Building a Software Company

Puritysoft Endeavor Going to European Magazines!

2005-03-25T01:06:00.000-08:00

PuritySoft Endeavor is going to be on two Danish CD magazine distributions. The website is http://altomdata.jubii.dk/ I don't know Danish, but this is good news and publicity. The email read like this:

"To whom it may concern

My name is , I am cd-rom editor at the two danish computer magazines Alt om DATA and Datatid.

I would like to ask for permission to distribute the trial version of your Endeavor software, on our covermounted cd´s that accomplies our monthly magazines."

Well, I said "absolutely!" and gave her a free full-version key to my Memento Jotter, to see if it could also be included in the distribution...

updates

2005-03-20T21:46:00.000-08:00

Well, Puritysoft has now released Trial Manager for FileMaker Applications and released news to FileMaker.org. The news created astonishing traffic on my website. So the interest must be there. It makes me think that I need to beef up the website a bit.

Also, since I started to require sign-in, I’ve been getting a healthy average of 3 new individual registrations. About 50% are signing up for both of my other software, PuritySoft Endeavor and Puritysoft Memento Jotter. Following ShareIt’s parent company’s advice, I’ve configured my account to send email after 24 hours with 20% discount, then 10% discount after three days, and a final one on the user’s 25 days after registration. It’s supposed to be effective, but the first two discounts won’t work with those who registeraed before I set it up. I’ll have to come up with a scheme that sends them more than one in a percentage decreasing manner, which is how it’s supposed to be effective.

The majority of the traffic is from the FMPro.org sight, followed by other shareware sites and, of course, download.com. I am now convinced that part of the reason I’ve been ranked so well has to do with links from the latter -- a high quality link.

I also had a period of 6 days of higher frequency of adsense clicks, then after some website cleanup, it slowed down significantly. I’m not sure why, except the site is cleaner to read. I’m wondering if it was due to the fact that people had to resize the window to read and inaavertently clicked on the ads...I suppose I can test this theory, but I’m more interested in the qualify of my site.

Staying focused in the Software Business

2005-03-13T04:00:00.000-08:00

First, an update.
My products "PuritySoft Endeavor" and "PuritySoft Memento Jotter" are now all over the Net. Since last week, if you look up "PuritySoft" on Google, you end up with nearly 800 links. You should know that the quality of those links degrades as you click further --but they are links to my site notheless; in theory, this will improve my ranking. My website is being idexed about every other day. So, anything that I link to is also indexed. I've got lots of work to do on the website. I also need to put (or link to) more content related to the solutions that the software provides. I know this, and I'm working on it.

I'm writing about staying focused, and I will say that part of my nature is to keep my eyes open for new opportunities. Through the process of "building a Software company" I came to realize that 1)visibility is important and about 2)the power of news releases and 3)(again) content. This may cause me to stay off the writing for a few days, but I've got yet another idea that could be mutually beneficial to Puritysoft and any software company.

BTW, I have always been an idea guy and I've had several that could have made me rich --because the same idea made others rich :) unfortunately, some of the reasons include funds, time, and lack of focus. Before I get speared about the piece of honesty, I have to pull myself a bit by saying that I also can learn very quickly and introspect every day! I've learned and instrospected a great deal since :)

So, to keep things positive, I will keep my options open. I'm commited to Puritysoft, but I will find avenues that may be beneficial to it in the long run. For instance, Puritysoft can be the primary developer of another company that I found.

The question remains whether I should share these ideas in this blog. I just might...

As a professional, I recognize the power of staying focused and the consenquences of the reverse. Claris (now fileMaker), spent lots of resources in a program they called "Claris First Choice." The idea was that it would use its marketing might to bring to market promissing third party products. It didn't work too well. Neither did ClarisCAD or even ClarisWorks. In fact, no one would argue the fact that the company got rid of all its product lines to concentrate on FileMaker Pro. In fact, it changed its company name --in my mind, this move spells F-O-C-U-S.

While at Apple, I saw the same thing with so many technically "cool" products that didn't meet a market demand. One good example, of course, was the Newton. But there were others, probably half of its R & D in 1996! Many were axed at that time, including my project. It also spelled "Stay focused."

Another interesting spin on this issue is that which involves the decision to become a Service or Product company. Back in the mid 1990's it was commonly considered staying out of focus to go both ways. I was once asked by the CEO of a company I worked for what I thought about, and I said that both could be done: you need a product to survive the service down-periods, and you need products to nail down your service --it's simple and practical. Well, that has become today's mantra in the Open Source community.

Software online Marketing

2005-03-07T23:14:00.000-08:00

The software’s only been on the market for a couple of weeks, and PuritySoft Memento Jotter is number one in Google for “Jotter Software.” The second link is also Puritysoft Memento Jotter. It’s been hard work, but I think I’ve gotten this down very well. I have euroDownload and sofotex for doing their part. I don't know how for how long this'll last, but for right now it's pretty darn goood. You can download the champion at http://www.puritysoft.com/download/jotter10Setup.exe

Soon I will share with you what it takes to succeed. BTW, I'm getting trial signups every day now...the ride is just beginning...

I've also been able to get steady clicks on the product page, which generates some revenue from Google for me. They make pretty decent cuts.

ooper
http://www.puritysoft.com

Software Factories

2005-02-21T10:37:00.000-08:00

I've started to look at commercializing the Trial Manager framework for FileMaker applications. How to provide a Trial version is gonna take some thinking, plus I need to clean up the UI somewhat.

One key lesson is that frameworks are best when they are developed alongside the application that uses them. This is an interesting product that I think will work well. There will be some distribution challenges. For instance, it's not going to be an exe file, but an fm7 that should run on Mac OS X and Windows XP/2000, and I have to provide the right level of security without breaking its security functionality.

Hopefully, FileMaker Pro developers will come to the website to find out more.

So long,
ooper
http://www.puritysoft.com

Product Releases

2005-02-21T10:25:00.000-08:00

A short update. Got lots of work done this weekend.

We have released Memento Jotter to the world --our second product.

Some lessons learned:

Having a PAD file really works miracles. I've been able to post the software to several websites that accept the xml format --all in a jiffy. The great thing is that most of these sights revisit your PAD, so that if your name, version (or anything else) changes, it will be reflected on their webiste automatically.

Jotter also showed up at download.com today. So, we'll see. I even had one affiliate request for our software last night. This affiliate gets indexed quickly in google. Puritysoft Endeavor is now at 172 downloads. The downloadable version is still not collecting any emails and has a problem enforcing the 30 days expiration. That has now been corrected, but I want to work on some other stuff before I can make the release.

So long.
ooper
http://www.puritysoft.com

Learn about PAD here: http://www.padspec.org/padfaq.php

Product Releases

2005-02-18T17:25:00.000-08:00

I’ve been busy getting new versions of the existing software and recently introduced Memento Jotter. Please see http://www.puritysoft.com/pages/Memento-jotter-info.htm for more info. Essentially, the catchy concepts are: PuritySoft Memento Jotter is a Thought Operating System. Among other things, the software helps you keep track of your free-form snippets of information using text, multimedia, and even external documents like MS Word .doc file. Jotter can keep track of such things as: Assertions, Convictions, Chores, Bugs, Dreams, Heuristics, Ideas, Inspirations, Memories, Methods of how to do something, Passwords, Predictions, Questions, Todos. But mostly, it’s whatever you want it to be…

Here is a quick update:
We have switched our online ordering from Protexis to shareIt.com. Protexis is so behind in terms of functionality and features that I must be honest in admitting that I may have been in error early on. This isn’t to say that I wouldn’t switch back should the competition go to sleep. There are three strengths behind Protexis that I should recognize: 1)Value, 2) close links to CNET/download.com, and 3) because they are just starting out, they seem more resilient to the customer. For a limited time, they also only collect 8%.
In contrast, ShareIt! works on a commission basis. In other words, after licensing your program, they retain a service charge of 2.95 + 5% (Pricing Model A) or 14.9% but no less than USD/EUR* 2.50. Pricing models can be set individually for each product. There are no monthly or recurring fees for using share-it! They are very international (and hence multilingual), and offer some marketing services –none of which I’ve tried yet. I’m sure there must be others that offer similar services, but ShareIt! has all I need and more. The number of features is kind of a two-way sword because the UI, although intuitive is vast.

If anyone is reading these blogs, please let me know if it’s worth sharing these thoughts.

ooper
http://www.puritysoft.com
ooper@puritysoft.com

Blogs and software

2005-02-08T17:41:00.000-08:00

PuritySoft has a unique offering. It’s called Memento Jotter. Memento Jotter has been referred to as a Thought Operating System. Essentially, you can jot down any kind of information, including blogs that you can then be published via email with a click of a button. Except for the most trivial of cases, Blogs are not easy to write. Quality blogs are a compilation of well-assembled thought processes as well of tracking of events. Memento Jotter can help in this area.
You can start by “jotting down” thoughts that come to mind, without concern for structure. You can come back later and organize these thoughts, and once you do this, you might be surpised to see a subject for a good quality blog, which you can then assemble into a new Jot and then send it at the click of a button. Can't get easier than that. Don't let structure get in the way of your thoughts. Structure is important, but only when you need it.

Software Factories

2005-01-17T17:00:00.000-08:00

Software factories

On a very high level, a software factory is the assembly of pre-fabricated components connected at construction time. This is done in order to meet a product requirement.

Once a factory has assembled its parts and turned it into a product, it is delivered to the customer through the appropriate distribution channels. In the Industrial world, this all happens separately and with significant latency. All of these concepts have been successfully integrated into the hardware sector. One company that stands out in taking advantage of this concept is Dell, which does order fulfillment online, assembles it and then delivers it effectively, efficiently at a lower cost, without sacrificing quality and customer satisfaction. The customer makes specific choices about product components, and Dell assembles and finishes the product, which then arrives at the customer’s door sometime later. Most of this process is automated.

The type of software factory and business model that I am trying to lead into is conceptually the same as that above. Of course, this concept meets an obvious need, but I’ve yet to see it deliver on its promise. A great part of this is due to the fact that one size rarely fits all. However, this is surprising, because software components are more flexible to rebuild than hardware; if anything, they should be more prevalent and more advanced! We’ll leave the why out of scope for now.
Not all is bad, industry standards have emerged through the years to solve this problem and open source implementations have come a long way. Even so, solutions often need customizations to meet the slight differences in business requirements.

Before work began on PuritySoft Endeavor, it was evident that many of our modules would be reusable and easily reassembled in different contexts. This is partially because we had a vision to do so, which in fairness is not always clear because you don’t always get to choose which products to develop. We came up with products around the Endeavor concepts even written in another blog some time ago. However, this is only half of the story.

Even though a great deal of thought has been put into the design of our flagship product PuritySoft Endeavor, I could think of some modules that are useful for most users, but not for others like the Recipe module. MS Word has the problem that most customers end up paying for features they will never use and to some degree, this is necessary because some modules are difficult to decouple. This is typically due to the irony of reusability where inter-module dependencies are common in software and greatly statically defined. Runtime Type Information (RTTI) and the refection API in java have made some strides in the last few years, particularly in the Internet arena.

In terms of FileMaker Pro, you have relationships that must be put in place at development time –they cannot be dynamically loaded at runtime. While this has some security advantages, it brings some difficulties in distributing software modularly. For example, you cannot sell a standard set of functionality and offer an upgrade without requiring a new runtime build and redistribution of a 5mb+ runtime. Nonetheless, this limitation can be offset with today’s increase of Internet bandwidth. FileMaker Pro has all the database and minimum UI functionality that is required pretty much off-the-shelve to accomplish our RAD prerequisites and while not ideal, we’re sticking to it until a business has been established.

In terms of reusability, PuritySoft Endeavor has modules in other applications that we write that could integrate easily. For example, Child Care Organizer can implement a Menu module that uses Recipes and the Child module could use Contacts, Tasks and so forth.

Enough on pre-fabricated software; how about distribution of customized software?
In a similar fashion, but perhaps even more efficiently than the Dell approach, in theory, we can automate the process and immediately produce a customized solution for the customer, with an installer and everything…this is no magic formula, but I think it would work very well for the customer and might give us a competitive edge. Though the reality check is that automation will not be available immediately, and they may be that these “roll your own software” or “build your own software program” approach could bring some interesting licensing and versioning issues.

The question is, is this worth pursuing? Absolutely. It’s not the “next” thing you’ll see from PuritySoft, but do stay turned.

Ooper,
http://www.puritysoft.com

What's in a company name? 1

2004-12-31T14:32:00.000-08:00

What’s in a company name?

First, happy new Year!

I know there is a great deal written about name-recognition and branding surrounding a company name. It mostly says that the name IS important. Having worked for IBM, Apple, SBC and intimate with Microsoft through several friends who landed there, let me share my mental and emotional associations with each of these. I will then take a swab at giving them some "biased" pointers:

Apple: Innovation, elegance, IQ/EQ, empower, high-culture. Not-invented-here mentality. Didn’t know how to market products until the Ipod.
Advice: Keep doing what you’re doing, streamline your products, and embrace the PC. Stay in the home front.

IBM: Elegance, business, solutions, focus, customer-centric, even creative, bureaucratic
Advice: Keep doing what you’re doing.

Microsoft: competitive, strong marketing, high-culture, opposite of innovation (even its logo shows that), IQ/no EQ, autocratic, aggressive
Advice: Hire more Apple people –and keep them. Lighten up on the high-IQ stuff.

SBC: bureaucracy, CYA (survivor) mentality, opposite of empowerment
Advice: You are a victim of the Telecom predicament. Retire a few, work on retention of good talent and teach lots of management courses. Your name may change again and you may need to do so because you need to redesign yourself.

So, let’s ask, what’s is in a name; products, emotions? It’s both, but let me define the different philosophies behind the names herein. Acronyms are mostly IBM-wannabes. Companies with Soft at the end show what they’re about. Everybody else will either become a household name or simply vanish as quickly as they came.

ooper
http://www.puritysoft.com

See my other blogs: http://21st-century-teams.blogspot.com/

Naming Software 1

2004-12-29T23:31:00.000-08:00

We have chosen the name of our next product to be PuritySoft ChildCare Organizer and here is why:

My experience with Claris taught me that including the company name in the product has some positive branding effects. Its customers called ClarisWorks "Claris" which provided a free association, which would be difficult if the name includes a common word such as Organizer.

We debated ChildCare and DayCare and the former won because the former was more popular with search engines and produced less software in the first few links. This could mean less competition!

You might wonder: with such emphasis in uniqueness, why include Organizer in the name then? With Endeavor I learned that in order to find it, a potential customer would need to look for the PIM (Personal Information Manager) category, and even then they would need to go far to find it.

I still like the elegance of PuritySoft Endeavor, and the name does imply what it does, but it is not common and we'll have to work harder to market it.

ooper
http://www.puritysoft.com
See my other blogs: http://21st-century-teams.blogspot.com/

Releasing Software 1

2004-12-29T19:07:00.000-08:00

First, I want to send our condolences to the families of so many victims of the Asia tsunami. Our hearts go to them. I also urge the readers to help. My favorite charity is the American Red Cross at http://www.redcross.org/

Here are a few lines I wrote regarding our release.

While "celebration" somewhat inappropriate given the world events, I wanted to make the point that celebration is an important phase after a software program is released. Puritysoft Endeavor Deluxe has now been released and my family and I took a couple of days to sit back and recover from the burnout.

I sent emails to everyone I knew and received kudos, but more importantly, I received great feedback. Thanks everyone!

The congregational effect surrounding the release caused some inspiration. I even had a teen-age nephew spend a whole evening researching OUR next product.

I also got some things done at home.

ooper
http://www.puritySoft.com
See my other blogs: http://21st-century-teams.blogspot.com/

Choosing the Right Product 1

2004-12-26T15:26:00.000-08:00

Okay. So it's the day after Xmas and I met my deadline --wheuf! I worked all day yesterday, testing and reposting the big fat 25MB of the .ear file to my website. I had to remove one of the calendaring views (monthly) because it was buggy. You can buy it now at http://www.puritysoft.com, but I've yet to put it on download.com.

So, on product choosing. What I decided would be best is to outline the things that were important to me and come up with a set of products that would be of quality and useful to people. Finding the target market was important, but I felt that getting the company off the ground was higher priority.

Before I could do that, I needed to identify the underlying platform.

I am a Java guy --I've been working with it since 1996. I considered going Java all the way, but the turnaround would be months, rather than weeks to get to the level of quality I wanted. I looked into thick application solutions and it does look like the Eclipse Engine combined with the Eclipse Modeling Framework could be a very good option, but there is a learning curve that I wasn't so willing to endure, since I wanted to have a serious product by December (now). While the system gives you free persistence, I didn't know how well it would perform. More importantly, it did not seem to have good database/querying support. This platform is probably my ultimate goal, but let's build the company first and I have found a good tradeoff for now.

After some debate, I chose a well-proven database engine called FileMaker Pro 7 from http://www.filemaker.com. I worked at FileMaker for six years and I felt I could be productive with it to achieve the fast turnaround I was shooting for. It was a good choice. I met my deadline, the application is robust and the bugs are mostly insignificant and relatively easy to fix. I am still learning FileMaker, but I can be productive. The only complaint I have is that the runtime engine is kinda fat (almost 4MB). Moreover, I am forced with the constraint that all databases need to be known at build time. This is a bumber, because this forces me to package the applications with the runtime individually, which would grow my distributions significantly. Nonetheless, it's a tradeoff I can live with.

If the reader is new to software development, keep this tradeoff concept in mind. It happens all the time!

Next, I wanted to choose a domain that I was familiar with, meaning one that I could easily articulate to a wider audience, as opposed to a niche that required a lot of documentation--remember, it's just me. What better than a PIM to do that. A Personal Information Manager is easy for everyone to understand, and one can get a lot of leverage for future products. For example, in my research I found that DayCare is one of the largest small businesses and one that needs good solutions. While the market is competitive, the opportunities are still there. I can also test it out with a friend of mine who owns a serious DayCare company with over 50 children.

I considered targetting other market segments, but small business would allow me to more easily compete without spending a lot of time trying to catch the eye of the corporate world. My Apple experience taught me that this task is too difficult, and -most importantly- unnecessary! So, our Mission statement will include the small business and the home as the target. This market has got plenty to go around and under some estimates, one of the biggest markets.

Now, I realize that the PIM market is quite saturated, probably because of the same reasons I chose to develop for it :). However, I chose a Home/small business PIM solution with special characteristics, because of scalability. When the ChildCare Organizer is done, I can try to sell the target customers my PIM product line. In some cases, I may also leverage the effort in both directions. The Childcare solution is more vertical and relatively less saturated.

So, this plan will give me the following: Quick company exposure, scalability and a streamlined effort.

I'll have more later.

ooper
http://www.puritysoft.com
See my other blogs: http://21st-century-teams.blogspot.com/

Distribution Issues Resolved? 2

2004-12-24T16:20:00.000-08:00

Well, it's Chrismas Eve and I have a deadline tomorrow night. I've just sent back final information for Protexis to provide the order fulfillment services. I have some more final twicks and testing, but I think I can make the deadline for PuritySoft Endeavor Deluxe. I have another market-testing product "Gift Tracker" and can only be bought for less than $9 at http://www.virtualSoftware.com. It's just right for this time ayear. Endeavor will have that feature built in and will be going on the market for $29.99. I'll write about the products later. Merry Xmas!

ooper
http://www.puritysoft.com

Distribution issues solved?

2004-12-23T21:24:00.000-08:00

Distribution issues solved? Hardly. But I have a plan that might work. Essentially, it's a matter of distribution and order fulfillment and this morning (around 1AM) I signed a contract with Protexis/CNET that enables PuritySoft to distribute software using http://www.download.com. Protexis manages product registration, trialware services, merchant services, and digital rights management (DRM). For now, I'm leveraging the free sign up that expires on December 31. This will essentially allow me to put a "Buy Now" link on Download.com, a link to a secure page for payment processing for 7% of my sales. See http://www.protexis.com/solutions/special_promotion.htm for more info.

A while ago, I also signed up with http://www.virtualsoftware.com and http://www.payloadz.com. I must admit that the last two have not turned into any sales, although the former just put me in (it took nearly a month to do so!). They are both free and only collect a percent of all sales. I have also submitted one of my programs to a couple of popular shareware sites http://www.brothersoft.com, http://www.myzips.com and http://www.sharewareriver.com. They all produce some traffic, which is welcome. If you look up PuritySoft on google, Endeavor shows up in 51 links! Over 80% of the links came through via Download.com.

By far, download.com is the world's leader in terms of traffic, it's very affortable and that's where the little bit of time will go for selling online. I need to figure out if payingt he $99/month for unlimited uploads and one-day turnaround is better for Endeavor 1.0.x. It turns out that I need to upload bug fixes often and the $9/upload/4-day turnaround is not very effective. In another blog, I will tell you more about the product and the logic behind it in terms of marketability and features. Also, I will explain the process in finding a logo.

ooper
http://www.puritysoft.com

Distribution Issues

2004-12-22T20:25:00.000-08:00

Distributing software on the Internet, as oppossed to (or in connection with) internal options has its advantages. I can make a global release at the speed of the Internet when for <$10 I can be found on dozens of search links within a week of publishing one product to one popular download site; I get Immediate downloads and even reviews just as quickly, what a concept! I will continue to list other advantages in future writings.

Not without its challenges though. Here are some questions: How the heck to you sell the product? How do you manage version KAOS when you start to publish to more than a handful of download sites that review your software (for days or weeks) before it gets posted (virus checks, malware checks, you get my grip)? --If you're a small shop, you're gonna find bugs, you're gonna fix them, and you're gonna want an update right away, Yet, you're gonna be so out of sync, your hair will fall off! I know what you're thinking, software process, right. I am approaching 18 years of software development, and I've seen it at all levels, but unless you're developing safety-related software, only one approach can possibly and it's called Agile.

In the blogs that follow I will share how I start my company from the ground up; I have one developer, one marketer, one CEO, one sales Rep and they all share one name, mine. Oh I'm already growing, I got my whole family and some friends helping out and it'll be a fun ride.

Ooper
http://www.puritysoft.com