the microisv show

My computer won't boot and I need my data!?! - Tugboat Enterprises Selkie Rescue can save the day!

Michael Lehman — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 23:28:21 GMT

At the Software Industry Conference 2007, Michael Lehman (blog, blog/podcast) and Bob Walsh (blog) interviewed Judi Tyabji Wilson, CEO of Tugboat Enterprises, about their innovative MicroISV product Selkie Rescue.

When your machine won't boot because the OS is discombobulated or you've come down with a nasty virus, you can boot from the Selkie Rescue CD. Selkie Rescue turns your machine into a file server from which you can then retrieve your precious data.

Definitely worth a look!

UPDATE: Fixed the download link.

Video Version: It's all about the code... CodeGear that is! - Nick Hodges of CodeGear talks about Co

Michael Lehman — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 22:40:52 GMT

In this video, Michael Lehman and Bob Walsh visit Nick Hodges at the Borland developer tool spinoff now called CodeGear www.codegear.com and talk about how CodeGear came about, Pascal, Delphi and native code.

It's all about the code... CodeGear that is! - Nick Hodges of CodeGear talks about CodeGear, Borland

Michael Lehman — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 14:33:19 GMT

Michael Lehman and Bob Walsh visit Nick Hodges at the Borland developer tool spinoff now called CodeGear www.codegear.com and talk about how CodeGear came about, Pascal, Delphi and native code.

A video version of this episode will be posted shortly.

The MicroISV Show @ SIC 2007 - MicroISVs on the "seat of heat"! - Part 1

Michael Lehman — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 22:50:01 GMT

The MicroISV Show hosts, Michael Lehman and Bob Walsh, recently visited the Software Industry Conference 2007. While there we did a few traditional MicroISV show episodes which will go live soon.

In addition, this event has an "exhibit night" at which Microsoft had a booth. We set up our video camera and put as many MicroISVs as were willing on the "seat of heat" and asked them who they were, the name of their company, a brief description of what they do and a URL you could visit to find out more.

This is part 1 of those short interviews.

In this episode you'll meet:

Ricky Housley - Del.icio.us Finder - http://www.toocoolkids.com/geeks/Downloads.htm

Ernest Cook - Better Idea Group - Quick Payment - http://bigsoftwareinc.com/default.aspx

Giusepe Farese - BeboSoft - Mediata Survey - http://www.bebosoft.com

Dennis Reinhardt - DAIR Computer Systems - HTMLAPP - http://www.dair.com/

Thanks to Ricky, Ernest, Guisepe and Dennis! They make products you should know about!

Stay tuned for more MicroISVs on the "seat of heat" in the near future.

How does your software make your customers feel - Lou Carbone - Experience Engineering

Michael Lehman — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 22:24:31 GMT

Does your software make you feel more or less empowered? Do you want to throw a party for your favorite software company or throw a brick at your screen? What emotional reaction your customers have to your application is huge, especially for the MicroISV.

Lou Carbone, founder and CEO of Experience Engineering (www.experienceengineering.com) has been leading the experience management revolution for more than 20 years. His writings on the subject have appeared since 1994. His 2004 best seller, "Clued In, How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again & Again", is in its seventh printing, and is a must read for MicroISVs.

In this episode, Michael Lehman and Bob Walsh talk with Lou and explore how important experience is in the development and marketing of your MicroISV application on the desktop and on your website.

From the hammock in the backyard - software to help stroke victims speak again - Clay Nichols - Bung

Michael Lehman — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 15:56:08 GMT

MicroISVs often have both the luxury and challenge of working at home. In this episode, our intrepid hosts, Michael Lehman and Bob Walsh, travel virtually to the backyard of the home of Clay and Terri B. Nichols founders of Bungalow Software to talk to Clay about software that helps victims of brain damaging illness learn to talk again.

The software Bungalow makes is a quintessential example of "scratching the itch". In their own words:

Terri Nichols was frustrated. A speech-pathologist providing therapy to stroke survivors, Terri's therapy time was limited. And stroke recovery takes a lot of therapy. Most of her patients could not afford all the therapy they wanted and needed. And the Plateau Paradox meant that insurance coverage was limited. Her patients needed an economical way to get a lot of speech therapy practice at home. So she turned to her husband, a computer programmer...

Terri explained in detail the methods she used for providing practice therapy. She also showed him worksheets she created as "homework" for her patients. Clay, in turn, developed the Aphasia Tutor computer (software) program. What started as a 2 week project turned into a year long process of tweaking and refining the programs.

Bungalow Software was born. That was 1994. It seems like last millennium.

Enjoy!

Putting your best face forward - The growing importance of design for MicroISVs - Mike Rohde - Rohde

Michael Lehman — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 16:14:00 GMT

It's a brave new world for MicroISVs in which it's no longer enough to drag some controls onto a form and simply make sure they're lined up and the tab order is right. The mantra "form follows function" is becoming more and more important for developers as advent of Windows Vista, WPF and Silverlight once again change the expectations of how customers perceive software. You've got to "put your best face forward" and think about design of the user experience right from the beginning.

In this episode, Michael Lehman and Bob Walsh talk to Mike Rohde, designer and art director for MakaluMedia, about the changing role of design in software development and how and why MicroISVs must incorporate design thinking into their development process.

Working from his Milwaukee, Wisconsin office, Mike is also a writer and blogger, sharing his thoughts on design, drawing, technology and life, at Rohdesign.com, since February 2003.

He is also the proprietor of PlannerHack.com a "do-it-yourself guide to converting a pocket-sized, ruled Moleskine notebook into a custom weekly planner and task management system."

Mike Rohde also provides design services and consulting for MicroISVs.

The MicroISV Show #21 - Dr. Edward Hallowell - Crazy Busy

Michael Lehman — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 23:36:28 GMT

This week Michael Lehman and Bob Walsh talk to Dr. Edward Hallowell, author of the book "CrazyBusy - Overstretched, Overbooked and About to Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD".

Crazy Busy refers to that state of "acquired" Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) that seems to be affecting more and more of us every day as we acquire cell phones that do email, start posting tweets on our Twitter accounts and get less done by spending more time!

Listen and learn what you can do to help yourself!

The MicroISV Show #20 - Pamela Slim - Escape from Cubicle Nation

Michael Lehman — Mon, 21 May 2007 23:24:18 GMT

In this edition of The MicroISV Show, Bob Walsh and Michael Lehman talk with Pamela Slim, author of the blog Escape from Cubicle Nation, wherein she opines regularly about "how to go from corporate prisoner to thriving entrepreneur".

Pam give her opinions on how to (and how not to) start your own company, when to tell your boss (and your co-workers) and how to do some self evaluation to decide on what things to do yourself and which things are best left to experts.

Here are links to the sites Pam mentions in the interview:

Pam's Business website: www.ganas.com
Pam's Radio Show on VoiceAmerica

Virtual assistant resources:

http://www.virtualassistantnetworking.com/ (it is an association for virtual assistants, but it also provides resources in the "Client Guide" section

The MicroISV Show #19 - Special Edition - Office Live Review for MicroISVs

Michael Lehman — Fri, 11 May 2007 22:53:18 GMT

May 21 - Redmond

June 5 - Boston

June 11- Silicon Valley

In this special edition of The MicroISV Show, Scott Burmester, Don Campbell and Rohit Puri talk about the upcoming Office Live Review for MicroISVs. Are you coming?

How to Register:

1. Click on the registration link: https://microsoft.crgevents.com/officelive/

2. Select New Registration
3. Supply the Registration Code: GENATT

Do you build software solutions and/or provide services to small business?

Do you want to create an additional stream of income with a low technical barrier of entry?

Are you interested in knowing how to take advantage of the shifting software plus services paradigm?

Then the Office Live Review for Micro ISVs is the event you should attend!

Come hear details about the Office Live platform, how you can easily integrate with your applications, create solutions and offer services to small businesses, and… receive a free copy of Office 2007 Ultimate and Windows Vista Ultimate! The first 20 people to create an Office Live solution and post it to the Office Live Marketplace will also receive a Zune!

Office Live provides you with an opportunity to access the 6 million US based small business market in a saleable and profitable manner through extending the Office Live platform by:

· Extend and integrate your existing products via the Office Live web services and the Windows Live SDK to interact with the Office Live environment accessing contact information, presence management, document management, shared calendaring and more.

· Creating customized, verticalized, and niche solutions offered to a single customer or created for a broad audience

· Providing design and other consulting services to Office Live customers

· Extending the capability of a customer’s existing server deployment with extranet based solutions that may integrate with other applications

Office Live is a set of web-based services for small businesses to manage their business online. It consists of a public facing web site for their customers and private web site that employees can use to collaborate and manage the business. The private site comes with business applications for managing contacts, e-mail, calendars, projects, documents, sales and more.

To the developer Office Live represents a compelling software-as-a-service platform for rapidly building custom solutions available to thousands of small businesses.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

When:

May 21^st ^th, 2007 9AM-5PM

Where:

Redmond, Washington in the Platform Adoption Center @ Building 20.

What:

This one-day workshop will focus on delivering the following goals for the attendees:

Understand Microsoft’s Office Live strategy and how to build solutions that extend it.
Understand Microsoft Office Live offerings – Office Live Basic, Office Live Collaboration, and Office Live Essentials, and what types of scenarios each of these apply to.
Learn about Office Live Business Applications and Shared Workspaces.
Learn how to customize the Office Live environment, including templates, look and feel, web parts, and navigation. Understand when to use Site Designer and when to use SharePoint Designer to customize the environment.
Learn how to extend the Office Live environment, to create verticalized applications. This includes defining workflow rules, data sharing, web parts and mash-ups.

The workshop will provide developers with the necessary experience to exploit Office Live functionality in the following technologies:

Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) v3 (Web Parts, Workflows, Lists, Content types, Web services)
Office 2007 (SharePoint Designer, InfoPath 2007, Access 2007, Excel 2007)
Office Live Specific (Business Applications, Shared Sites, Site Designer, SBA Sharing Workspace)
Windows Live ID
Web Technologies (HTML, XHTML, Web Design, CSS)

Attendees are encouraged to consider the following pre-requisites to ensure a positive experience in the workshop:

Active development experience with C# and/or VB.NET or JavaScript
Active development experience with Windows SharePoint Services v3 and Office SharePoint Server.
Basic understanding of Web technologies such as HTML, CSS, RSS, client-side scripting
Ideally development experience with Office client applications
Basic understanding of SharePoint portal technology

Workshop Format:

The course will be comprised of module covering an Office Live concept. The agenda for the one-day event is as follows:

Start	Stop	Description
08:30	09:00	Arrival and registration
09:00	09:15	Welcome and logistics
09:15	10:00	Understanding the Office Live Architecture
10:00	11:00	Understanding the Office Live Data and Storage Architecture
11:00	12:00	Using Workflows to Define Business Rules in Office Live Apps
12:00	13:00	Lunch
13:00	14:00	Programming with the Office Live Web Service API
14:00	15:00	Integrating with Office Live Authentication using Windows Live ID
15:00	15:15	Break
15:15	16:15	Build Office Live Integration using VS with Project GlidePath
16:15	17:15	Creating Mash-Ups in Office Live
17:15		Dinner

The MicroISV Show #18 - Nick Bradbury

Michael Lehman — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 23:44:15 GMT

In this episode Nick Bradbury, author of FeedDemon, talks about living the MicroISV life, being acquired by NewsGator and more.

Nick's blog is at http://nick.typepad.com and his products are available from http://www.bradsoft.com

The MicroISV Show #17 - Kevin Epstein - StupidMarketing.com

Michael Lehman — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 18:29:20 GMT

On this weeks show, Michael and Bob talk with Kevin Epstein, author of Marketing Made Easy and proprietor of the Stupid Marketing site and blog where his theme is: "It's not that I hate marketing; I just hate bad marketing."

Kevin, a Silicon Valley veteran with a career that spans Netscape, RealNetworks, Inktomi and VMware, is currently VP of Marketing at Scalent which makes data center management software.

In this episode Kevin, Bob and Michael talk about marketing and MicroISVs: when, where and how to start thinking about marketing and how to do it.

Standard MBA method for doing marketing plans:

· Company

· Customers

· Competitors

· Product

· Price

· Promotion (marketing)

· Placement (distribution)

SWOT analysis

· Strengths

· Weaknesses

· Opportunites

· Threats

Kevin's website & blog:

· http://www.stupidmarketing.com/

· http://blog.stupidmarketing.com/

The MicroISV Show #16 - Jessica Livingston - Founders at Work

Michael Lehman — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 00:00:46 GMT

This week Michael and Bob talk with author and investor Jessica Livingston whose recent book, Founders at Work, give great insight into the startup process and the many twists and turns that many have encountered on the road to success.

Jessica is a partner in a firm that gathers startups together and funds their early stages: www.ycombinator.com

The website for her book can be found at: www.foundersatwork.com

The MicroISV Show #15 - Phil Wright - dotnetmagic.com

Michael Lehman — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 22:50:55 GMT

In this episode, Bob and Michael talk to Phil Wright, founder of two MicroISVs: dotnetmagic.com and componentfactory.com selling .NET software components.

Phil talks about how he got his start as a MicroISV, the challenges and joys of moving his business from the UK to Australia, and the marketing strategies that have worked for him.

The MicroISV Show #14 - Don Dodge - Microsoft's Emerging Business Team

Michael Lehman — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 22:23:41 GMT

This week Bob and I had a great time talking to Don Dodge the Director of Business Development on Microsoft's Emerging Business Team.

Don and his group work with startups by introducing them to product groups, helping build partnerships and, in rare cases, some startups have even been acquired by Microsoft.

Their website is called The Microsoft Startup Zone and can be found at: http://microsoftstartupzone.com/

Don also writes a great blog over at The Next Big Thing.

The MicroISV Show #13 - Dave Collins of SharewarePromotions.com

Michael Lehman — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 03:46:40 GMT

This week we talked to Dave Collins of www.SharewarePromotions.com about how to choose, maximize and monitor your marketing efforts via online advertising via Google AdWords and other services. Dave and his company are masters at this complex art and he reveals some of his secrets and points out how to find out if anyone is even searching for the keywords you might buy.

Google AdWords Management Service:
http://www.sharewarepromotions.com/google-adwords.html

Google AdWords Report Service:
http://www.sharewarepromotions.com/google-adwords-report.html

Competitive Edge Monthly Newsletter: http://www.sharewarepromotions.com/newsletter/

ORGANISATIONS: Association of Independent Software Industry Professionals: http://www.aisip.com/

Association of Shareware Professionals: http://www.asp-shareware.org/

GOOD INFO: Joel On Software's The Business of Software: http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?biz

Webmaster World Forums - (free) registration required but highly
recommended: http://www.webmasterworld.com/

TRANSCRIPT:

[intro music]

Michael Lehman: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the MicroISV Show here on Channel Nine. I'm Michael Lehman, Technical Evangelist for Microsoft, along with my co-host, Bob Walsh, Managing Director of Safari Software. Today we are going to be speaking with Dave Collins of Shareware Promotions.

Bob has his new book, "Clearblogging," which is just out, and he is also running a weekly series on his blog, MyMicroISV.com on which he is evaluating web sites. So if you would like to be a victim or, excuse me, a volunteer go to MyMicroISV.com and drop Bob a line.

Also, on the projectglidepath.net site, where I am running an evangelism program for Micro ISVs, we are now featuring the Project Glidepath Windows Vista Spotlight. If you are a Micro ISV and you have an application that runs on Windows Vista, please come and click on the link at right, and submit your application, and if you are one of the first 30 companies to pass our compatibility tests, you'll receive a free Zune. In any event, you'll get listed in the spotlight and covered on my blog, and in a number of other venues here at Microsoft, and we will promote your application as a MicroISV.

So now, without further ado, Bob Walsh and Dave Collins. Take it away, Bob.

Bob Walsh: Thanks, Michael. Today we have with us Dave Collins, who is the founder and Chief Bottle Washer and busy man around town of Shareware Promotions. Shareware Promotions is basically a MicroISV without software, based in the UK. What they do is they work with MicroISVs a la shareware authors and startup companies to get the word out about their product. They do software marketing, SEO, submissions, and Google AdWords, which is going to bring us to the topic today.

Dave can talk a lot about a lot of different things that are useful to MicroISVs, but for today we are going to focus on Google AdWords and what a MicroISV needs to know about them. We're going to start with the question of, let's say that you're just about to start selling your MicroISV product or web site, and you know that Google is out there at least, you should and now the question is, do you go for AdWords or not? That's the first question for Dave, here.

Dave Collins: Thanks, Bob. I think the answer to that really depends on the state of the MicroISV, if the company is ready to sell and if, specifically, the web site is really ready to, if you like, sing the praises of the software and really do a good marketing job and sales job; then absolutely, there is no reason to hang around. The sooner you can get your software, push it in front of the eyes of the people who are interested in it, on Google, the better.

But the web site does need to be ready in terms of doing a good job of presenting the product, the benefits, the features, and basically taking the user, the visitor, by the hand, leading them through the product and convincing them that they want to, at the very least, try it if not buy it.

Bob: Well you know, it sounds like besides putting forth your MicroISV user proposition, there may be some elements in there that you have to contend with in terms of search engine optimization and metawords and all those other good things that are out there. What would be the three things beside having a ready-to-show, good looking, intelligently designed web site that expresses your marketing position, what other things do you have to cover before you get into AdWords?

Dave: The main difference, I mean, if you are comparing regular SEO channels with AdWords, the two main differences are, first of all, with SEO it is a lot of work, a lot of experimentation, and especially new web sites can often wait six, nine, twelve months or longer before actually showing up in the index. The difference with AdWords is that it's up there more or less within minutes. You open your account, set up some ads, put in your keywords, and before you know it, it is up quite literally minutes after you open the account. The problem with it is that you're paying for it.

Bob: So probably AdWords comes before SEO.

Dave: Sorry?

Bob: It sounds like AdWords would be the thing you want to do before you get into the whole sort of SEO briar patch.

Dave: I'd say, for me, it's not a case of either or, it's a case of both. The advantage of AdWords is that it's instant, you can be up there immediately. The disadvantage is, whereas with SEO you learn as you go along and mistakes don't really cost you any more than ranking, mistakes in AdWords can end up costing you a fair amount of money. You do need to know what you are doing before you just start burning through your expensive clicks.

Bob: Well maybe the place to start, then, is, OK, if AdWords are the right thing to do when you are about to start selling, what would be your sort of two-minute view of what that is going to look like for that MicroISV? What sort of things can they expect to see happen there?

Dave: Assuming that the person responsible for the AdWords account had got a reasonable grasp, what you can get from AdWords is an incredibly qualified stream of visitors and traffic coming to your web site, in the sense of, you are in complete control, exactly what people are looking for. So you can say, "If they are looking for these precise things, show them the ads." The beauty of the system is, if they see the ads and they are not impressed, they are not going to click on it and you are not going to be charged.

So really, I mean, it is more or less unparalleled in the sense of, the company can direct the exact people they want to come to visit their web site and see their product or products. They are in complete control. Not only that, but that can even put the value on each and say how much they are actually prepared for each of these visitors. So there is an amazing degree of control there.

That is really quite different, in a sense, from regular SEO, where realistically you are always going to get a lot of traffic coming from Google and the other search engines through regular SEO who are, in fact, interested in what you are looking for. There are a whole host of reasons why, but really that costs you nothing other than bandwidth, which is, especially today, it is remarkably cheap.

Michael: Let's jump in here for a...

Dave: Sorry?

Michael: I just want to jump in here for a second, Dave, and ask you to define what SEO is, in case somebody doesn't know that particular acronym.

Dave: Sorry, yes. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is basically a process of making sure in essence it is a process of making sure that the search engines can find the material that is on your site to read it and index it. And that the people looking for whatever it is, whether it is product or information, services that you may be selling from your site or pushing from the site, that they find it. It is basically making sure that your site is well set up for the search engines.

Michael: Great.

Dave: So as I was saying, the key difference with AdWords is you are not only in control of what it is that people are going to be looking for that brings them to the site, but you are even in full control of exactly what they are going to see when they arrive. There is no random factor where they may see certain pages of your site. You can make sure people searching for a specific phrase get to land on a page on your web site that is completely tailored around that specific phrase. If you get it right, it is pretty much the most targeted form of marketing that exists.

Bob: It sounds like, one of the things that I get by implication, there is that if you go out and you are spending money on AdWords, you should not just point them to the front page of your web site, you should be pointing them toward a landing page that is tailored to the word that got them there in the first place.

Dave: That's right. There are occasions when the main index page, the home page of the web site, will work very well for specific ads and specific keywords, but generally speaking, if you are maintaining an AdWords account, by default the ads shouldn't just all point to the same page. You're missing out, really, on a lot of the flexibility of being able to set up these tailored pages. So bearing in mind that you're paying for every single click, it is extremely important that you can do absolutely everything in your power to make sure that once they click on your ad that they find exactly what they are looking for and they stay on the web site.

Michael: Let me ask another question. Oh, go ahead, though.

Bob: On the keywords side, how does a MicroISV go find their starter kit of keywords?

Dave: The process is actually very simple. In a sense it is not dissimilar from the same process as regular SEO, the search engine optimization. The key mistake that people make is that they focus on the words that they think that users may be searching for, and in actual fact it can be very, very different from what it is that the majority of the people out there are searching for. So the good news is, there are a whole load of different sites and services out there that make finding these keywords very, very easy. Google themselves, within your AdWords account, actually have a keyword tool which is, it is better than nothing but it is very, very imprecise and it is very, very basic.

The couple of services that we work with and recommend are WordTracker at WordTracker.com and also Keyword Discovery at KeywordDiscovery.com. Both of these sites' services tap into massive, massive databases. So basically you put in a word that you think people may be looking for, and you get all the synonyms, the variations, associated words, and you can actually see for all these lists, you can see for each word exactly how many searches, to get a good feel for how much demand there is out there. So growing the keyword list is a critical part of the process, but with WordTracker and Keyword Discovery it is actually a very, very easy process.

Bob: Well let me kind of give you a hypothetical here. Let's say I do a MicroISV Web 2.0 service for nurseries, and it is basically an accounting package for nurseries so they can track what they sell, the plants, and the basic stuff, but of course it is on the Web so that makes it shinier and easier to use. And I'm going to charge, let's just say for the sake of argument, $30 a month, and I want people to come find this. So would a good keyword be "nursery" or "nursery software," or am I not going in the right direction there?

Dave: It's a good start, it's a very good start, but the point is that really in a sense the base, the starting point, for your searches are all common sense. So if it is nursery software then obviously you should actually be looking for that as a starting point, if nothing else, just to get the ideas, just to get an idea of what people may be searching for. The reason why you really need services like WordTracker and Keyword Discovery is I suspect there isn't a person in the world who can tell me off the top of their head how many people a day, or even a week, may actually be searching for the phrase "nursery software."

But when you run that phrase through these services, you not only find out it could be anywhere from literally zero to hundreds a day I suspect it is closer to zero but you just don't know. But you get a feel for how many people are searching for them, and you actually get a feel for what other phrases they may be searching for that are related. And while you were actually talking, I actually ran "nursery software" through one of these companies, and I see there is no one searching for "nursery software."

Bob: No?

Dave: But there are two searches a day for "tree nursery software" for the phrase "tree nursery software." In a million years I would never have guessed that that is a phrase that people are searching for, but services like this make finding these phrases very, very easy.

Michael: Let me jump in and also ask another question, partly because this is going to run on Channel nine here at Microsoft, and of course as everyone knows we also make a search engine, as do other people. In the process of thinking about these things, I guess I have two questions. One of them is, right now are there any viable alternatives to Google AdWords, and if so is it something that you would recommend a MicroISV be looking at right now.

I understand that the lion's share of the market is obviously, right now, in what Google is doing, but how would you advise people, if at all, to consider other search engines and other advertising things? What I believe is happening is that our adCenter product is now accepting advertisers, and in some future date will also accept something allowing people to put links on their blogs and so forth to drive traffic.

Dave: Right. In answer to your question, there are actually a lot, a lot of different alternatives that are out there. At the present time I'm sure 99.9 percent of people listening to this will already understand Google is by far the most dominant in terms of size and in terms of, really, return on time invested, in terms of how much you are going to spend on this and how much money and time, and how many people you are going to see at your website.

In the past, I mean really the first big one historically was GoTo, that then became Overture, that then became Yahoo! Search Marketing Net; and anyone who knows me and has heard me speak at the conferences knows that I am no great fan of Overture or Yahoo! Search Marketing as they are now, really mainly because they haven't evolved with time. Aside from fairly regularly changing their name, their actual system is still stuck more or less at the same place it was five, six years ago, if not more.

There are other options as well. There are a lot of pay-per-click schemes. You mentioned specifically Microsoft adCenter. We have dipped our toes in, we set up an account a while ago and played around with adCenter, and my theory on it is this is the one to watch in terms of if anyone's got the resources and the expertise to make a new scheme really work, then clearly Microsoft has got to be pretty much at the top of that list. I'm going to see what is going to happen with MSN adCenter. But at this point in time a problem that a lot of MicroISVs have is limited resources in terms of time, and at this point in time everything that we have worked with has suggested that, in terms of return, AdWords is the one to be working with right now, and at this point in time nothing else comes close.

Michael: That makes sense. One other question I had for you is: I'm a MicroISV, I have written an application, now I am thinking about doing AdWords. How much money per month should I be expecting to spend on AdWords, or what is a reasonable amount of money per month to spend, and what kind of return do I get for that? What are typical results, I guess?

Dave: OK, that was a variation of the question that I was dreading, actually, that I was hoping wouldn't be asked. It is obviously, it is a question that a lot of people ask me. The bottom line is if I take a step back, if you don't mind there are two ways to succeed with Google AdWords. One is with expertise and finesse, and the other one is money; and you actually can completely do, really, really run quite a good AdWords campaign with absolutely no expertise and knowledge, and just throw money at it, and you will do reasonably, you can do reasonably.

I'm sure you can probably guess, in many industries money wins over expertise hands down. But one of the things that is quite interesting about the MicroISV industry is a lot of these companies, they are not sitting on huge amounts of money, and they are not prepared to just throw X thousands every day, every week, or every month, into AdWords and just hope that it works. So they basically lean more towards trying to get the upper hand in terms of the control and the expertise as opposed to the money.

Now the bottom line of how much a company needs to spend, it is absolutely impossible to answer, because the factors that will affect the amount that you are going to have to pay per click will, first of all, be your competitors. If, let's say hypothetically, your company has five, six competitors, and they are all throwing a lot of money at their ads, and they are paying a lot of money per click, then realistically at least initially you are also going to have to spend a lot per click just to get towards the top of that list.

The other point is that Google sets an actual initial value of each keyword. It seems arbitrary but I don't believe that it is. I mean, it is essentially demand and supply, and they know if a company is prepared to spend $10 per click on a particular keyword, well why should they sell it for five cents. So there is Google and there is your competition. They are the two main factors that will actually set how much you have to spend per click. So when you add that together, you've got the combination of how much you actually, you want to spend per click, how much you want to spend per day.

So for instance, you've got a $10 budget, a $10 daily budget, but you actually have to spend $2 per click, it is not really going to get you very far. You are going to get five, possibly six clicks a day, and that's it, you have hit your daily budget and nothing else is going to happen that day. Whereas other people, perhaps they are going after keywords that you don't have to spend anywhere near as much money.

For the same ten dollars a day they could literally be getting hundreds of clicks for the same money. It really depends on the keywords that you're after, how much other people are prepared to spend on them and really most crucially, critically, in a way is how well you can work the AdWords system. Because if you can work the system, you can turn it around, you can actually get more traffic, more clicks, spend less.

But if you don't really know what you're doing then you're more at Google's mercy and you'll actually get less traffic and spend more. But the bottom line is that $1 a day might be enough to get a reasonable number of clicks or $200 a day might not be enough at all.

Bob: And how you do your job with AdWords can really have that type of a range of impact.

Dave: It can have a massive impact. A very important point to understand is that the Google AdWord system by default is unbelievably heavily biased towards Google. And it goes without saying, it's not going to surprise anyone that Google AdWords does work to the favor of Google. But by default the whole system sets up a whole series of defaults that are actually quite bad for the advertiser but very good for Google.

An example I often give conferences to try and get this point across, I give an example where fictitious companies spend a hundred dollars a day on their AdWord account and every single day they make consistently $120 worth of sales. So from their point it's spend a hundred, make a 120. It's only $20 profit but it's in a sense money for nothing.

So that company might consider the option of "Well instead of spending a hundred, let's spend a thousand, so that then we'll be $200 a day for nothing." In the example that I give, what may actually be happening in this example where they're spending 100 and getting 120 back, what they may not realize is that of the 100 being spent each day, only 20 is actually generating the 120 worth of sales. And the other 80 is thrown straight into the bin or into the pockets of Google depending on how you look at it.

And this is a farfetched example but it's actually a scenario that we're very used to seeing. So I quite absolutely take my hat off with utmost respect for Google for the genius that underlies the system. In a sense they're running a casino, and one knows the house always wins in the casino.

But Google's stroke of genius is that even though you are actually losing, you walk out of the casino with a big grin on your face and you think that you're walking away a winner.

Bob: OK. So it sounds like on my whole list that I'm making of how to do AdWords right, I've got two things so far. First-of I want to get a good healthy pool of keywords. If I can find keywords that aren't going to cost me an arm and a leg - as far as Google thinks the markets for those are - that's a good thing.

My clients needs don't have budgets where they can afford, typically, $100 a day ad buy, more likely they are going to be spending $15 to $20 a day, at least initially. If they spend $500-$600 in a month, that's a significant outlay.

The second thing sounds like they need to really bone up on how Google really works. Don't take the defaults as being in their best interests, but the time they spend there will be time well spent, learning how the system really works. So does that make sense as a recap?

Dave: That does make sense. Well one other point that perhaps I've not emphasized anywhere near well enough, is that the keywords are obviously very important, but what a critical factor is that the keywords have to be as tightly targeted as possible.

As an example, if the product that you're selling is a email client, specifically for businesses, then if you go and set-up and AdWord account and you're going after the keyword "email" it's AdWord suicide. You're going to be getting a massive number of people typing in "email" who actually aren't interested in your product.

Whereas if you target the more obscure phrases like "email application for businesses" or "email application for small businesses" or "email application micro ISV" All these smaller, more obscure combinations. You're not going to get anywhere near as many people searching for that, but those that are should be a lot more interested, really, in what it is that you're selling.

It's a very important factor that your list of keywords has to be very much tightly focused.

Bob: So you want to tie you keywords back to how tight you focus your marketing segment. In other words, if you've got a product out there that's an email productivity application, it might be nice to say, "Well I'd like to sell it to everybody in the world who uses email" but the reality really is you need to start with maybe the 25 to 35 year old people who run their own businesses in the IT industry in the Northwest part of the United States, just to segment that down and then focus on those keywords.

Dave: Yeah, exactly. And, again, this goes back to understanding how the system works I don't want to get lost in the specifics but basically Google has what is called "matching options" by default for keywords, any keyword that you add by default in Google is "broadmatched." Now what that means all this is information that's available online on Google AdWords help if you bid on the word "email" for instance which we've already established would be a bad idea by bidding on the word email, if someone searched for "free email program" they may see you ad, that will trigger it.

If they're searching for "Mac email software" they are going to see it because the word email is in there, if they look for "free email" or for "send email" or for "email server" or for "email client" or "email protection," "email viruses" all of these things have the potential to trigger your ad, by default.

So, again, I'm just using this as an example to reinforce how absolutely important it is to really learn how the AdWord system works. Before you even think about actually dropping any money onto it, other than sort of dipping your toes in as an experiment at the beginning.

There are so many mistakes that you can make in a Google AdWords account, and there are so many mistakes that we see people making time and time again, that really cost them a lot more money than they need to spend.

Michael: Dave one of the things we heard when we talked with Joel Spulsky and we've heard from other guests and obviously we've talked about it at conferences is the fact that Micro ISVs, in general, their skill sets are biased in the technical direction and not in the sales and marketing direction. It sounds to me like some of the things you're saying are sort of basic marketing thinking.

If you had a Micro ISV come to you and wanted to get some help, is there any particular websites or books or courses or anything that you might recommend to one of them to beef up their knowledge of sales and marketing before you start to work with them on AdWords so they can start thinking in the sort of proper viewpoints of where they need to be. Because obviously if they're not even looking at things from the right place, and you said, they could waste a lot of money and even if they used your service they could they could chew up a lot of time and not get the results they wanted out of it.

So do you have any recommendations of things that people might do prior to spending money?

Dave: Yeah, there's actually a lot of information as I'm sure you can imagine the problem is really differentiating between the good resources and the not so good resources.

There are a huge number of different forums, some of which are very worthwhile; the Joel on Software Forums are a good source of knowledge, the Association of Shareware Professionals. There's a book that quite a good introduction, some guy called Walsh according to the cover, "Micro ISV from Vision to Reality" I suspect the name rings a bell. Which covers a lot of the basic and the not so basic.

But the bottom line is there is no shortage of resources, that really in a sense... The issue isn't the lack of information that's out there; the issue is how to actually recognize the good information and how to find it, and really very often the best option is simply to look around, use common sense. I mean, we can all spot a good forum, one that is really worthwhile and filled with good information, from the one that people are perhaps not quite in tune and not quite the vision to take their businesses where they want to go. But if we're talking specifically about AdWords, the marketing basics are absolutely, absolutely critical.

There are a lot of very good developers out there who need to really polish up their marketing skills because the two really do go hand in hand. And when it comes to AdWords you have got to have these marketing basics and with AdWords you have to know how the system works. Both of them are equally important. I mean, I would never name names, but nowadays our companies turned away. We actually turn away more companies than we choose to work with and send a price quote for simply because we don't believe that the product or the web site or the company is ready, if you like, to actually start spending money on the marketing.

Michael: One of the things that Joel was saying, and I wanted to see if you would corroborate this based on your experience with your clients, is that he said his almost number one rule is never start a company by yourself because you can't wear both hats successfully, both the marketing and sales hat and the technology and support hat. What do you think about that?

Dave: Oh, I couldn't agree more. I mean, it is a beautiful connected, wired world that we live in, and selling software on the Internet, on the Web, has literally has never been so easy. The problem is, these massive doors have been thrown open to the whole world, and the bottom line is that unless you are incredibly lucky there is a lot, a lot of competition out there. And unless you are unbelievably lucky and you actually are a talented businessman, a good marketer, you are good with figures, you can handle the accounts, a fantastic coder, a fantastic web site designer, your graphic design skills are superb and none of us, none of us at all can actually I mean it is not really about wearing two hats, it is more like wearing 15 or 20 hats none of us are in a position to do that and hope to excel at really any of them, never mind all of them.

So I completely agree. The problem is, small businesses don't like spending money. We don't like spending money. We would rather pay ourselves a salary rather than pass it on to a third company who are going to handle different things on our behalf; but it is just one of those realities of doing business. A reality of doing business is you do have to spend, whether it is spend on your AdWords account, spend on someone to handle your AdWords account, pay an accountant to do your admin and your paperwork, you just have to spend. Trying to do everything on your own is a pretty much 100 percent guaranteed way to make sure that the potential of your company is going to be capped.

Michael: It sounds like that is a guaranteed way to make that old adage true about, "The way to make a small fortune in the software business is to start with a large one."

Dave: Right, yeah. Very, very true.

Michael: It sounds like maybe what we need is the equivalent of Match.com except for programmers and marketing people and salespeople and so forth.

Dave: I think in a sense there are these forums out there. I mean there is the Association of Professional and Joel on Software. And all these places, in a way, if you use them correctly, that is what they do, they put the marketing people in touch with the developers because if you have a great product and someone who really knows what to do with the marketing and the sales, it is a fantastic combination. But aside from skill sets, I mean, how many of us are sitting around each day wondering how to fill the last three or four hours of our working day?

Bob: Well when I counted up the number of hats you have to wear when I wrote the book that you, by the way, nicely quote, thank you I got to 47 and then I stopped. And I agree that obviously it really helps if you have two people who have different skill sets, one more technical, one more toward marketing and people and that sort of thing; but I would just like to say for all the solo MicroISVs out there, it is possible to do both. It is not easy, and you will wish to God that you had more time every day, but there are ways of getting somewhere with this and it is possible. But I have to say it would have been easier, at least for me, if I had had a partner who could have dealt with either the coding part of things or the marketing part of things, instead of having to really deal with all of those things.

I want to come back, though, to AdWords for a second because so far we have been talking about, you are going to start selling a product. Well, what if you already are, you already have an AdWords campaign or two or three and now the question is, well, I have gained some results. How do you know if $80 of those $100 you are spending are actually going to waste, and if they are going to waste, how can you take your AdWords campaign up a level?

Dave: It's a very good question. In terms of knowing whether it is going to waste or not, just the simple answer is tracking. You absolutely have to have some form of tracking in everything that you do in your AdWords account. The beauty of the system is, it is more or less set up for this. It is heavily geared towards you being able to track. Whatever you may be interested in tracking, you can.

Now, the two things you need, you need some form of tracking that, personally, I would stick with the simple, stick with the basics; or you could go for Google's option, which they actually have built into the AdWords system, the conversion tracking. The problem with the conversion tracking is it is very, very limited. It is cookie-based and it expires after 30 days, so for a lot of people selling software that might be very far from ideal. But there is nothing whatsoever to stop you tracking, putting a different tracking referral code into each of the ads that you do, each of the ads that you're running, and then to actually follow this in your raw server logs, using web log analysis software to actually see which of the ads are working.

You don't need to get bogged down in the technical side of things but if, for example, you see that one ad may be sending 100 people a day to your web site. If the average time spent on your web site is two seconds, then you know something really isn't right with that ad. On the other hand, if the same ad is sending 100 people a day and the average time spent on the web site is one-and-a-half minutes, and they are looking on average at two or three pages, then you can say something is actually working quite well here. It is very, very easy. Really all you actually need is to add the tracking, and you need the log and AdWords software to actually handle that.

In terms of the other part of your question, how to expand an existing campaign, really, in a nutshell there are two areas that you focus on: you focus on the keywords and you focus on the ads. In a sense, the process is the same for each of them. It is a three-part process where you research, you carry out the research, you then expand what you already have in your account, and from there you track and purge. What I mean by that is track in the web logs, keep an eye on how these are actually performing. The ones that are not good, you just throw them away, delete them. The ones that are good, you leave there and you build on them. So you're sort of basically demolishing the weaknesses and you are building on the strengths, and that is really an ongoing process that you need to be carrying out within your AdWords account, both for keywords and the actual ads themselves.

Bob: One thing I would just add to that, Dave, is that as you delete those items that aren't working out, it might be a good idea to enter them in your business or development journal, just so you don't make the same mistake twice. It is very easy, as we process all this information, to forget that we have actually gone down a particular road. That is one of the things that I mentioned in a post a while ago at MyMicroISV about programmer productivity, and that is having a log of what you decide to do, and that is the sort of thing that would fit right in there.

Dave: Right. I agree. However, with AdWords there is a catch there. There are two catches to that approach, specifically with AdWords. The first is that with time there is going to be a massive amount of data that builds up there; but more importantly, the second problem is that people's searches and search patterns actually do change with time. So what doesn't work tomorrow might actually work fantastically well in three months or six months or twelve months, and you just don't know.

Something that is important to remember anytime you are over looking at one of your ads is that you've always got to remember unless your ad is the only ad being displayed on the page in Google search results, your ad is always going to be next to or surrounded by other people's ads.

So how your ad actually appears and how well it actually works can be massively influenced by the other ads. As an example, let's say you're, again we'll get the same example, let's say you're selling some sort of email client. Let's say there are five other companies all bidding against you. So anyone searching for email clients for businesses will see five ads and yours. If the other five ads are all displaying the prices and yours isn't that could actually work against you, in quite a big way.

If, on the other hand, the opposite's true. You're the only person displaying the price, and let's say hypothetically they think your price is quite high, they actually may be put off by that and the other ads that aren't displaying the price may be more appealing, and can get the clicks.

So in a way there's a catch. This is part of the beauty or, I suppose, the evil of the AdWords system, depending on how you look at it. You're absolutely forever chasing your tail. And there's no shortage of information. There's no shortage of data more or less on tap, but it's one of these examples that really the deeper you actually dig, the more confused you can get. And sometimes you just got to weigh it up, make a quick decision and throw it out there and see.

Bob: Well, let me ask another question kind of turning on that particular point. How often should I be monitoring my AdWords campaign? How often should I be in that dashboard looking at this information? How much of my time in life should I be spending on AdWords after I get it up and running?

Dave: In terms of how often to check it is a very, very important question actually. At the absolute least, I would recommend a very bare minimum that someone be checking their AdWords account spending some time there every two weeks. But really it should be weekly.

The other important point to consider is when you actually make changes to your AdWords account, whether it's adding keywords or deleting them, or adding or deleting ads, it doesn't matter. The point is, you've always got to allow these changes time to actually work and kick in and produce the results and data before you make any decisions. So you can't go the other extreme and sort of add five ads into your ad group tonight and tomorrow night be checking, see how it's working and deleting the three of them that aren't producing anything.

We generally recommend a seven-day cycle. The reason for that is once your ads are up, give it at the very, very minimum, seven full days to really work. The reason that we say seven days, is that you may well see very, very different patterns over a weekend and the week probably almost certainly you will. Some companies choose not to display their ads over the weekend some choose only to display their ads over the weekend. But you have to have a full seven days, or blocks of seven days in order to make an informed decision about what's working and what isn't.

Assuming you're going to be checking your AdWords accounts once a week and working on it, the amount of time you're going to be spending there really depends on how much money you're spending there. I mean, there's a common sense approach, if you're spending five dollars a day, so $150 a month, you don't want to be logging into your AdWords account once a week and spending four or five hours there.

If, on the other hand, you are spending, let's say $100 a day, so you are looking in the reach of $3000 a month, you also don't want to have your weekly AdWords session only being five minutes it just not enough. You need to get that balance, but it's roughly in proportion to how much you're spending there.

Bob: Any final advice for microISVs when it comes to Google AdWords?

Dave: Yeah, I'd say to sum it up more or less, I always say that AdWords is usually a moneymaker but not always. And the important thing to make sure that you are making sufficient return on your AdWords is simply to track. You absolutely have to track. It's absolutely critical.

It's equally important to keep up to date with what's actually happening. Now, Google has this fairly irritating habit. They add changes on a continual basis to the AdWords system. They don't have a "what's new" page on the website. They don't have a "what's new" location that you can go to see what these actual changes are. They do have their "Inside AdWords" blog, but they tend to only focus on the big changes. They make a lot of subtle changes that can make quite a big difference and it's never written up anywhere.

So I would also recommend keeping up to date with the news on Google AdWords. It's very, very, very important. Some of the changes that they make can actually have a massive impact on your bill, on your monthly bill and on the return that you are making. Inside AdWords is a good, definitely a good place to start. We actually have a blog on our website that only deals with AdWords changes. That's at www.sharepromotion.com/AdWords. You may go for a week or longer where we don't post anything there, because the only time we add something is when AdWords actually applies a change to the system. We will come across it quickly and tend to put it up very quickly as well.

The bottom line, I do like my analogies now when I say that AdWords is in a sense, to look at your AdWords account like you should be looking at a car. That you need to actually look after it, keep it safe and productive. If you have your car and it sits in the driveway and you never go anywhere you're not going to gain from it, but equally leave it in the driveway with the engine running and no one sitting in the driver seat is an invitation to disaster.

You need to treat the account well. You need to really, really learn how to use it. Really invest the time in learning how the AdWords system works. As long as you do, as long as you know how the system works, you track all of your assets, it's more or less impossible to lose.

Bob: Okay, Michael, any last questions?

Michael: No, I think it's been a great show. Dave, I want to thank you very much for coming on the MicroISV show.

Bob: One thing I want to point out to our listeners before we go here, is that sharewarepromotions.com has a newsletter and there are a lot of things we haven't covered about Google AdWords. For instance, the actual headlines that you write and how to write them. But I just got my nice February 2007 issue of Shareware Promotions Competitive Edge newsletter here. There's an article in here about copy writing for developers. So I would recommend everyone listening to this podcast, if you haven't already signed up for this free newsletter that Dave is doing, do it.

Dave: Thank you very much. I would add the address as well which is http://sharewarepromotions.com/newsletter. And all the information is there. It is similar to our AdWords blog in approach. It only goes out once a month and it's 100 percent unique content, which is all too rare nowadays, I think.

Michael: All right and we will include on the channel nine post, of course, links to all the things we've been talking about and Dave if you have other links besides the Joel on Software forum and the other forums you were talking about marketing, please send them along and we'll put them in the post.

Dave: Great. Thank you very much I will do.

Bob: Thanks, Dave.

Dave: Thank you very much, Bob and Michael.

Michael: Thank you. All right. So this is Michael Lehman, co-host of the MicroISV show here telling you that's the end of our interview with Dave Collins of sharewarepromotions.com. And come back next week for another podcast here on the MicroISV show. And check out Bob's new book at clearblogging.com. And don't forget to check out the Project Glidepath Windows Vista spotlight opportunity if you're a MicroISV to get your application featured and promoted by Microsoft at projectglidepath.net and for all of us and the MicroISV show see you next week.

[music]

The MicroISV Show #12 - David Shadle - User Experience Evangelist

Michael Lehman — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 22:44:20 GMT

This week Bob and I talk with David Shadle, Microsoft User Experience Evangelist about how design influences software development and vice versa.

Here are links David suggests you check out as you start thinking about design for a new product or enhancements to existing ones:

http://www.microsoft.com/design

http://www.netfx3.com

http://programmermeetdesigner.com/

http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/ - Jensen Harris Blog

http://blogs.msdn.com/karstenj/archive/2006/06/15/632639.aspx - a blog post offering a 5-day course for Hitting the wpf curve/cliff

http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/ - Tim Sneath's blog, technical and talks/showcases how WPF enables great UX.

http://lawsofsimplicity.com/ - An excellent book by John Maeda entitled “The Laws of Simplicity” which provides amazing insight and thought leadership on creating user experiences.

The MicroISV Show #11 - Jim Holmes & James Avery - Windows Developer Power Tools

Michael Lehman — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 19:45:34 GMT

In this episode of The MicroISV Show, we interview Jim Holmes and James Avery, authors of the new O'Reilly book: Windows Developer Power Tools (companion website).

Jim and James talk about how the book was written (65 collaborators!) and give their top five picks for Power Tools for MicroISVs:

James' top five:

1.       Subversion
2.       Trac
3.       Mbunit
4.       Cruise control.net
5.       Nhibernate

Jim's top five:

1.       Subversion
2.       Trac
3.       Mbunit
4.       Msbuild
5.       Watir

Jim also picked out FxCop as his one "must have" tool that isn't on the lists.

The MicroISV Show #10 - Joel Spolsky

Michael Lehman — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 18:19:54 GMT

Joining Michael Lehman as co-host of The MicroISV Show is Bob Walsh, Managing Director of Safari Software (www.safarisoftware.com), author of "MicroISV: From Vision to Reality", author of the soon to be published "Clear Blogging", and proprietor of 3 websites which are useful to the MicroISV community: www.mymicroisv.com, www.todoorelse.com and www.clearblogging.com.

In this first collaboration, Michael and Bob interview former MicroISV and successful software entrepreneur, Joel Spolsky (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/AboutMe.html), co-founder of Fog Creek software, prolific blogger and host of the Joel on Software forums including one on the Business of Software (http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?biz) on which many MicroISVs ask and answer critical questions about starting and staying in the software business. Bob Walsh along with Eric Sink are the "hosts" of the BoS forum.

In the interview, Joel talks about his experiences as an ISV, Fog Creek's CoPilot 2.0 application and ends with what he thinks are the two most important things every MicroISV should know.

UPDATE: Transcript of the show:

[music]

Michael Lehman: Hello and welcome to the MicroISV Show here on Channel 9. I am your host Michael Lehman, Technical Evangelist for the Microsoft Corporation, specializing in micro-ISVs. Today on the MicroISV show we are starting a whole new format. The beginning of this new format is I would like to announce that I am now going to have a co-host. My co-host will be Bob Walsh, Managing Director of Safari Software, and author of the book, "Micro-ISV From Vision to Reality."

Bob, would you like to give our listeners a one-minute introduction to who you are?

Bob Walsh: Sure. I am a micro-ISV running a company called Safari Software, Inc. I basically do two things. I write and that can be in the form of books and blogs, and I write code in the form of applications. I have done about 20 odd years of contract programming but my main focus now is my micro-ISV. It has one product out right now called Master List Professional.

On the right hand side of things, you will find me at three different blogs, mymicroisv.com is the first one. It is a blog and resource for micro-ISV with lots of good guest posts from people who actually know what they are talking about. My second blog is todoorelse.com, and that's where I get into things like David Allen's Getting Things Done and online productivity.

And finally I have started a new blog called clearblogging.com, and I have a book out in a couple of weeks by Apres by the same title. That is a book about everything you need to know to successfully start blogging or to improve the blogging you have got right now.

I am hoping that with this show, working with Michael we can get to some of the people out there who really have useful information for micro ISVs, be they micro ISVs, be they huge vendors, be they people in any name, weight, shape or form out there. So we are going to be expanding the focus of this show not just interviewing micro ISVs, but interviewing people from all sorts of companies, all walks of life who can provide information and experience and wisdom. Stuff you can't get out of a book or out of a tech proposal for micro ISVs. My hope is that we can come across enough information in this podcast to really make your micro-ISV succeed.

Michael: Perfect. Without further ado I would like to welcome Joel Spolsky to the program, and Bob, take it away.

Bob: If you have been programming under a rock for the last few years, you don't know who Joel Spolsky is, Joel Spolsky is the driving force behind Fog Creek Software, which is known for several products, specially FogBugz, an excellent bug tracking and feature tracking online application, as well as joelonsoftware, which is one of the most read developer blogs, I think, out there in the world. So how many people now read joelonsoftware in a month?

Joel Spolsky: Now at least 50, well, maybe a little bit more than that. [laughs] I don't really know. [laughs] I have stopped counting.

Bob: OK. The last numbers I had heard were pretty significant, something on the order of 4-500,000 unique visitors a month.

Joel: Well OK, it is probably more than that. Just the job section - that's the only place I track it because that is the place where we charge for advertising to list jobs - the job section is over 700,000 unique visitors per 21 days. That's how long an ad runs for. So probably a little bit more than that per month and that really is only a section of joelonsoftware. So I don't I think it would be exaggerating to say that there is at least a million a month.

Bob: OK. So Joel's been talking to the developer community for a long, long time. Joel started out with his partner, Michael... I am always getting his last name spelled wrong.

Joel: Pryor. Michael Pryor.

Bob: Michael Pryor. They were what we would call today a micro-ISV but obviously Joel's and Fog Creek Software have graduated to bigger and better. How employees now at Fog Creek?

Joel: About a dozen. We usually have large numbers of interns. We have some more interns coming back this summer. We will probably have about 24 all told in June. Not quite micro but still mini.

Bob: OK. What are the things that some of those interns did a couple of years ago was Copilot. Maybe the best thing to do is, can you tell me a little bit about what Copilot is and who is it for?

Joel: Sure. Well it started out - I guess I will tell a story - which is that when we... Our main product is FogBugz. FogBugz is a product that our clients install on the server. Everybody's server is a little bit different and so even though we have a pretty good setup, we wind up having to diagnose their problems quite a bit. We found that it is much easier when you can use some kind of remote desktop kind of application. Terminal server is a remote desktop that comes with Windows or VNC.

The trouble is 99.9% of the time, both parties, both the helper and the helped party are behind some kind of firewall. So a regular traditional VNC-type program won't work. So we had all kinds of things that we kept trying to do. We had a server setup outside the firewall on our side, where we tried to get our customers hooked in through that. What we found is that just getting our customers to install and run VNC, even with a fairly technical customer who actually knew what VNC was and how it worked, would take about 15 minutes on the phone. This was rather frustrating so we didn't bother doing it.

Then it occurred to us, "Gosh, we can have a little script that just installed VNC for them and set it up and open the appropriate holes in the firewall and various things." We had some summer interns coming down the pipeline, so I thought lets stick one of those interns and we will have him write some sort of script and then we will be able to do our remote desktop support that much easier.

Somehow that sort of expanded into, let's take all the interns and let's make a from scratch program, a custom version of VNC. Fortunately it is open source, so this is possible as long as whatever changes you make go back into the product. So that's what they did. It became a standalone executable that configures itself completely and that doesn't require setup steps. It doesn't leave files around the helper or the helped person's computer. We did just about everything we could think of to make it really simple to use.

Our initial target market... The truth is the target was people like us, other software companies trying to help their customers with their product with a remote desktop-type situation that would be a very secure, all SSL secured and so forth, 128-bit, and not leave anything around on any computer that could later be used as a hacking target or something like that. Also very, very simple, very, very easy to use. Basically the instructions are, go to copilot.com and type in this 12-digit number, download and run the program that you find there, and that's it. So the 12-digit number is the probably the hardest part of that. We are working on it.

Bob: You mentioned in your post when you announced Copilot 2.0, that one of the reasons you were able to accomplish so much with those interns, was that you used open source software as the starting point. I want to know that a little further. So really your product is a total sort of a hybrid, part of it is open source, at the desktop, and part of it is proprietary, the backend server code. What do you think of that as a model for micro-ISVs?

Joel: The model is really not so much some open source software and some not open source software. It is not the fact that we have that software on the server - because it doesn't do very much, it handles billing and it is what we call a reflector, which means that in order to get through the firewalls we have to have both parties that need to communicate connect outwards. Where they connect outwards to, is our server and our server basically just passes traffic between them once they both get connected. That is a very, very trivial thing that the first intern wrote in the first two days. Then there is some backend billing and subscription services. Basically what we feel like we are charging for, is the support and just the fact that it works and you don't have to do anything to get it working. Not really a software component. So there is an awful lot of open source software models that are built on the, "what we are charging for is service and not necessarily the best", and that is pretty much our model as well for Copilot at least.

Bob: Does that leave Copilot vulnerable to, let's say some big company walk in and take a look at the GPL code that you have got out there and say, "Well, we are bigger and better and we would have it out there today."

Joel: Yup. No, please don't. Yes, but they could have done that before we created this product and they didn't. Actually I am not that... There is a few issues here. One is that it doesn't really worry me that much. I believe that there is lot more to it than a brand around service, support and just awareness, than the actual do you have the bits that cause this thing to work. The reason I learnt that is, over the years, when we first released FogBugz bug tracking software about 2000, a bunch of clones started springing up. I should say about FogBugz we do distribute the source code for our customers' convenience but they are not really allowed to resell it. It is not open source in that sense of the word. For their convenience they are allowed to look into source code, modify it in-house. They are certainly not allowed to sell it.

But over the years, at this point, probably seven or eight Fogbugz clones have popped up all over the world. None of them has two million sales. We look at them and sort of giggle. They are cloning the wrong thing. They have cloned the FogBugz application itself, but they haven't cloned any of our knowledge of how bug tracking works, how the software development process works. They haven't got a website that has a million unique visitors per month. They don't have any of that kind of stuff. So realistically we are just not that worried about people cloning the actual software.

I mean, you can if you want to. You are welcome to go to the Copilot website, go to FAQ page, you can download all the source code, and you can build a service just like Copilot yourself. That will take you a few weeks and then you are going to have to get people to find out about it and provide them with a high level of support. By the time you have done all that, you realize that you are not making quite as much money as we are. [laughs] We are also probably not offering you a...

Bob: Or you may, as you had hoped, ripped off somebody's code. You know, I kind of wonder here the lesson you pass on to micro-ISVs is not to be as paranoid and obsessed if their applications get cracked or people copy their code. They need to focus on the non-code parts of what they are doing.

Joel: Yes. I don't know what the ratio is right now, software developers to non-software developers at a company like Microsoft. In the years that I worked in Microsoft many, many years ago, I believed that it was about 10:1 non-coders to coders. Maybe it was 5:1. But that number is only getting increased. So, when you think about it, in a functioning software company, probably 80% of their effort, maybe 80% of their spending is devoted to things other than creating the code, the bits that run on people's computers. That is really important to keep in mind, that this is not the be all and everything else is actually a little bit more important.

Bob: It sounds like you have been getting to the real point there, is that for a micro-ISV which is a one to five people self-funded effort, the majority of their efforts, the majority of their time ought to be spent on things other than the code base.

Joel: Probably about half of it, at least. In the start-up phases, somebody has to figuring where the customers are going to come from and how to get the customers. Otherwise it is just not going to work. You are writing code in a garage and doing nothing else, the code will never - nobody will ever find out about the code. Unless of course you invent the code that cures cancer and that would be great. People then probably would beat a path to your garage. But that happens about two out of three times.

Even there are two or three times in the history of software, Google maybe. But even in the early days of Google, I am sure they were out there trying to get people to find out about their product and try it out. So it is the marketing, it is the awareness, then it is the support for your customers that makes them elated and makes them tell other people about the product. All of those things are really the crucial component. And the software, not so much.

Bob: OK. Let me ask you, first there was CityDesk which was a VB6 application for design and templating websites. And if I understand correctly, what happened is FogBugz grew out of your in-house efforts to support that product.

Joel: Well actually, no. CityDesk was second. Here is the history. The history is that there was a vision. The original vision for the software at Fog Creek was a complete software management system that would have a client component, a server component and a workflow component. The workflow component was going to be FogBugz. Basically this way of telling people they need to work on something in the content management system, whether there is bug in the system, or a page that needs to be fixed, and all of the workflow. The workflow engine you might imagine around, say, journalists working on putting a website together.

The client component was CityDesk. It was going to be Windows based because the idea was people knew how to use wordprocessors. That provided theoretically a vastly superior and richer interface than a big old edit box on a web page. Turns out not to be true. The server component never shipped. It never became a product. What really happened is that FogBugz shipped first because we had it first and it actually grew and was very, very popular. Interestingly the people who rejoin software are the most likely people who need or use or want, bug tracking or project management and all the things that FogBugz does well. So that kind of became a hit on the strength of the fact that there was an audience that we had, both at fogcreek and joelonsoftware, we had this audience, of people that theoretically would be interested in FogBugz.

But that audience wasn't that interested in content management. Content management from various reasons I have discovered is not actually a good product category. So that sort of failed. So CityDesk is now, I would say, highly de-emphasized, We are not really developing it anymore but we continue to support it, because we are fanatical about support. Fronts fine on this stuff. But we are not really going to continue developing that because it is too small a market compare to other products.

Bob: Is this a statement more about how things worked out for Fog Creek or is it a statement that you are really weighing on the desktop versus the web-app argument here?

Joel: I am willing to weigh in on the desktop versus web-app argument here. I don't think there is pretty much anything left that needs to be a desktop app. Unless you need to interface with hardware that you don't have access to through the web. Even then most people will build web applications that talk to a very small proprietary component, that is the...

Bob: I understand. Your post's headline for this is, "Joel says desktop is dead"?

Joel: Yeah. I think so. [laughs] I very much changed my opinion just because we saw that people weren't that interested in the issue. Some people were and there is definitely a community of people that love the CityDesk idea of desktop-based content management. We kept saying nobody wants to edit in a big old textbox and use that as a day-to-day editor. It is so awful compared to Microsoft Word, or compared to the rich GUI desktop experience. Then we saw that most people are perfectly happy to use web-based email. Almost everyone is completely happy using web-based email as their primary email interface. Even people who have Exchange server and Outlook available to them are more than happy to use GMail and often prefer it.

So it has finally gone into my head that all the things that I consider to be part of the superior desktop experience are just not that important to the mass audience.

Bob: Hmm. I quite disagree with you, but I have to say that you have got a lot more experience with this than I do.

Joel: I will think long before I am happy to go wrong again. I will probably flip-flop on this particular issue couple of more times. Right now I really can't see building anything other than as a web-based app. Look at CityDesk, for example. it is all driven through the web, but there does have to be a Windows-based component to it - sorry, a desktop-based component to it, we have not only Windows now. Similarly Skype needs something on the client. But I am pretty sure that if you actually look at Skype - and I don't quite know how it is architected - but I am pretty sure that there is HTML as a pretty significant component of the technology that they used to build their desktop app. Even if you are building a desktop app - or look at QuickBooks, the quintessential desktop app, large swathes of that now are implemented in the form of HTML that is hosted by IE inside QuickBooks.

Bob: So maybe that this is really not the argument any more about having a desktop app that doesn't communicate through the Internet. Any application has got to be Internet-connected and Internet-centric.

Joel: Yes, almost any - except for very specific vertical needs - that's true. The way you can see that is think about word-processing, and how much of your word-processing you do in your email program, whatever that may be. How much of that you do in your blogging program, whatever that may be, and where is it actually that you have to bust out Word for Windows, and actually type a letter because you need to print something to send to the local division of jurors to try to get out of jury duty, or something, that doesn't have email yet.

Michael: The interesting thing to that, to take your discussion, is that when most people use web-based things, the underlying technology in the browser is still actually using either the rich textbox function that's built in to the OS, or the runtime library or they are actually sometimes using Microsoft Word components under the hood, without actually busting out Word as a separate application. I think more and more - just to add my 2c of this discussion, that all of the things are indeed becoming hosting containers. Part of my evangelism program is to release the whole project glide path and as part of that, not only are there inside Visual Studio, now there are custom dialog boxes, now there are a variety of web browser components used in critical places both for local content as well as content on the web. So it is becoming more and more blurred.

But as you said, we can have the discussion about whether the desktop is dead or not long into the night. But it is interesting to hear your opinion on that.

Joel: It is a little bit premature to say quite that. What I would say, however, is that if anybody came up to me and said they were going to build an application of a particular sort and I could not really see any need for it to do anything, maybe let's say, hardware specific or performance specific that really needed to be a desktop application, I don't see any reason it shouldn't be built as a web application at this point. Something like, let's say you are going to build QuickBooks today, you would definitely build that as a web application. There is no question that the benefits that you get for having the web application greatly outweigh the slightly reduced quality of these interfaces that you can build. Which is increasingly less and less true thanks to Ajax and so on and so forth. It's not really true any more that you can't build a web...

Bob: Yes. But I think it is going to be a long, long time down the road before we see Photoshop as a web service.

Joel: Well, but don't forget that... Photoshop, maybe. Then again, what 80% of people do with pictures is going to be scaling and rotating and fixing colours and stuff like that. Applications like Flickr or Picassa, that can actually do really neat things with those photos. I guess this podcast is a desktop app, right. Applications that - it is not so interesting to say what you are doing in Photoshop, it is more interesting how you are getting those digital pictures out and distributing to your friends, A couple of short editing stages between the camera and putting it up on the web, and those are the kind of things that can be done easily with web applications and probably relatively elegantly. A full application for a designer who sits there all day long manipulating digital images, I am sure Photoshop still has a space on the desktop.

Bob: When you look at the most successful web applications, a big component of that success is the online communities that have sprung up around the applications. As a matter of fact some of these applications are nothing but the community. I guess what I should ask you is, if you are going to start out from tomorrow as a micro-ISV, you can pick the proverbial graphics, photography application you talked about...

Joel: Yeah...

Bob: How much time and effort would you put into building the community, versus just building the code base?

Joel: That's a good question. The community may be... Well, the community will create itself as long as you get the parameters right. And as long as you've done the right things so as not to drive people away, the community will probably build itself, if the chemistry is created correctly. So, there it's just a matter of fine tuning it and hitting it off.

You may... The answer to that question sort of depends on how you plan to market your product. Community is often used as a way to distribute and market a product. Take Slicker for example, where its community features were pretty much crucial to ensure that there would be a reason for people to tell other people about Slicker , and, thus, market it in that that way.

In our case, in the case of, for example, FogBugz, have have more of a broadcast thing with Joel on Software than a community thing. Although there are discussion forums, probably only five percent of the people that ever pass through Joel on Software will stop by the discussion forum and the community features. Mostly, it's just kind of a broadcast media sort of thing. And that's okay, too.

So the real question is "how are people going to find out about your product and tell other people about your product?", and a community is one way of building that into your product itself. Making your product what we used to call viral, giving it some reason for people to tell other people about it. There are ways of doing that without necessarily building it into your product. If your product is remarkable in the Seth Godon sense, remarkable meaning it's the kind of thing you might want to remark about because it's interesting in some particular way, then people talk about it even if it doesn't have its own community mechanism built in. If you already have a platform or a gigantic marketing infrastructure like Microsoft then it's a lot less important to try to build communities.

Bob: Well, let me ask you a favorite question of mine, which is should micro-ISVs blog and if so, when and why?

Joel: That's a good question. I used to sort of say, I mean - there's no question that I blog to joelonsoftware - I used to deny that it was a blog. It's not really a blog it's more of a place where... There's no question that through that I've managed to build up an audience who also then hear about FogBuggs and Copilot and buy those products, or at least check them out.

Really, my entire goal with it was an educational one as there's certain things I have learned about software development and I wanted to spread the word. Even from the most selfish perspective so that I never again have to take a job at a company that doesn't know how to do these things.

Right. But more importantly joelonsoftware definitely predated Fog Creek.

And I was writing those articles long before FogBuggs or Copilot.

There's this sort of skeptical view that I'm just doing this in order to sell the products and that can be fairly trivially disproven by the fact that I was doing joelonsoftware before I was trying to sell products.

One of the books came out - "UI for Programmers" - actually predated selling any products. To answer your question, though, should people blog, it sort of depends. It's been very successful for me and it's been very successful for other companies I can think of like 37 Singles.

On the other hand I've seen an awful lot of blogs come across as either tone deaf or not authentic. A good example might be Jonathan Schwartz where there's a strong feeling that everything is censored by a PR department very heavily and everything is a little bit too mark on happy smiley. It doesn't sound like something Jonathan Schwartz would necessarily say. Those are probably not very helpful.

There are also people who if you're a micro-ISV and you're just sort of a really good developer and you craft view beautiful software it may be you're maybe not such a good writer and blogging might be out waste of time. If you're not going to get a readership you should probably have a blog at least to keep people up to date on what you're doing. If you're not going to really have something important to say and that people want to read independent of what you're working on and write it well, then you're not that likely to build up a body and it's not going to be a good marketing mechanism for you.

Bob: OK, Michael any last questions?

Michael: Yeah, Joel I would say that as part of what we are trying to do with the micro-ISV show to help micro-ISV's figure out what it is they need to be doing to be successful. I liked your comment about how we need to be spending 50% or even more of their time at least post development cycle thinking about their business. If you could pick one tip based on your experience in going from zero to hero, what would be the thing you would tell yourself from five years ago if you could give yourself a piece of advice now to be the one thing not to miss - the one thing you should do.

Joel: Can I have two things?

Bob: You can have two things.

Joel: The number one thing is a micro-ISV shouldn't be one person, it should be two people at the very least and one of them should have the business and marketing and sales skills experience. The other one should have the tech skills and the programming and the inventing the product type of skills. That kind of partnership is far more likely to be successful than the individual working alone just because people don't usually have both of those skill sets and so they really need to all be covered.

Or if you have only the sales and marketing you're not going to be to be successful because you won't have a good product and if you don't have product development skills you won't be successful because no one will hear about you and the business side won't really work. Having two people, I feel, is crucial just to validate your idea, almost to keep each other motivated, bounce ideas off each other and so on - that sort of thing.

The first part is the minimum size for a micro-ISV that can go anywhere beyond a fun project.

The second part, and Bob alluded to this earlier, which is my prototypical example of the photo gallery which is probably nine million micro-ISVs have made an application where it's like "Hey, everybody's got these digital cameras my application lets you upload all your pictures and put them on the web and make web galleries." There have been about a million of these and a very tiny number of them have been successful and the vast majority of them have been instant flops. For some reason this is an incredibly appealing idea for software developers to do, maybe because they feel like they know how to do everything, all the steps they're going to need to do to write the code to make this work, but for some reason they never really make it work.

But what I've always told these people time and time again, and they never listen to me, is instead of making the generic "upload your pictures application" take a very, very small niche audience - wedding photographers - and make the ultimate application for wedding photographers. Find out exactly what wedding photographers need. There's a lot of money around wedding photographers, they get paid an awful lot of money, and figure out exactly what their workflow is. If you need to find wedding photographers because they're in the yellow pages and there are directories of these things. Call them all and find out what they want and try to sell them your solution.

And so what I always tell micro-ISVs is, and that's just an illustrative picture, try to narrow your potential audience almost as much as possible to get started. In order to bootstrap you're going to have to find a very small initial audience you can serve extremely well of people who all speak to each other. One you can find all in one place, where there's money being spent because you're going to need to get a part of it for this thing to work. And once you find that very narrow niche, that's the way you get bootstrapped and you can think about crossing the chasm as Jeffrey Morris says into other kinds of industries and other kinds of larger markets. But you really need to pick something vertical to start with.

Bob: OK I think that's it for today's show.

Joel: Great.

Michael: All right Joel, thank you very much for coming on the micro-ISV show and if people want to go and find out more about you and your products and so forth what's the best web address for them to go to.

Joel: Tell them to go to joelonsoftware.com. That's my personal web page and there's links to all kinds of groovy stuff down the side. If it's your first time at joelonsoftware you can start with the little sidebar and just read through that; there's links to all kinds of past stuff and that will bring you up to date. On the main section of joelonsoftware are things that I post about once a week.

Michael: All right. Sounds great, all right. Thank you very much Joel Spolsky for coming on the micro-ISV show today and as always the views expressed by our guests are not necessarily those of the Microsoft Corporation or the hosts but they are respected views of our respected guests and we enjoy bringing them to you. Bob, do you have any closing words?

Bob: If people are out there listening to this podcast know of someone that we should interview please contact me or Michael at our respective. Email and let us know we really are looking for people out there to interview that can bring value to the micro-ISV community.

Michael: Thank you Bob through joining the show as a co-host. I think this show is a great opening for our new venture and I'm looking forward to future shows. As always check back here next week for our next edition of the micro-ISV show here at www.projectglidepath.net

Project Glidepath is an Technical Evangelism initiative designed to help MicroISVs upgrade and build new products for Windows Vista including .NET 3.0.

The MicroISV Show #8 - Marcus Tettmar - MJTNet

Michael Lehman — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 16:36:16 GMT

This edition of The MicroISV Show features an interview with Marcus Tettmar of MJTNet (www.mjtnet.com) developers of Windows Automation Software "Macro Scheduler".

The MicroISV Show #7 - Buzz Bruggeman - ActiveWords

Michael Lehman — Sat, 13 May 2006 20:20:58 GMT

This week on the MicroISV show features an interview with Buzz Bruggeman of ActiveWords. ActiveWords is a very interesting and useful product that launches applications and documents via keyboard strings typed into any application.

Buzz talks about some of the highs and lows of being a MicroISV and gives a lot of good advice learned the hardway from his 9 years in the MicroISV business.

He also talks about how podcasting and blogging has helped his business as well as how adding more follow-up emails dramatically improved their conversion rate.

The MicroISV Show #6 - Bob Walsh - Safari Software

Michael Lehman — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 23:03:27 GMT

We're back again with the second half of the interview I did with Bob Walsh, author of the book MicroISV from vision to reality and founder of Safari Software. http://www.safarisoftware.com

In this episode Bob talks about how he's been a developer since 1983 and how after the dot com crash, finding himself working twice as hard for half as much he went into business for himself.

Bob talks about the inspiration for his product, Master List Professional, why he chose windows and why he built a desktop application and finally closes with an look at the challenges of wearing so many hats as a MicroISV.

The MicroISV Show #5 - Kyle Alons - Kinook Software

Michael Lehman — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 00:57:33 GMT

This time on The MicroISV Show I interview Kyle Alons, founder of Kinook Software, http://www.kinook.com/, makers of Visual Build and UltraRecall.

Kyle talks of his years of MicroISV experience and how he's managed to make Kinook a self-sustaining entity.

The MicroISV Show #4 - Eric Sink - Inventor of the term MicroISV

Michael Lehman — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 18:20:34 GMT

This time on the MicroISV show I'm talking with Eric Sink (blog, MicroISV article on his blog), founder of SourceGear, who coined the term MicroISV in 2004 when he was a columnist for MSDN (Articles: 1, 2, 3).

The discussion ranges from why Eric wrote the articles, the evolution of the term MicroISV, how the longer a career a developer has the motivation to strike out on one's own grows, how the choice of tools can dramatically affect a MicroISV's success, and Eric's own experience as a MicroISV.

Finally, Eric gives his advice on what to do if you're thinking about becoming a MicroISV.