quick to do. I write a script, record the voiceover and then record the software in action. It helps that my wife, Judy, is a trained voiceover artist, but the bottom line is that customers can watch a tutorial over and over until it sinks in. We produce it once and it get used thousands of times.
As an added bonus, these videos are also used for marketing MoneyWell.
This really is the key to excellent customer service: What can I do to empower my customers instead of making them always reliant on me?
The best service is when we don't have to do anything at all. Just by going to our website, an answer is found. Just by opening our software, the customer is notified of an update. Just by posting a question to our user forum, other customers jump in to offer help.
Service is also about honesty. If I make a mistake, I need to fall on the sword. Most people are going to rush to my defense when I don't try to make excuses and shield myself from criticism. I can't tell you how many times I've immediately apologized for a bug or a missed response only to have a customer write, "Hey that's fine. You're doing a great job. Thanks!" At times, the hardest thing for me to do is swallow my pride and take the blame but I know it's the right thing to do. All I have to think is, "Would I rather be right or have lots of happy customers?" Uh, let's see... yeah, gimme the happy customers.
When I hear other companies complain about their customers, I cringe. Even if those comments don't get back to your customer base, your bad attitude will seep through during your conversations with them. If you don't deal with people well, then you'd better hire someone who does. You can't afford to play the part of the "Soup Nazi" unless you have a product that has no competition.
I have built companies with 40 or more employees and it is difficult to keep the quality of service high as the layers between me and the customers increase, but I'm very determined this time to keep any loss of service to a minimum. Judy starting full time with No Thirst Software on July 1 will help immensely and we won't hire our first tech support person unless he or she is passionate about our products.
By focusing on our customers' happiness and well-being, everything we do is affected. We can't control our incoming cash flow directly because we can't force people to buy our software and affect sales directly. What we can do is take excellent care of our existing customers and optimize how we spend our time. I believe creating great software and supporting it with over-the-top customer service is the best way to grow this company.
Let me know if you see us dropping the ball on this and we'll get to test out how well I fall on the sword.
Peace.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Was It Worth the Money?
I'm a little late with my wrap-up, but better late than never, right? And before my wife says it, I'll say it—this blog entry may be considered at geek level orange. So if you don't like the typed content, there are links to pictures throughout.
Going to Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) is by no means cheap. It's close to two grand before you add in airfare and a hotel room for six nights. So now that I've attended my first one, the most common question I get is, "Was it worth the money?"
Absolutely! Without a doubt. No question in my mind.
Your mileage may vary, but I got so much out of this trip that I will do it again in a heartbeat. Let me break it down a bit to examine the benefits for me.
Keynote Address: Out of everything at WWDC, this was only marginally better than watching a text feed from my computer at home. Yes, Jobs RDF (reality distortion field) was present, but not very powerful. Maybe because everything announced was already rumored. Maybe because the iPhone product demos went on and on and on and on. They counteracted any excitement that Steve built up.
Sessions: I was pretty lucky and picked many great sessions. Sure I can watch them later on ADC iTunes but the Q & A after each session is missing from those recordings and many of those were golden. Developers—smarter than me—were asking questions that I wish I had the wherewithal to ask at the time. I only felt the need to walk out of one session—and did. Thanks to the MacDevNet podcast that recommended it was okay to do that.
Labs: These were great. Having the ability to monopolize a Core Data engineer and bombard him with questions was invaluable. I only wish that I had been more prepared with questions and could have taken advantage of more labs. Of course, I have plenty of questions now that I didn't ask. Next year I'm taking a few days before WWDC to prep with code samples and questions for these labs.
CocoaHeads: Several top notch Mac developers put on presentations at the SF Apple store. Unfortunately, I arrived way too late to see anything but the top of the screen and the back of the SRO crowd. Another mistake I will not make next time around.
Parties: The parties were good, but not great for networking. Too loud and too crowded to really talk and get to know someone but lots of fun and helped me meet a few people that I only knew via Twitter or email. Apple's Bash was easier because it was outdoors. Still the best conversations happened at the more personal outings at local bars like the Chieftain.
Networking: Outside of the parties is where the majority of the networking happened. It started early on Sunday during registration. I saw a tweet that Fraser Speirs was sitting in the registration hall. Trying to be social, I approached someone that I thought looked like Fraser (I only know him from a tiny Twitter picture) and talked to the wrong person. Of course as I walked away and checked Twitter on my iPhone, Fraser tweets, "Some guy just asked someone two people down from me if he was Fraser Speirs." Nice. I'm outed on Twitter, so I owned up to it publicly and then went back to give Fraser a hard time for letting me walk right by him.
I knew at this point that it was going to be fun coordinating meetings over Twitter. Many of us posted information about what session we were in and where in the room we sat, along with the "shirt of the day" tweets. It's a good thing that Twitter reinforced their servers for the conference (Twitter tends to go down more than Yahoo's stock price) or we would have been lost.
It took every single day that I stayed in San Francisco to meet everyone on my list and I still missed a few. We talked between sessions, ate lunch together, shared code, and opened the door to several opportunities to connect our products. If the only benefit I got out of WWDC was the networking, I would say the trip was worth it.
MacDevNet Roundtable: Scotty held the first Developers Roundtable around an actual table (oval, not round, but that would be picking nits) and I was invited to sit at it. Doing a group podcast with the actual people present is so much nicer than negotiating for your chance to speak on Skype. Have a listen if you haven't already heard it. Besides me, Scotty hosts Dan Wood, John Fox, Daniel Jalkut, and Craig Syverson. Somehow, I even got labeled as the "fanboy" in it.
I did take some pictures with my handy-but-not-good-in-low-light iPhone. Next year I'm taking a real camera and getting better photos. I guess I have a lot of "next year" vows. I hope I remember to read this and do them.
Peace.
Going to Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) is by no means cheap. It's close to two grand before you add in airfare and a hotel room for six nights. So now that I've attended my first one, the most common question I get is, "Was it worth the money?"
Absolutely! Without a doubt. No question in my mind.
Your mileage may vary, but I got so much out of this trip that I will do it again in a heartbeat. Let me break it down a bit to examine the benefits for me.
Keynote Address: Out of everything at WWDC, this was only marginally better than watching a text feed from my computer at home. Yes, Jobs RDF (reality distortion field) was present, but not very powerful. Maybe because everything announced was already rumored. Maybe because the iPhone product demos went on and on and on and on. They counteracted any excitement that Steve built up.
Sessions: I was pretty lucky and picked many great sessions. Sure I can watch them later on ADC iTunes but the Q & A after each session is missing from those recordings and many of those were golden. Developers—smarter than me—were asking questions that I wish I had the wherewithal to ask at the time. I only felt the need to walk out of one session—and did. Thanks to the MacDevNet podcast that recommended it was okay to do that.
Labs: These were great. Having the ability to monopolize a Core Data engineer and bombard him with questions was invaluable. I only wish that I had been more prepared with questions and could have taken advantage of more labs. Of course, I have plenty of questions now that I didn't ask. Next year I'm taking a few days before WWDC to prep with code samples and questions for these labs.
CocoaHeads: Several top notch Mac developers put on presentations at the SF Apple store. Unfortunately, I arrived way too late to see anything but the top of the screen and the back of the SRO crowd. Another mistake I will not make next time around.
Parties: The parties were good, but not great for networking. Too loud and too crowded to really talk and get to know someone but lots of fun and helped me meet a few people that I only knew via Twitter or email. Apple's Bash was easier because it was outdoors. Still the best conversations happened at the more personal outings at local bars like the Chieftain.
Networking: Outside of the parties is where the majority of the networking happened. It started early on Sunday during registration. I saw a tweet that Fraser Speirs was sitting in the registration hall. Trying to be social, I approached someone that I thought looked like Fraser (I only know him from a tiny Twitter picture) and talked to the wrong person. Of course as I walked away and checked Twitter on my iPhone, Fraser tweets, "Some guy just asked someone two people down from me if he was Fraser Speirs." Nice. I'm outed on Twitter, so I owned up to it publicly and then went back to give Fraser a hard time for letting me walk right by him.
I knew at this point that it was going to be fun coordinating meetings over Twitter. Many of us posted information about what session we were in and where in the room we sat, along with the "shirt of the day" tweets. It's a good thing that Twitter reinforced their servers for the conference (Twitter tends to go down more than Yahoo's stock price) or we would have been lost.
It took every single day that I stayed in San Francisco to meet everyone on my list and I still missed a few. We talked between sessions, ate lunch together, shared code, and opened the door to several opportunities to connect our products. If the only benefit I got out of WWDC was the networking, I would say the trip was worth it.
MacDevNet Roundtable: Scotty held the first Developers Roundtable around an actual table (oval, not round, but that would be picking nits) and I was invited to sit at it. Doing a group podcast with the actual people present is so much nicer than negotiating for your chance to speak on Skype. Have a listen if you haven't already heard it. Besides me, Scotty hosts Dan Wood, John Fox, Daniel Jalkut, and Craig Syverson. Somehow, I even got labeled as the "fanboy" in it.
I did take some pictures with my handy-but-not-good-in-low-light iPhone. Next year I'm taking a real camera and getting better photos. I guess I have a lot of "next year" vows. I hope I remember to read this and do them.
Peace.
Thursday, June 05, 2008
What's a WWDC?
If you're a Mac software developer or a die-hard fan, you probably know that WWDC is Apple's World Wide Developer Conference. For developers, this is the place to go to suck in as much knowledge as we can in a five-day period. Apple hosts sessions to teach about development tools and related topics and they also give us labs to sit and talk to the people that designed the Apple's systems. It's geek nirvana!
It's also a chance for developers, who are spread around the world, glued to their computers, and typically carry on conversations limited to 140 characters at a time, to actually sit face to face and have a real conversation. This is my first time to go, so I don't know which I'm looking forward to more—the schooling or the socializing.
The Mac developer community is so giving and open and has helped me tremendously with my development of both Debt Quencher and MoneyWell. I'm not sure I've sold enough copies of both to pay for all the drinks I owe these guys, but I'll do my best to pass around my gratitude. I'm more excited than my daughter if she were told that everything is now available in pink... and free. Just yesterday she asked if we could get a ping pong table... in pink... with pink paddles... and zebra striped balls. The girl scares me sometimes.
The only difficult part is continuing to run a microISV company while I'm MIA. My wife, Judy, is set to come on board full time to work with me at No Thirst Software, but that doesn't happen until July 1, and I'll be at the conference from June 7 through June 14. This means that my average one-hour response time for support will suffer a bit. It will be worth it, though, because what I learn at the conference should greatly accelerate our two pending MoneyWell projects (2.0 and iPhone versions), which means more software goodness for our customers.
Even if you're not a geek, you should pay attention to Steve Job's Keynote on Monday morning. What he announces may very well make you want to create a new expense bucket in MoneyWell.
Peace.
It's also a chance for developers, who are spread around the world, glued to their computers, and typically carry on conversations limited to 140 characters at a time, to actually sit face to face and have a real conversation. This is my first time to go, so I don't know which I'm looking forward to more—the schooling or the socializing.
The Mac developer community is so giving and open and has helped me tremendously with my development of both Debt Quencher and MoneyWell. I'm not sure I've sold enough copies of both to pay for all the drinks I owe these guys, but I'll do my best to pass around my gratitude. I'm more excited than my daughter if she were told that everything is now available in pink... and free. Just yesterday she asked if we could get a ping pong table... in pink... with pink paddles... and zebra striped balls. The girl scares me sometimes.
The only difficult part is continuing to run a microISV company while I'm MIA. My wife, Judy, is set to come on board full time to work with me at No Thirst Software, but that doesn't happen until July 1, and I'll be at the conference from June 7 through June 14. This means that my average one-hour response time for support will suffer a bit. It will be worth it, though, because what I learn at the conference should greatly accelerate our two pending MoneyWell projects (2.0 and iPhone versions), which means more software goodness for our customers.
Even if you're not a geek, you should pay attention to Steve Job's Keynote on Monday morning. What he announces may very well make you want to create a new expense bucket in MoneyWell.
Peace.
Friday, May 23, 2008
The Lone American
Scotty's latest MacSB Podcast is out and I'm the lone American on it. Sharing the mic space with me are Danny Greg and Fraser Speirs, as well as our host, Steve "Scotty" Scott.
We chat about Licensing and Serials and I learn a few British terms, like "wash up," which I thought was Scotty giving us a TMI moment but really he was just going to clean some dishes. Silly American.
Peace.
We chat about Licensing and Serials and I learn a few British terms, like "wash up," which I thought was Scotty giving us a TMI moment but really he was just going to clean some dishes. Silly American.
Peace.
Thursday, May 08, 2008
Hold on to Sixteen as Long as You Can
Little ditty about Jack and Diane...
A favorite John Mellencamp song popped on the radio as I left for lunch today after shipping a new release of MoneyWell.
Two American kids growin' up in the heartland.
It followed a ZZ Top song and the two songs sent me back to my days in college. Everything was so possible. All the doors were wide open and we could do anything we wanted. We just had to try.
Jackie gonna be a football star...
None of us had any history of business failure or lost career opportunities. One of my best friends in college was a fellow Computer Science major and we constantly competed for top grades and the highest bonus for handing in our projects early. We also had hacked the college's computer system and had the passwords for all the operators and even created our own teacher account so we could have higher access rights. Fred Dartner was one of the nicest math teachers at Erie Community College—he never failed a single student. We were big fish in a very little pond.
Oh yeah, life goes on... Long after the thrill of livin' is gone...
But then the real world hits and the self-assuredness of academia fades as rejections and failures pile up.
Oh yeah, life goes on... Long after the thrill of livin' is gone. They walk on.
Many people forget that there are no limits to what we can do. We are only limited by our imagination, desire, and faith. That by serving the greater good, we too will be taken care of and will survive.
Jackie sits back, collects his thoughts for the moment. Scratches his head and does his best James Dean.
I was thinking back to a year ago, before MoneyWell 1.0 had shipped, and how I felt at the time. This was after many months of design and coding and I wasn't quite sure how it would be accepted by the marketplace. But there was a glimmer of hope that I was on the right track.
Gonna let it rock, let it roll. Let the Bible Belt come and save my soul...
Now with the release of MoneyWell 1.3.3, thousands of customers, and a vivid vision for what is planned in the 2.0 release, I feel rejuvenated. Full of hope. Ready to take on any challenge.
Hold on to sixteen as long as you can... Changes come around real soon make us women and men.
There was no fear when I started my first company in college—I had more guts than brains. There was a ton of fear present when No Thirst Software launched—I had more failures than successes. But now, it's almost two years since I started this blog and caught the bug to go out on my own again and I'm happier than ever.
Little ditty about Jack and Diane...
Because I know that anything is possible.
Two American kids doin' the best that they can.
Peace.
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