Archive for ISV
Northern Virginia Code Camp (NoVA) Presentation
Posted by: | CommentsI had a great time talking about what it takes to suceed at creating your own software product company at the Northern Virginia Code Camp over the weekend. You can see the presentation slides below. The code camp was well run with good food and a nice facility provided by Microsoft. High quality pizza made a great lunch.
I was presenting during lunch opposite a panel discussion on software craftsmanship so the attendance wasn’t as good as in some other code camps (usually it’s standing room only!) but there was more than enough for a good discussion.
The key takeaway from the presentation is that you have to understand the market you’re diving into and why you’re the right group of people to create a good solution for that market before you get hung up on any particular idea being worth building a company around. In many ways that’s the difference between making a company and having a hobby.
My friends at DevExpress were kind enough to give me two licenses to CodeRush to give away to aspiring entrepreneurs. Judging by how hard people worked to answer the questions to get the licenses you definitely should check it out!
If you have a users group or just about any group of technology professionals and want to hear about what it takes to create a successful software product company, drop me a line and I may be able to come speak at your event too!
Philly Code Camp 2010.2 Presentations & Fun
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Thanks to everyone for coming to my sessions and the organizers for making the event run so well. The facility was great and it’s really quite remarkable that the community can have such a strong one day training event without having to charge participants. Microsoft was there to help out, but it was clearly a training event for the community not a Microsoft press event, exactly as it should be.
We had fun talking with the other vendors at the show, most notably Component One and the folks from CapTech. This is the first time we’ve had a vendor booth at an event like this, so in many ways it was a dry run to get the hang of what it’s like. We gave away a full copy of Gibraltar Analyst as well as a year’s subscription to Hub at the conference, and got to talk with a lot of people about both Gibraltar and VistaDB. We got some great real world examples of where VistaDB fits, which is a big help as we work on the marketing for that going forward.
I presented two sessions -
A Year in the Life of an ISV
If you’re thinking about what it’d be like to ditch your corporate development job or consultant gig and strike to create & market your own product (Or you’re a consultancy looking to create a product to diversify) this presentation shows what to expect on the path from shipping your first version to business success.
This one’s always a little risky at a code camp because, well… there’s no code. But, with the incredible diversity of tracks that were available at Philly Code Camp (13 tracks, over 60 sessions…) I think it’s also good to be able to “take a break”. Next time I might go for the last session of the day to maximize the value of that.
Designing APIs for Others
I covered a range of real world lessons about commercial API development emphasizing the differences between in-house & internal development and great, reusable commercial libraries.
I got some great feedback on this talk, particularly on an example that broke my own rule about samples: I tried to over-simplify it and instead created a “not best practice” sample. I’ll fix that for next time!
If you saw either presentation, please be sure to fill out the conference evaluation and I’d love to hear your feedback – drop it in the comments below or send it to me directly at kendall.miller@gibraltarsoftware.com.
If you’d be interested in having us come talk at your code camp, .NET Users Group, or event – please reach out and let us know. We’re always looking for new & better ways to engage with the community.
Do you Have Time for a Chat?
Posted by: | CommentsWe’ve been running an experiment on GibraltarSoftware.com for the past two months: We’ve had live chat available throughout the site. Each page has a nice big image on it when we’re available:
We changed our schedules around to make sure we could get at least 16 hours a day of coverage. We ran a set of tests to make sure we knew how to work with it effectively and put out our shingle, ready for a nice chat.
Since we started, we’ve had thousands of folks go through the Gibraltar Software site, mostly in the last five weeks since we launched Beta 4, the final (public) beta of Gibraltar. We’ve had a good number of downloads of the beta, and it’s in use every day from around the world (A big shout out to our friends in Vietnam, Lithuania, and Russia: My, it really is a global information age!). So, how many live chat sessions do you think we’ve done (excluding tests)?
None. Not one.
On the advice of a fellow entrepreneur we even started proactively reaching out: If someone went through more than five pages of the site over three minutes of time, we’d initiate a chat from our end which would pop up a relatively innocuous invitation to the user in the lower right hand of the screen:
Each time we did it, the user clicked close within seconds, ending the chat. As a friend of mine used to say: Message received, reading you loud and clear. People don’t want to be invited to chat.
Hello? Is This Thing On?
This experiment has left us really wondering: Is there any point to offering live chat on your web site?
- Perhaps just having it gives people a warm & fuzzy feeling that rubs off on your site, even though they’d never use it. Like the Office Comments box or getting a survey after having your car fixed.
- Perhaps our audience is technical enough that they want to do their own research without interacting with people (however we have gotten a few emails…).
- Perhaps we’re not cool enough and we’re doing it wrong. Certainly possible. Wouldn’t be the first time. Won’t be the last.
Independently of whether or not it’s an effective and necessary component of building solid customer relationships, we have learned a lot about what a good chat solution looks like. One thing we’d kill for is a real client. Not one of these web browser client wannabe’s. I’d rather it worked more like what we use for instant messaging (Windows Live Messenger, BTW) where I can pay it no mind until there’s someone to chat, and it manages presence detection automatically.
Another negative side effect of being logged into the chat system all the time is that we know whenever anyone is on the web site, and what pages they’re clicking through. It makes it almost feel like a game: who’s referring traffic to us right now, where are those folks going: I find myself rooting for the players to make the right next move. All of this is a distraction from doing our actual work: Making our product better, creating tutorials, answering questions we get from users. Having to keep a browser window up and visible to make sure we don’t miss a chat (haven’t missed one yet…) is not helping.
So what’s your experience, on either side of the glass: Do you use live chat to interact with folks behind a web site? Do you like interacting with customers and visitors via live chat? Is it better than email? We’d love to hear about your experience – fire away in the comments!
