 |
Posted by Gavin Bowman on Monday, February 25, 2008 at 9:00 AM
A weekly roundup of Micro ISV news, announcements and relevant blog posts. News and AnnouncementsRelevant Blog Posts and ArticlesFurther (mostly relevant) ReadingTags: microisv digest entrepreneurship startups shareware
Posted by Gavin Bowman on Thursday, February 21, 2008 at 11:15 AM
Bob Walsh's new eBook was released last week, and it's focused on helping Micro ISVs troubleshoot and create their website. It's all about how you present your product to visitors, and it analyzes a lot of typical mistakes. It even has step by step exercises, making it extremely easy to act on the advice. Being a former journalist and running a Micro ISV of his own, Bob's the ideal person to explain these topics in a straightforward way that any marketing-phobic programmer can understand. I'm sure all those weekly site reviews Bob's been running on 47hats contributed a lot of material and experience. I enjoyed the book, it was about the right length for the topic, and it put all the concepts and ideas into the right order. When you're bootstrapping you tend to pick up little pieces of information on a topic over the course of many months or years. Even though you think you know it all, there's a complete lack of cohesion, so it's nice to have all those random thoughts straightened out. If you're just getting started, or are just approaching launch, this is a perfect topic, and I'm sure you'll learn a lot from the book. Also, at $19, as another fan puts it, "Bob’s ebook will pay for itself with the first extra sale you make". Link: MicroISV Sites that SellDisclosure: Bob was kind enough to send me a free copy, and one of my sites, Oriador Staff Scheduling, is discussed in the book.Tags: microisv marketing books
Posted by Gavin Bowman on Monday, February 18, 2008 at 9:00 AM
A weekly roundup of Micro ISV news, announcements and relevant blog posts. News and AnnouncementsRelevant Blog Posts and ArticlesFurther (mostly relevant) ReadingTags: microisv digest entrepreneurship startups shareware
Posted by Gavin Bowman on Monday, February 11, 2008 at 9:00 AM
A weekly roundup of Micro ISV news, announcements and relevant blog posts. News and AnnouncementsRelevant Blog Posts and Articles- Launching is barely step one, from Instigator.
- Better than free, from Kevin Kelly.
- What is the opposite of a vacuum, from OnStartups.
- How to run a beta test, from Dennis Crane.
- Internal Primaries, from Seth Godin.
- Progress updates from Floyd Price, Ben Kubs, Patrick, Jon Chase, Phil, KC, the class of 07.
Further (mostly relevant) ReadingTags: microisv digest entrepreneurship startups shareware
Posted by Gavin Bowman on Friday, February 08, 2008 at 12:51 PM
That little pang of jealousy over Andrey's release yesterday must have provided the extra momentum I needed, because I finally finished uploading and releasing the first Oriador Staff Rota update of 2008. There are full release details on our software release blog. Long time readers here might remember that I used to contribute to Codesnipers, and that one of my more popular entries there was a series on Micro ISV Mistakes. I'd like to revive the spirit of that series for a moment to discuss idiotic version numbering. The latest Oriador release is version 1.5. Taken on it's own, that's fine, but go ahead and take a quick look at the release history. That's right, we released version 1.0 on 4th July 2004... coming up for 4 years ago. And only a handful of the 40+ releases since then were just fixes, they almost all added extra functionality. We all know that a certain type of person will dismiss anything with a 1.x tag, so I'm not going into that, but here are a few other reasons why being overly conservative with your version numbering is a bad idea:- - #1: Money! We haven't billed for an upgrade in close to 4 years. I usually don't like to sound too heartless and materialistic, but that's just silly. If I'd known for sure we weren't going to have major releases every 18 months or so, I should have ran a maintenance/support contract system, or charged a subscription.
- It's harder to be brave or ruthless. Whenever I've had a feature I wanted to add or cut (maybe I didn't think it was getting used, or it might have been restricting things in another area), it was much harder to make a firm decision in a point release. I always tried to preserve the status quo for the existing users, or at least find a way to support them through an option. This sometimes left great new features hidden or over-complicated option screens.
- Expectation. Now the product has already evolved so far from version 1.0, I've felt like version 2.0 needs to be a major generational jump over the current version. In my mind I've set a precedent for the amount of extra functionality that can go into minor releases, so the bar for a major release is way too high.
I'm getting over it, I managed to resist the urge to call the latest update version 1.4.6, so I guess that's progress. If you have a product that's been sitting at version 0.x.x.x for a while, it's probably time to set yourself an acheivable 1.0 target. And if you ever find yourself releasing a minor update with major functionality changes, I hope you'll think of me :). Tag: micro isv
Posted by Gavin Bowman on Thursday, February 07, 2008 at 10:40 AM
Antair have just released version 3.0 of the BlackBerry Spam Filter. I don't have anything to do with the development of the Spam Filter product, but I am close enough to know how much work has gone into this release, and Andrey tells me there are a lot of major new features. We've also added a nice new Over The Air portal page for all of the Antair BlackBerry software, it's at http://antair.com/ota. If you're not familiar with OTA, it's just a mechanism that allows software to be downloaded directly to the BlackBerry, rather than sending it through the Messaging system, or using some kind of desktop software to facilitate the download and transfer. If you have a BlackBerry and want to try any of our games or software, just point it to that page and pick the product you're interested in. I've been finishing up an Oriador Rota update for the last couple of weeks, so I'm obviously gutted that Andrey managed to get his first big release of 2008 out mere days (hopefully) before mine! Tags: blackberry antair spam filter
Posted by Gavin Bowman on Monday, February 04, 2008 at 10:00 AM
A weekly roundup of Micro ISV news, announcements and relevant blog posts. News and AnnouncementsRelevant Blog Posts and ArticlesFurther (mostly relevant) ReadingTags: microisv digest entrepreneurship startups shareware
|
|
|
|
