A Google search for “deleted my blog” returns 12,100 results.

After reading this line my first thought was “I wonder if that domain name is taken.” It wasn’t, so now I’m the proud owner of DeletedMyBlog.com.

I’m no SEO expert, but my experience with the term microISV has taught me that a domain name that matches a common search term will consistently rank high in the search results if it has enough valid content. By not registering the domain, the owner of the site missed a great opportunity to build a site that could provide a lot of information and eventually push the person over to the other site to sell them the software. Or, skip that altogether and make that the site for the software.

At some point, missing the obvious happens to everyone and it usually happens often. Just ask Eric Sink, he has a post devoted to this very blog about it. [waves]Hi Eric![/waves]

If your goal is to launch a successful microISV product, there’s no doubt you have your hands full and your mind cluttered. You may be Getting Things Done but you’re not going to think of everything. So how do you avoid missing the obvious?

1. Ask for help - 10 points if you ask for opinions on your product from a non-programmer, 25 points if it is someone in your target market. I hear Bob Walsh has set up shop as a microISV consultant, he could probably help you find something you’re missing.
2. Set up a content site related to your niche - This will take time to implement and get indexed so you’ll have to start early, but the benefit is that you can track keywords that drive people to your site.
3. Set up RSS feeds for terms related to your product niche - You’ll stay up to date on news that could affect you and possibly get ideas for things you might be missing
4. Hang out in niche related forums in newsgroups - You’ll learn more about your target market and you will probably end up with more credibility in your niche
5. Purchase and/or research your competitors and document the differences between your offerings - This should be obvious in and of itself but some people still just build what they think people want, not what they really need. Identifying your competitors shortcomings is a huge selling point.
6. Test niche-related terms with Google Adwords - Similar to #2 above. If you use the broad match option to show your ads, you can see the terms being searched, drive traffic to your site quickly, and gauge response early in the development process.
7. Look at every major feature in your product and ask yourself “What is a completely different way to solve the same problem?” - You may come up with a completely innovative way of solving your customer’s pain.

Chances are I’ve missed something obvious in the list above. If you have any more suggestions, please share it in a comment.

What are the top 3-5 principles you focused on that made WP successful as a product?

Besides timing and luck, I’d say:

1. Minimizing startup costs…

2. Being adaptive to user-led changes in product direction

What are the top 3-5 principles you focused on that made you successful as a developer?

…..

2. At the same time, I’m happy to ship a crude version 1.0 and iterate. I find my time is more effective post-launch than pre-launch.

]]> http://www.microisv.com/archives/2007/08/21/tim-ferriss-interviews-wordpress-creator-matt-mullenweg/feed/ http://www.microisv.com/archives/2007/08/16/one-simple-thing/ http://www.microisv.com/archives/2007/08/16/one-simple-thing/#comments Thu, 16 Aug 2007 22:49:28 +0000 Brian Plexico General http://www.microisv.com/archives/2007/08/16/one-simple-thing/ In my year and a half hiatus from posting here, I continued to lurk and follow the goings-on in the microISV community. One thing I noticed is that not much changed. The same topics continue to be asked in a slightly different way, people come and people go….some people come back. I think this will always be the case because the microISV community is such a small niche and the very nature is that people work alone.

The one issue that still sticks out is that there aren’t more people getting ahead. The two causes seem to be a lack of motivation and lack of results. A lot of times, these two things create a never-ending circle where lack of one begets lack of the other. This is essentially what happened here at the site, life took over and the rewards hadn’t previously been big enough to create the motivation to return to the site once my time was freed up. Here’s how the post a few days ago came about and it is a good testament to how one simple thing can get the ball rolling again.

Two years ago I modified a VBScript that was posted to Lifehacker.com and sent my update to the Editor, Gina Trapani. She posted the updated version of the script and even included it in her book. Fast forward to late last week when I made some updates to the script for my personal use and decided to once again send the update to Gina where she in turn posted it to Lifehacker. When she linked to microISV, the number of visitors went way up and seeing this inspired me to post again.

If you’re suffering from a lack of motivation or stuck in a rut, find one simple thing that will help jump start your microISV. Pick something small in your app that has been nagging you or can be improved with just a small change, preferably something you can complete in one day. Do NOT implement a completely new feature.  That may provide a big bang but could also make the mountain seem that much higher to hike. Below are five ideas to help you get going again.

1. Document your code - This will allow you to quickly go over the code in your app and see things that you may not have seen in months or even years
2. Set up Google Analytics - You’ll be motivated to see the counter in the Goals section increase
3. Remove a seldom used feature - Sometimes taking things away can be just as beneficial as adding something new
4. Improve your error handling - Get rid of the generic error handlers and replace them with something that could help your user help themselves.
5. Refactor redundant sections of code - The more succinct your code, the less room for errors to creep in

]]> http://www.microisv.com/archives/2007/08/16/one-simple-thing/feed/ http://www.microisv.com/archives/2007/08/14/the-microisv-voyeur/ http://www.microisv.com/archives/2007/08/14/the-microisv-voyeur/#comments Tue, 14 Aug 2007 15:15:19 +0000 Brian Plexico General Entrepreneurship http://www.microisv.com/archives/2007/08/14/the-microisv-voyeur/ One of the first questions everyone asks about when starting a microISV is “How much can I make?”. While most people are understandably secretive about how much money they are making, there is a place to go to get a good answer to this question.

While primarily used for people selling websites that generate revenue from advertising, the Sites for Sale forums at Sitepoint will often have people selling applications they have created. The sellers are required to post the url for the site and will show screenshots of revenues to prospective buyers.  By viewing the forums regularly, you can get a feel for what the public is willing to pay and, even better, what is big in the market at the moment.

This current auction shows a good example of the depth of information that is available on the forums.

]]> http://www.microisv.com/archives/2007/08/14/the-microisv-voyeur/feed/ http://www.microisv.com/archives/2006/03/06/conception-to-sales-in-7-days-can-it-be-done/ http://www.microisv.com/archives/2006/03/06/conception-to-sales-in-7-days-can-it-be-done/#comments Mon, 06 Mar 2006 19:16:54 +0000 Brian Plexico General http://www.microisv.com/archives/2006/03/06/conception-to-sales-in-7-days-can-it-be-done/ When checking my referrer logs this morning I found that a portion of my interview for Bob Walsh’s book was quoted when someone asked if a working app can be completed in 7 days. The first reply from Bob says:

It all depends on the application, but unless you live in some parallel universe, I doubt you can build a worthwhile product in a week.

If you can, please tell us how!

Ok then, I’ll tell you how!

When checking my referrer logs this morning I found that a portion of my interview for Bob Walsh’s book was quoted when someone asked if a working app can be completed in 7 days. The first reply from Bob says:

It all depends on the application, but unless you live in some parallel universe, I doubt you can build a worthwhile product in a week.

If you can, please tell us how!

Ok then, I’ll tell you how!

The Idea

A few years back I spent pretty much every weekend in the woods shooting my shotgun at little clay discs flying through the air. Being a person who likes numbers and reports and readily subscribes to the idea of “if you track it you can improve it” I decided to see if there were a software app to track my scores. There were a few apps out there but many were old and I immediately thought I could do better.

The first thing I did was to limit myself to only the skeet shooting discipline. Skeet shooting is very well defined in that the number of shots, the field layout and the number of stations doesn’t change. This allowed me to take out the complexity of other shooting sports that allow for each of these variables to change. Because I decided to limit myself to skeet shooting I was able to hard-code the number of shots and stations into the app. At this point the only real variable was whether the shot was a hit or miss which means that the entire dataset is an array of 1’s and 0’s.

The most difficult part of the app was deciding how to allow people to enter the data into the app. Typing was out because it was too slow so I decided to create a grid with a red ‘M’ for miss or a green ‘H’ for hit. Clicking the square would toggle the choice. This also proved to be very intuitive for the users and they didn’t require much help which pretty much eliminated the initial need for documentation even though I did include a help file that told them to basically “click the square to toggle the outcome of the shot”.

Code Re-use that’s the key!
On the forum Ade said the following:

This was in reference to his second product. It’s not 100% clear from the interview, but it sounded to me like there were a lot of similarities between this and his first product — that he took his firt product and customized it to skeet shooting enthusiasts.

It was in fact my second product but I didn’t use any code from my first app. The first app was far more complicated and couldn’t be customized for this use. Since all I had to track was a string that looked like 110101001111, I was able to code this very quickly. And because the skeet layout is standard, translating the string to be displayed is just as simple. Shot 1 = array element zero. All I had to do was send the value and shot number to a function that toggled the button on the grid.

Bugs and Testing

No name anonymous guy says:

“In all honesty I question how any one person can properly design, develop, and test a product in one week. It certainly cannot be properly tested or documented in that time frame. “

I built the app to require little to no documentation. When you opened the app, the only thing you could do was enter a new score or view an existing score. This is not Photoshop with hundreds of menu choices that lead to hundreds more menu choices. It did one thing and one thing only.

As far as making sure the app would run on all flavors of Windows, well, I relied on experience for this. I have a lot of experience, professional and personal, with deploying applications and I was confident that this app would not pose a problem. My experience proved that this was correct. Had I used a lot of third party controls then I would not have had this confidence but I didn’t have to worry about that.

That being said, there were a few bugs that were reported by customers. I fixed them and thanked the customer for helping me fix the app. They were more than happy and appreciated the speed with which they were fixed.

Sell! Sell! Sell!

Another no name anonymous guy (maybe the same one) asks:

And how much can you sell a “one week product” for?
Sounds like freeware to me, not something your going to sell for more than $5 or sell thousands of copies of.

$24.99. I made my first sale on eBay when someone used Buy It Now to purchase the app for $24.99 within a day of the auction being posted. I tried varying the price over the next few weeks to see what worked and settled on $17.99.

It can be done…if you think it can be done

I would venture a guess that the majority of programmers out there can write an app that parses an array and toggles a display value in just a few hours so I probably took a long time doing it in 7 days. There truly is no more to the innards of my app other than handling button clicks and the like. The key has been stated hundreds of times before across this site, the JOS forums and every other microISV blog out there.

• Start with an idea that will benefit you personally
• Pick a niche that isn’t super-crowded
• Keep version 1 as simple as possible
• Get it out there as quickly as possible

If you do those four things, even if it takes longer than 7 days, you’ll be in a much better position than if you take a year to get your app out in the real world.

]]> http://www.microisv.com/archives/2006/03/06/conception-to-sales-in-7-days-can-it-be-done/feed/ http://www.microisv.com/archives/2006/02/22/how-about-this-for-software-marketing/ http://www.microisv.com/archives/2006/02/22/how-about-this-for-software-marketing/#comments Wed, 22 Feb 2006 19:16:24 +0000 Brian Plexico General http://www.microisv.com/archives/2006/02/22/how-about-this-for-software-marketing/ Axosoft is allowing customers to purchase a Small Team Edition 5 user license of their OnTime 2006 bug tracking and project management software for a $5 donation to the American Red Cross.  The regular price is $495. I would be interested to see the results in the future on how this works out as far as customer retention when the next paid upgrade is released.  I imagine that they will have quite a few customers locked in to the product by that time.

Move quick if you’re interested.  The offer ends February 24.

via DownloadSquad

]]> http://www.microisv.com/archives/2006/02/22/how-about-this-for-software-marketing/feed/ http://www.microisv.com/archives/2006/02/13/micro-businesses-boom/ http://www.microisv.com/archives/2006/02/13/micro-businesses-boom/#comments Mon, 13 Feb 2006 19:15:42 +0000 Brian Plexico General http://www.microisv.com/archives/2006/02/13/micro-businesses-boom/ The Coloradoan has an article that talks about the booming micro-business industry in Northern Colorado.  Fort Collins has 287 businesses with 5 employees or less on file with the Chamber of Commerce.

]]> http://www.microisv.com/archives/2006/02/13/micro-businesses-boom/feed/ http://www.microisv.com/archives/2006/02/06/small-is-beautiful-says-cnet/ http://www.microisv.com/archives/2006/02/06/small-is-beautiful-says-cnet/#comments Mon, 06 Feb 2006 19:15:13 +0000 Brian Plexico General http://www.microisv.com/archives/2006/02/06/small-is-beautiful-says-cnet/ CNET has an article looking at the new Web 2.0 startups that are not doing startups the traditional way.  The article includes the obligatory VC quote on how these businesses are good for the founder but don’t have the “fundamental ingredients for creating lasting, meaningful businesses”.

]]> http://www.microisv.com/archives/2006/02/06/small-is-beautiful-says-cnet/feed/ http://www.microisv.com/archives/2006/01/27/upgrading-vb6-apps-to-net/ http://www.microisv.com/archives/2006/01/27/upgrading-vb6-apps-to-net/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2006 19:14:24 +0000 Brian Plexico General http://www.microisv.com/archives/2006/01/27/upgrading-vb6-apps-to-net/ Many developers are still creating apps in VB6 because many of the world’s computers still don’t have the .Net framework installed and they don’t want to have to include the framework in their install. Because the .Net framework will be part of the Vista operating system, Microsoft is looking to help developers upgrade their apps with minimal effort. Read the patterns and practices article to learn more about Microsoft’s strategy to help developers upgrade with as little pain as possible.

via Michael Lehman (must be Michael Lehman day on microISV.com)

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