(Note: no Digest next week, I’m taking next Monday off for the 4th of July holiday.)

(If you have an announcement of interest to your fellow microISV, indies or startups, please email me at bob.walsh@47hats.com with the word digest in the subject.)

News and Announcements

• Omkar S. Bapat, BapatSoftware, has released SwiftStart 2 a free Windows bookmarks/favorites manager. (via email)
• In show #29 of the Startup Success Podcast Bob and Pat talk with with talk with Björn Herrmann of StartupSchool which is building the first lifelong entrepreneurship curriculum in the cloud by entrepreneurs and for entrepreneurs. StartupSchool is part of Supercool School, a bottom up, grassroots-like approach to organizing and holding live classes online.

Relevant Blog Posts, Videos and Articles

• Marcus Watkins, Versatile Monkey, does one extremely good job of detailing the triumphs, mistakes and lessons learned creating PodTrapper for the BlackBerry. (via BOS)
• Scott Carpenter, InvoicePlace, found a good one: Project planning: 8 ways to kill your project.
• A good read: Bootstrapping stories: Financing Your Startup Through Consulting (over at Seattle 2.0)
• Finding a mentor for your startup or microISV doesn’t get the attention it deserves, except here: On Being – Or Finding – a Great Startup Advisor: Video Interview with TechStars Mentor Jud Valeski. On ReadWriteWeb.

Further (mostly relevant) Reading

• Or in this case, watching: Jun Loayza of Viralogy.com interviewed me for this video blog for startups: Bob Walsh from 47Hats.com – How to succeed as a MicroISV. Jun did a great job of asking some very useful questions. Hopefully my answers lived up to them.

(If you have an announcement of interest to your fellow microISV, indies or startups, please email me at bob.walsh@47hats.com with the word digest in the subject.)

News and Announcements

• They’re at it again-tomorrow! Want some free help with your microISV site? Sharon Housley of NotePage, Inc. and Dave Collins of SharewarePromotions will be doing a live website critique webinar Tuesday June 23rd at 5:00 PM UK time (12:00 Eastern, 11:00 Central). Sign up here.(via email)
• Rob Bazinet, The Still River Software Company, LLC, has launched their first product, CustomerFu, a customer-centric complaint management application. (via email)
• Jay Cincotta, eSymmetrix Inc., has launched their first product, Gibraltar, an error/usage monitoring application for .NET applications. (via email)
• Kuzmitskiy Dmitry, djsoft.net, has released version 3.2 of RadioBOSS, a Windows application that makes automating your broadcast to the world, your business or shop professional, simple, affordable, reliable. (If that sounds like I wrote it, well, I did!)
• In show #28 of the Startup Success Podcast Bob and Pat talk with with Sramana Mitra; technology entrepreneur, Silicon Valley strategy consultant, blogger and author of Entrepreneur Journeys, Volume 2 – Weapon of Mass Reconstruction. We talk with Sramana about the startup founders she’s interviewed, the right way to raise money, the state of startups today and much more.

Relevant Blog Posts, Videos and Articles

• Nothing jumped out at me this week.

Further (mostly relevant) Reading

• If you want to get a handle on this whole Social Networking thing, pick up a free copy of Steve Woodruff’s brand new ebook, Getting Started with Social Networking. A good start-at-the-beginning tutorial.

By Jason Moore
uSightRead

Background

So here I am, maker of a iPhone App, not exactly what I planned. I always wanted to make and sell my own software. After college I worked for a large goverment contractor, and I mostly viewed that as my “day job”. The real work was done at night, behind closed doors so nobody could see the million dollar idea I was working on. Only problem was, there was no million dollar idea, just a bunch of false starts and half finished software that never even sold one copy. Then about three years ago, I got a job at an actual startup. I was still just an employee (the only employee) with no real power, but I was working with the latest technologies and I was still going to be driving a Ferrari in five years. The only problem was that the founders didn’t really know what they wanted and with the birth of my first child, I no longer wanted to work 60 hours a week.

I moved back under the umbrella of a large company again. It was a nice 40 hour a week job. The people here came from a startup that was recently purchased, so it still feels like a startup with the fast pace, and get it done attitude. Odd that when I’m happiest at my “day job” is when I actually decided to make some software that would actually sell.

Just Do It

My friend and I had talked about making an iPhone app for a few months. I convinced my wife to buy me the required Mac, and set off on actually creating an application. In previous attempts at making a software product, I would get extremely discouraged if I found any hint of competition and usually abandon the idea. This time was different. The product I chose was not particularly unique, and there’s even a couple of other directly competing products on the iTunes store. Why was it differenty this time? Why was I willing to actually compete? I guess because it’s a product that I actually wanted and in the past it was all about finding a product someone else wanted.

Armed with my idea, my MacBook, and about half an hour of free time a day, I set off on creating my app. Since I was working alone, I was responsible for everything, from graphics to the website. This clearly shows in the final app. I’m a software developer, and my art skills definitely leave something to be desired. Despite these failings I did manage to get the app on the store in about a month. It’s missing some major features that I would like to have put in before shipping, but I really wanted to get something out there. In the immortal words of Guy Kawaski, “Don’t worry, be crappy.” The best thing about getting a product out there is that customers (or potential customers) will tell you what they want from your app. Now instead of guessing which features to implement first, I know what should be first because 10 people have told me.

First week of sales or, I’m not going to be retiring anytime soon

Bob Walsh asked if I wanted to do a guest post and I told him sure, but I wanted to wait to see what the first week of sales are in so I had something to report. Well, the numbers are in and I sold a grand total of 43 copies. I know what you’re thinking, and yes, even the pet rock application has sold more copies. I’m actually just amazed that anybody bought anything that I made.

At this point there’s a couple of options on how to increase sales. The first is more features. Obviously there have been some comments, so I have a general idea of which things are high priority and which are not. Second there’s marketing. I’m already third on the major keyword phrase on Google, so that’s pretty good. The one major problem I have is that nobody (besides me for testing purposes) has clicked on the “Buy Now” button for my App. About a third of my website traffic is direct and I’m guessing that’s the people getting to the website from the iTunes store, but nobody is going the other way.

At this point, I think the features are more important and they will make the product easier to market. My current schedule is to have a release every month with the most requested features. I doubt I’ll ever be an iPhone App millionaire, but it’s fun and for the first time ever I have a product someone can buy. It’s a good feeling, you should try it sometime.

About

My name is Jason Moore. I’ve been a professional software developer since 2001, and a hobbist for many years before that. I wrote an application for people to practice reading music called uSightRead.

(If you have an announcement of interest to your fellow microISV, indies or startups, please email me at bob.walsh@47hats.com with the word digest in the subject.)

News and Announcements

• They’re at it again! Want some free help with your microISV site? Sharon Housley of NotePage, Inc. and Dave Collins of SharewarePromotions will be doing a live website critique webinar Tuesday June 23rd at 5:00 PM UK time (12:00 Eastern, 11:00 Central). Sign up here.
  (via email)
• Gautam Jain, Conceptworld Corporation, would like some feedback about his new product, RecentX – a Windows utility that speedily recalls whatever file or web site you were recently working on. (Via BOS)
• Naicu Octavian has launched AVChat 3.0, a Flash video chat for small and large online communities, and is looking for feedback on his site. (via BOS)
• Max Schneider,L-Ceps, is looking for feedback on its site that sells learning language software. (via BOS)
• In show #27 of the Startup Success Podcast Bob and Pat talk with Charlie O’Donnell, co-founder of Path 101, a new York City startup rewriting the definition of career guidance though data mining public resumes. Charlie has been a VC, founded nextNY (a 2300+ social group for New York startups), teaches entrepreneurship at Fordham University and is the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at ITAC: Industrial & Technology Assistance Corp. of New York – all of which we touch on in this podcast.

Relevant Blog Posts, Videos and Articles

• Corey Maass, Dubfiler LLC, found a good one: “Something called the Internet”. It’s a 1994 video talking about this new thing Bill Gates was a major contributor to: the Internet. Didn’t know that? Neither did I.

Further (mostly relevant) Reading

• Speaking of history, I’ve been really enjoying listening to Mike Duncan’s lively and gripping podcast, The History of Rome. Rome? Think treachery, bravery, greed and plots told with a light, enjoyable approach. Good stuff! (iTunes)

(If you have an announcement of interest to your fellow microISV, indies or startups, please email me at bob.walsh@47hats.com with the word digest in the subject.)

News and Announcements

• Atle Iversen, PpcSoft, has released PpcSoft iKnow, a Windows personal knowledge management tool specifically designed to help professional knowledge workers manage information overload and increase their productivity.(via email)
• Corey Maass, Dubfiler LLC, has opened the doors to Dubfiler, an online file transfer service built especially for DJs, producers, promoters, and musicians. Definitely has the best music of any microISV – check out sub.fm and The Kids Are Bored.
• Brian Wiblin, FillAnyPDF LLC, has launched FillAnyPDF. FillAnyPDF.com is a website where you upload your PDF form and link to it so other people can fill it out and sign it online. No software is needed. Brian added in his announcement email to me, “This site was largely influenced by the book Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality [link]. I struggled with the name for a long time until I read the book and said “what does it do?” . Within 10 minutes I had the URL picked out Also from the book, the home page tries to have all the key elements, show the product, establish credibility, etc.” Go Brian! (via email)
• Nir Dobovizki, NBD Tech, has released a new version of yaTimer, a task and timer Windows tracker, and is looking for site and product feedback. (via BOS)
• Kuzmitskiy Dmitry, djsoft.net, is looking for feedback on his site for his two products, RadioBOSS and RadioLogger. (via BOS)
• Pat and I have been swamped – me with getting StartupToDo ready to launch and The Web Startup Success Guide proofed; Pat with it’s the end of the fiscal year at Microsoft stuff. We’ll have show #27 of the Startup Success Podcast up within the next few days, and have an excellent interview with Sramana Mitra author of Entrepreneur Journeys: Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction that we recorded today for the show after that.

Relevant Blog Posts, Videos and Articles

• Nothing this week.

Further (mostly relevant) Reading

• None this week.

Starting a new pet project is easy. But finishing it? That’s a different story.

Many programmers love to tinker with side projects. I’ll argue that most of the decent ones do, anyway. Learning new tools makes us want to build things. Innovative technologies, cool product ideas. Unfortunately, the result is usually just a sad collection of forgotten files on some hard drive.

I’m certainly no exception to this – my portfolio isn’t exactly jam packed with polished results. I’ve worked up enthusiasm for a variety of hobby projects over the years, with somewhat spotty follow-through.

Recently, however, I decided to step it up a notch. “This time I’m going to stick with it until I end up with a real product.” So I did.

To keep development of my product rolling I try to consistently apply basic productivity techniques. They’re not particularly new and amazing methods – many of them are just Project Management 101. Unfortunately, they often seem to go straight out the window when programmers sit down to work on their own time. Perhaps using basic project management practices makes pet projects feel less sexy, somehow?

Anyway, these are some of my favourite techniques to keep producing in my spare time.

Set goals

Stating exactly what you want to achieve motivates you and focuses your efforts. And no, saying that you “kinda want to build this thingamajig” won’t cut it. Be specific. Quantify. What am I creating? For whom? By when? What, and how much of it, do I need to achieve? Write down concrete, measurable objectives.

Divide into milestones

If your project will take more than a few weeks it’s crucial that you divide the work into separate deliverables. Always having a single enormous blob of work left is demotivating. Instead, structure your project as a collection of smaller increments. And reward yourself every time you complete one of them!

Make yourself accountable

Tell someone what you are doing, and keep people informed of your progress. Talk to friends, post progress updates on your blog, whatever. The idea is to set up a small amount of external pressure to keep you going when the chips are down. I told Bob that I’d finish this cool widget by March – so I’d better get cracking!

Something every day

You need steady momentum to keep the project rolling. It’s much harder to sit down and work if you only do so every other week – you then need to use more time and energy to “spin back up” every time. You also run a higher risk of falling off the wagon completely if you miss one or two of those long sessions. Instead you want to ingrain a steady, regular habit which feels as natural as brushing your teeth every evening.

Don’t force it

Like woodworkers say: don’t work against the grain. If you hit a serious wall in some task, switch to something completely different to keep your momentum going. There’s always other stuff that also needs to be worked on. Some code proving hard to debug? Jump to, say, user interface design instead. Then come back to the original problem later on. Problems have a way of solving themselves if you let your subconcious chew on it for a while.

Iterate, iterate, iterate

You won’t get every task right the first time. Allow yourself to come back to each area of your product multiple times with fresh eyes. You’ll see more clearly the second and third time you return to that piece of code or functionality.

Sustainable pace

Slow and steady will get you there in the end, full sprint might not. I think that taking the tortoise route is the safest approach. Avoid burning yourself out by overworking. This is especially important in the beginning when you have lots of enthusiasm. You will feel less optimistic in a few weeks or months, it’s just a matter of time – so pace yourself.

Timebox everything

Perform an initial rough estimate of how much time and effort the project will take, given how ambitious it is. Then set aside fixed amounts of time you are willing to spend on your project. “I have to be done in three months, using no more than ten hours a week”. Work on each specific task for set amounts of time. This maximizes your focus. Timeboxing is especially useful if you’re in a relationship; your girlfriend/boyfriend/wife/husband/children will thank you for this one.

Ruthlessly trim scope

This is the flip side of the technique above. You now have strictly limited time to burn on the project, so get the most out of your available hours. We have a tendency to get carried away, dream up new features and let the scope of our projects grow. Try to constantly remove instead. Paraphrasing Einstein: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Do you really need this, that or the other to be satisfied with the finished product? If not, just archive the idea, then move along.

Let life intrude

Accept that Everyday Life can and will mess up your schedule sometimes. That’s ok. Don’t stress out about it – as long as you’re moving forward you’ll get there eventually. Just keep plugging away. Stick with it!

I’ve described the techniques above in the context of software development, but they should be fairly universal and applicable for anyone practicing some sort of craft in their spare time. If you have any other methods which work well for you, I’d love to hear about them!

Are there areas in which any of these techniques don’t work or are actually harmful? I don’t know – feel free to tell me if you know of specific counter-examples.

Now, time to get back to work on that cool new feature…

(If you have an announcement of interest to your fellow microISV, indies or startups, please email me at bob.walsh@47hats.com with the word digest in the subject.)

News and Announcements

• Steve Cholerton, Arten Science, has released two more products: MonitorMyMac, which takes timed snapshots of your screen(s) or takes shots with your webcam and the REALbasic Starter Kit (Windows and Mac).(via email)
• Manuel Onate, Momsoft, has relaunched his microISV site selling a line of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Windows utilities, thanks to a really nice job of design by my favorite web designer, Stefanie Fontecha, Fontecha Designs LLC, with copy by me. Hope you like it!
• Roger Martin, TechInfoSystems, has released Gallery Server Pro 2.3, a .NET open source web gallery. See his blog announcement. An interesting sales bit of data Roger mentioned about his Open Source software: about 8% of users donate an average of $45 each. (via email)
• In show #26 of the Startup Success Podcast Bob and Pat talk with Shawn Shen of Google about OpenSocial, Google App Engine and more.

Relevant Blog Posts, Videos and Articles

• Nothing found, although I’m enjoying reading Sramana Mitra’s Entrepreneur Journeys: Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction. A good read – I’ll probably do a fullblown review soon.

Further (mostly relevant) Reading

• None this week.

It’s not about getting funding – although your chances as a one-person company of getting even a smidgen of angel funding fit comfortably on the head of a pin. It’s about belief. I’ll come back toward the end of this post and explain what I mean – first it’s time for a confession.

In my professional career, first as a reporter then as a programmer, then as a microISV I’ve been something of a loner. The few times in my professional life I’ve had to manage people were terrible experiences for all involved. Like all traumatic experiences, you learn to avoid the things that cause the pain. What’s more it’s easy to go from specific experience to limiting generalization. It’s a short road from “I don’t want to manage people” to “I don’t want a business partner”, especially in this age where we can and do all sit in our own houses yet still get paid for the work we do.

I think more than a few microISVs start and stay one-person affairs because the person starting it has internalized their bad experiences managing people or being managed and wrote off the idea of partnering in the same breath.

But I’ve come to realize finding and keeping the right business partner isn’t about managing – or being managed – by that person: it’s about having someone share and believe in and work with you on your dream.

In some ways it’s your very first sale – and your most important. If your software idea is so anemic you can’t interest even passingly someone else in partnering with you – or you are so doubtful that software will sell enough to be worth two people’s efforts, watch out!

So how do you find a partner? This is of some interest to me since for the past 18 months I’ve been solo bootstrapping Project X/StartupToDo.com, and it has been a long, hard road that I finally realize would have been a great deal shorter if I’d decided at the start to find a partner for this startup.

The first step I think is defining what you bring to the party, besides a vague idea you want to turn into selling software. What are your technical, business, marketing, customer relations, content creating and social networking skills like? Me? First class content creation, marketing and evangelizing skills, hard-won more-than-a-beginner Ruby on Rails/JavaScript/JQuery programming abilities and an an utter lack of CSS make the page pretty aptitude. That’s my honest self-assessment: what’s your’s?

The second step is defining what your partner or partners should bring to the party. Do you need someone who can code a little but Community Manager a lot? Are there technical skills that given what your software will do and where it will do it, that your partner might provide? Do you need someone who can get excited about the parts of launching your startup that leave you cold? I know in my circumstances and I think for most startups you need the complement of what you have, not more of what you have. There’s simply too many different, diverse skill sets needed to build good software and sell it well to have the luxury of a partner who’s just like you.

The third step is getting yourself out there. That means everything from Meetup entrepreneurial meetings to code weekends to college reunions to IRC chat sessions to commenting on potential partner blogs to Twitter and Facebook and all the other social media, to industry events large and small. It means rubbing elbows – literally and online – with other people, one or two of them just might turn out to be potential partners. It means blogging about what you’ve got to offer and what skills you hope your potential partner has (Strong Rails/JQuery and the ability to beat CSS  into submission and a good look, in case you wondered).

The fourth step is not being afraid to talk with people about your Big Idea because you’re afraid someone they will “steal” it. For every idea that’s been “stolen” in this business there’s a thousand that died because the person who had the idea couldn’t alone execute it, or they lost their faith they could complete it. You’ve got to trust your partner, and that trust starts before they’re your partner.

Trust is half of the personal chemistry that makes for a partnership: the other half is belief. Your partner or partners have, I think, need to believe in your idea as much as you do. Belief is a very powerful thing – it can make you work untiringly , push past what you thought you could do, create something where there was nothing before. Belief makes reality in human affairs, whether you’re talking about starting a business or a nation, and two or three people who believe in the same idea are far more able to make that idea a reality than one person, no matter how strongly you believe.

So how much do you believe in your software idea? And what are you doing to find someone who’s prepared to share – and grow -that belief? For me, I totally believe Startuptodo.com will double the odds of success for the startups who subscribe to it once it’s open for business – and it’s high time for me to go share that belief with some of the people I’ve been meeting in the microISV/startup world and see if I can find me a partner to share that vision with. I’ll let you know how it goes.

@shanselman tweeted a link to WindowTabs about five hours ago and I have already gotten 50 downloads and several purchases.  With AdWords, I struggle to get five downloads a day. Word of mouth marketing rules.

The good old days you could rely on Google AdWords to do your marketing for you are well and truly over.

Mo goes on to lament he’s not spending enough time on marketing. While I agree with Mo that your first priority has to be creating and improving your product or service, marketing – or to be more precise, being part of the online conversation about your product and the problem(s) it solves – had better be a priority too. Marketing has to happen or your startup will die, it’s just that simple.

Here’s two basic microISV marketing ideas: if you are not doing these basics, you are in trouble.

• Use Google Blog Search and your RSS reader to monitor what people are saying about your product, service or company. That means creating the searches, pulling the feeds from the searches into whatever RSS reader you like (or iGoogle or a similar browser portal) and then having a recurring item on your daily to do list so you check those feeds and respond as necessary.
• Twitter Out, Twitter In. Take your pick of desktop, web based or mobile clients, but when you rev your product, get mentioned in a blog (see above) or otherwise make a tiny bit of news, or have a bit of value to share, using your company Twitter account should tweet it. What’s a company Twitter account? See The Twitter Survival Guide for details. The “In” part of this is setting up several searches and either monitoring them several times a day in realtime or at least feeding them to your RSS reader. Now this is just basic Twitter Business Hygiene – you can’t be part of the conversation if you’re even listening to the conversation – but it’s a decent start .

Twitter is fast becoming a force you need to reckoned with. Doing so is not rocket science. It just takes first the will to stop giving yourself a pass because you don’t like “marketing” and second an hour at most to set up what you need. Try this: set up the above, commit to spending 1 hour for the next 21 workdays “marketing” and see what results you get. Then cut me a check for 5% of your increased sales!

If you have a minute, here’s a quick question I’m putting to the start-up people I know. I’m going this alone. I’ve asked a few people to get involved but haven’t found the right fit. I’m wondering if you agree with everything I’m reading that says, ‘under no circumstances go it alone!’.

It’s been a question on my mind a great deal lately, it’s getting kicked around a lot at the Business of Software forum (here and here) and it came up a great deal as I was writing The Web Startup Success Guide.

Six years ago when I started writing my first commercial app, it was a no-brainer: I’d heard story after story how this partner had caused the company to implode, how that partner was lazy, how another partner had screwed they guy who came up with the idea if the first place. No way I wanted any part of that.

Now I’m not so sure.

Neither human nature or contract law has changed in six years. But the workload it takes to build a successful software business, how much two people (or more) can get done online and some of the prevailing attitudes have.

First the workload: six years ago a developer could write a good desktop app, tap the new huge eyeball magnet called Google AdWords, support their customers and life would be good. Or at least three times better – in terms of fulfillment, happiness and paycheck – than being a code monkey in corporate captivity.

Six years on, every business entity uses AdWords, the competition for prospective customer’s attention has gotten greater, and social media (Twitter, blogs and all the rest) is fast becoming the way you get that attention. It takes more work, more than most people are capable of, let alone capable of year after year.

That ever growing impossible workload and the inability to execute it are the single leading reason microISVs and startups  fail and big reason I’ve been writing StartupToDo.com (formerly Project X). I’ve come up with a way to save every startup/microISV founder that subscribes to StartupToDo about 40% of the time they spend doing what they need to do, at least the first time. (The money will be very nice too! )

Secondly, two partners or three founders working together toward a common cause using the wealth of online collaboration tools now out there can be far more productive than in years past. It’s a lot easier and more effective to collaborate as partners than to do the traditional hierarchical business thing of managers and managed people. Put another way, two partners working online doing all of the things that need to be done for a startup is much more effective and valuable than one “CEO” and one “employee”. Collaboration goes with instead of against the Internet – something that will be having profound repercussions for decades

Third, the attitude thing is an age thing – people my age (I’ll be 52 in July) – grew up in a pre-Internet, post-Watergate/Vietnam War era. I think we find it harder to trust others than people in their 20s and 30’s; I know it’s harder to gut-understand this whole Internet-connected world. And while I’m not ready for the Old Programmers Home yet, most people in this business are significantly younger, and there attitudes about trust are noticibly more open.

In some ways, the one man microISV has always been a myth: Tina, my partner in love and life, and her steady paycheck made “microISVism” work for me; nearly every successful microISV I’ve talked to over the years has some form on spouse helping them.

As for startups, if you’re not part of a two or better person team of founders, forget it. No funding; not taken seriously.

So my advice to Corey is yes, even if you want to create a successful microISV, get a partner.

How do you find one, what do you look for, how do you make it work? All good questions which I will take a stab at next week. In the meantime, I’ve got a big push of StartupToDo.com coding to do and by the way, yes, I’m looking for a partner.

===

By Andy K
CloudBerry Explorer for Amazon S3

After managing software development teams for computer multinationals for 8 years, Pavel decided to switch gears and do a start-up of his own. Now – 6 months later – his head is “in the clouds”, his micro-ISV – CloudBerry Lab is quickly gaining traction, their first tool – CloudBerry Explorer for Amazon S3 – is among the most popular freeware tools for Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3), and they are quickly expanding their product set with more Amazon and Twitter products and services.

Going into Clouds

Just a year ago Pavel was managing a regular programmers’ team at a big software vendor, and then things changed.
“For a long time I felt that everything in the database world was already invented ,” – he recalls – “Then, all of a sudden heard about cloud storage promising resources on demand, unlimited scalability and pay-as-you-go model, no installation, no configuration…  Just start using it when you need it and pay for as much as you use it. This sounded like a new promising technology for me and I set out to start a new adventure.”

What’s in a Name?

Picking a company name is not easy these days. One can spend hours doing WHOIS searches only to find that .com domains for any words and acronyms coming to mind are already taken. To make things even more difficult, Pavel and his team wanted to have a meaningful and properly spelled (!) name, ideally starting with the word “cloud” – that’s how CloudBerry Lab came into being. And although Pavel still has to dismiss RIM’s Blackberry-related questions every now and then, CloudBerry Lab brand is starting to get some visibility of its own.

Amazon S3

Having a database background, Pavel got quickly attracted to Amazon’s S3 service. The biggest stumbling point he got was the command-line interface as the only option. There had to be a better way to manage your files regardless of where they are – and that’s how CloudBerry Explorer for Amazon S3 freeware was born.

The explorer is a nice two-pane file manager that lets you easily copy or move files between your local hard drive and S3 drives (called “buckets”) out there in the cloud. With all the friction gone, S3 now literally becomes a simple extension to your local storage which anyone can use.
CloudBerry Explorer quickly went up the S3 tools charts, encouraging CloudBerry to further expand their Amazon presence. CloudBerry Online Backup which is currently in beta (worth signing up now by the way, as every tester is promised a free license once the product is out) is built on the same proven technology and makes personal data backup and restore easy and automated.

Twitter

Living on a shoe-string makes one consider grass-root marketing as the number one way to make the business visible – and that’s where Twitter came in handy.
Pavel ‘s partner Andy signed up as @cloudberryman, set up a search for “Amazon S3″ and started reaching out to anyone having trouble with the service which CloudBerry’s tools could solve.
“We notice that if you respond instantly there is a huge chance that people respond immediately and download the product.” –Pavel says – “In fact, we have been able to find some good friends this way who help me to make the product even better.”
This Twitter activity proved to be very successful. These days Twitter is in CloudBerry’s top 5 referrer’s constantly driving traffic to their web site.

Twitter Tools

Engineers see the world as a place which can always be made better. Same thing applied to Twitter. It did not take Pavel and his friends long to realize that there were Twitter tools they wish they had.
They developed a Twitter browser plug-in that helps users post quotes from the websites they visit and together with short URLs to the pages. Select the quote you want to tweet, click the plug-in button – and your tweet goes live – as easy as it can ever get!
One of CloudBerry engineers has developed IE plug-ins in the past and was able to hit the ground running in no time. It took CloudBerry Labs just a week to make the first working alpha version of the plug-in. Another week to straighten things up, to put all graphics in place, and fix a few nasty issues – and the IE add-on was out on the web.

Firefox was a bit more tricky. No one on the team had necessary background so Pavel went to the web and found a freelancer with Firefox extension experience. CloudBerry delivered all the necessary design documents, sketches, graphics, Twitter API calls; freelancer wrapped this into Firefox extension code; and they worked together to test and stabilize the plug-in. This flexible mixed approach was a great way to quickly expand into a new technology area with limited development resources.
Now plug-in is available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Twitte.la – is CloudBerry Labs latest child. The online service allows to quickly and easily see keyword popularity trends on Twitter. Pick either one or two keywords and see how much they were mentioned by the Twitter community lately. A great tool for any company’s marketing department including CloudBerry Labs itself.

What’s Next?

Despite the early success Pavel believes that CloudBerry Lab still has not found its ultimate killer product. However, he truly enjoys the mISV path he has taken after quite and stable global ISV life.
“I feel like a child about to open a box with the gift,” – he jokes – “And, as wise men say, if you never try it you will never be able to say if it works for you or not. “

(If you have an announcement of interest to your fellow microISV, indies or startups, please email me at bob.walsh@47hats.com with the word digest in the subject.)

News and Announcements

• Sharon Housley, NotePage, Inc, reminded me to remind you that this year’s Software Industry Conference is fast approaching, July 16-18 in Boston, MA. I found SIC to be an excellent experience and well worth going when I went a few years back. (via email)
• One of my clients, Manuel Onate, Momsoft, has just launched Brochures4Software, a custom brochure service for software companies. If you’re interested, entering coupon code FORTYSEVENHATS on the second screen of the purchase process between now and July 1st will save you $50 (via email)
• Dan Cooperstock, Cooperstock Software, has released HTML MessageBox. It’s an exact replacement for the standard Windows API MessageBox function, that lets you make your Windows application’s message boxes more readable and useable by allowing you to set a larger default font, then use simple HTML to add emphasis such as boldface, italics, underline and mixed fonts to the text of your messages. It includes interfaces for standard Windows API calling, a COM wrapper, and a .NET class wrapper. (via email)
• In show #25 of the Startup Success Podcast Bob and Pat talk with none other than Andy Brice, founder of the Oryx Digital Ltd and creator of PerfectTablePlan, about what it takes to run a successful microISV, key results of a visit to download to sale survey Andy recently did, and more.

Relevant Blog Posts, Videos and Articles

• Ivana Juga, a51, reached out to share some lessons learned running their latest beta for activeCollab 2. A good, short, read.

Further (mostly relevant) Reading

• CNET News now reports that Stanford University’s free iPhone course has been downloaded over 1 million times. Even if you figure only 1 in 10 of the people who downloaded this multipart non-credit college course from iTunes featuring Apple engineers, that’s another 75,000 apps coming down the pike to join the first 25,000 apps amassed at the iPhone App store in all of nine months. What do you get when you cross a bandwagon and a runaway train?

Here’s the cities:

• October 19 San Francisco
• October 21 Seattle
• October 23 Toronto
• October 26 Washington, DC
• October 28 London

What’s the topics? Not nailed down yet, but expect introductory talks by people who know what they’re talking about on:

• Android
• Objective C and iPhone development
• Google App Engine
• Python
• jQuery
• ASP.NET MVC
• FogBugz 7.0
• Mercurial and Distributed Version Control

Check out Joel’s announcement, but this is going to be way cool.

Hello,

SpeedDate.com, the world’s first speed dating Web site, is the first major dating site to launch an Android application that offers portable, immediate and 24-hour access to the millions of singles engaged in online dating.  According to a poll by Yankelovich Partners, 81 percent of employed consumers feel the need to simplify their lives. By downloading the free application to your Android, users can leave their computer screens and be able to message dates throughout the day no matter their location.

I’ve missed the boat. Again. While I could have been digitally connecting with missjanelle9, I’ve been busy writing The Web Startup Success Guide and StartupToDo.com. Both of which will be useful and significant, but fun? Ha! Not to mention SpeedDate.com raised in 2007 and 2008 a total of $8.6 million in VC funding, now there are over 160,000 speed dates a day and has supposedly millions of members online at any given time..

Seriously, the Mobile platform is taking off like a Saturn V rocket. Apple opened the App Store about 9 months ago and now there’s over 25,000 iPhone apps that have been downloaded one billion times. Google Android has a store too – http://www.android.com/market/ – and Eric Chu, the Google Mobile Platforms Program Manager, whom I interviewed for the book makes a strong case that Apple is by no means going to be the only breakout mobile platform in the next 18 months.

For so many years, writing software was hard work about serious stuff. New platforms, new technologies, new societal values means there’s lucrative software to be written above and beyond – and maybe beneath and under – all of the traditional software categories.

Something to think about on your next speed date.

(If you have an announcement of interest to your fellow microISV, indies or startups, please email me at bob.walsh@47hats.com with the word digest in the subject.)

News and Announcements

• Ronnie Pitts, Austin Valley Software Corporation, has launched CashWaltz, a family-focused expense tracking service designed to let each family member contribute to the task of maintaining the family budget by simply sending a text message, email or instant message. Ronnie is looking for feedback, and offering free accounts until 6/17.(via email)
• Jason Nichols, Padlock Software LLC, has just released Padlock License Manager for Java, which let’s you create trial versions of your Java-based software. Jason is looking for feedback on his site (nice!) and product (useful!).(via email and BOS)
• Peter Severin, wireframesketcher.com, has released WireframeSketcher, a wireframing plugin for the Eclipse IDE and is looking for product and site feedback (via BOS.)
• Robert Ringham, chordfusion.com, has made his first sale of Whiteboards Can’t Jump, an iPhone app that let’s you click and post your whiteboard/postit/napkin art and vote on the artisitc contributions of others. And before you scoff, he’s made his first iPhone app sale – can you say the same? (via BOS)
• Sorry – no Startup Success Podcast this past week – I’m writing the last chapter (Chapter 5 – Money: raising, managing & making) of The Web Startup Success Guide and I was maxed. Never fear, Pat and I will have show #25 out this week.

Relevant Blog Posts, Videos and Articles

• Nothing this week.

Further (mostly relevant) Reading

• Jonathan Kay, Ambassador of Buzz (how’s that for cool title?) at Grasshopper.com reached out to me today to share a video they’ve done: Entrepreneurs can change the world. I’m glad he did. I’d bet you’ll like it too.