If you are a little bit like me you are also always a somewhat late in starting to plan the new year.

When making great plans good tools can be really helpful. I was scouring the web for a good Calendar with which I could plan my marketing activities for 2012. I came up short…

I wanted a Calendar that gives me enough room to put my own comments in continually over the year and at the same time give me a large scale overview of what is coming on the horizon.

So I had to put it together myself. I think it came out pretty good and I thought maybe you’d find it helpful too. It’s spread over 2 pages with some Holiday’s and special days included if you want to tie in your marketing activities with for example Halloween or Valentine’s Day.

Please subscribe to my Software Marketing Secrets News and I’ll email you the download instructions.

Please comment below if you like it or if you have any suggestions to make it even better. I’d love to hear your opinion!

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I think it’s also very important to remember that even if your trial is free you have to sell the trial.

So take it away Andy.

What type of free trial should I offer for my software?
By Andy Brice

Once upon a time, the idea that you would allow people to try your software before they bought it was revolutionary. But now, thanks to the shareware movement and the ease with which software can be downloaded from the Internet, free trials are the norm for most types of off-the-shelf software. Prospective customers no longer have to rely on reviews of questionable independence or reading the packaging in a shop. They can try the software for themselves before making any commitment. This has been overwhelmingly a good thing for software users. It has also been a boon for vendors of good software.

When I surveyed 92 small software product vendors in 2009, 100% of them offered a free trial.

Eric Sink says:

Every small ISV today should give its customers an opportunity to try before they buy. It is officially now absurd to do otherwise. Customers will come to your Web site and expect to find a demo download.

And that was in 2004.

So, for most software products, the question isn’t – should I have a free trial? The questions is – what sort of free trial should I have? As with everything related to marketing, it depends. There are many different approaches. Below I describe some of the more common ones.

Time-limited

Typically this takes the form of a fixed number of contiguous days of free and unrestricted use. The software then stops working  and you need to buy a licence to continue using it. The time period is often 30 days. As you can see in the pie chart above, this was the most common type of trial in my survey.

The advantage of this approach is that it allows the user to try the full functionality of the software. But it does have a number of issues:

• The trial might expire before they have finished their evaluation.
• It isn’t suitable for software that might only be needed for a limited time. For example, a 30 day time-limited trial wouldn’t be a good idea for my wedding seating arrangement software as a wedding is a one-off event (we hope), and people could just start the trial 30 days before their wedding.
• You have to find some way to hide the data about the date the trial starts.
• It is relatively easy to circumvent. Even if you hide the install date well and check for changes to the system clock a potential customer can just keep reinstalling the software inside a new virtual machine each time the trial expires.
• Cookie expiration is an problem. For example, Google Adwords conversion tracking cookies only last a maximum of 30 days. So Adwords conversion tracking won’t count a sale on day 31, which is probably where most of your sales will happen with a 30 day trial.
• As most sales will only happen after your trial expires, you will have to wait longer to get your money.

I have sometimes downloaded software, started to evaluate it, got distracted and then returned only to find the trial has timed out. Very frustrating and unlikely to result in a sale. So I am generally not a fan of fixed duration trials. There are a couple of ways you can try to work around this issue:

• Only limit the amount of time they are actually actively using the software. For example, allow them 8 hours of total active usage. This shouldn’t be too hard to program. For example, stop the timer if there hasn’t been a key press or mouse click event in 2 minutes.
• Allow them to request an extension. Then at least you have got their email address and can follow them up.

Usage-limited

In this approach you limit the number of times a certain action can be performed. For example the number of pages they can print or the number of times they can start the software. This avoids the issue of a time-limited trial which expires before the user has finished their evaluation.

Feature-limited

In this approach the trial disables an important function of the software, for example printing or saving.  The problem is that a user won’t know if this feature works properly until they buy the full version. This may put some people off.

It has the advantage that you can ship a separate trial version with features missing completely from the executable, which makes life a little harder for crackers (note that they can still get hold of the non-trial version to crack if they want to, e.g. with a stolen credit card number). But it also makes life harder for customers, as they have to install the software a second time after purchase. Personally I care more about making life easy for my paying customers.

Capacity-limited

A capacity-limited trial restricts the amount of data that can be entered. For example, a password manager might only allow you to enter 50 passwords into the trial version. This approach can be problematic when performance is important. For example, if you limit a database trial to one thousand records, how can the user test whether the search performance is adequate for a database with a million records?

Output-limited

Many products exist purely to produce some form of physical or electronic output, for example image editors and label printers. Adding a watermark, or altering the output in some other way, can be an effective way to limit a trial. But you need to make sure that the modification to the output can’t easily be removed or worked around (e.g. using screen capture). You also need to be sure the user doesn’t think the modifications in the output are due to a bug in the software.

Nagware

Nagware allows you to use the software without restrictions, but ‘nags’ you periodically to pay for it. Usually this takes the form of a window that pops up when you start or exit the software. But I once used some software that also nagged you in audio. A woman’s voice with a heavy Scottish accent no less. It got uninstalled very quickly! Nagware isn’t very effective in my experience. I never did buy WinZip. Did you? After a while you just click the ‘continue’ button without thinking about it. Little tricks, like moving the ‘continue’ button or greying out for a few seconds are just annoying. And annoying people doesn’t seem like a great start to a business relationship.

No trial

Some software has no trial, just a money back guarantee. If your software is an enterprise system that takes significant effort to configure, then this is entirely understandable. But if it is off-the-shelf, downloadable software, what are you trying to hide? On the plus side it avoids the issue of people downloading software and then never getting around to trying it. My own stats show that only some 40% of people who start a download of my software actually install and run it. Also many people won’t ask for their money back even if they don’t like your product. So you might get sales to people who wouldn’t have purchased with a trial. But do you really want these people as customers? Personally I am unlikely to buy a software with no trial, unless there is no real alternative. I assume you won’t let me try your software because it isn’t very good. I’m sure many other people feel the same way.

Hybrid trial

Hybrids of the above approaches are also possible. For example, the trial of my wedding seating arrangement software doesn’t allow you to save, print or export plans with more than 30 guests – a hybrid of the capacity-limited and feature-limited approaches. I figure that 30 guests is enough to show what the product does, but not enough to be useful for most events. Also no-one is likely to pay for event planning software for an event with 30 or fewer guests.

Conclusion

A good trial is a balancing act. You need to give prospective customers enough to show them your software could solve their problem, but not enough to actually solve their problem. But if you are too restrictive they might go to a competitor with a more relaxed trial policy. It can be tough to get the balance right or to know whether a different approach would get better results.

Obviously, the best type of trial depends very much on your product. If it is a product that is likely to be used a lot and  is going to increase in value as it is used, then you might be best offering a generous time-limited or usage-limited trial. But if it is a product that is only needed for a one-off task or a limited period of time, then a feature-limited, capacity-limited or output-limited trial probably makes more sense.

For example, most consumers will (unless they are very unlucky) only want to use disk recovery. So it wouldn’t make sense to offer a 30 day free trial for consumer disk recovery software. It would probably make more sense to offer a feature-limited trial that allows them to see what data could be recovered, but not actually allow them to do the recovery until they pay up. But if you are selling to professional disk recoverers, then a time or usage-limited trial might be appropriate.

I asked  Craig Peterson of the Beyond Compare file comparison tool about their very generous trial policy (30 non-contiguous days of use) in an interview and he said:

That goes back to competing with all the other products out there.  If someone installs two programs to evaluate, and then doesn’t have a chance to really try them out until a month later, the one that works is more likely to get the sale.  It also makes it more likely that potential customers will learn the application and start relying on it, so when it does come time to pay they’re less likely to throw out that investment and switch to another tool.

Data comparing different types of trial is hard to come by:

• My 2009 survey didn’t show any clear difference in mean conversion rate between time and feature-limited trials (there wasn’t enough data for usage-limited trials to be worth counting):

• Patrick McKenzie reports on an A/B test of nagware vs feature-limited versions of the same software, showing the feature limited version had a 5 times higher conversion rate.
• A poster on the Business of Software forum reported that a bug which accidentally turned his trial from feature-limited after 30 days, to feature-limited as soon as it was installed, increased his conversion rate by 33%.

The nagware vs feature-limited result is fairly conclusive. But, apart from that, there doesn’t seem to be much hard data to go on. Even if there was more data, it wouldn’t necessarily apply for different products in different markets. So, unless you want to program multiple types of trial and run lots of split tests (trial and error?),  you are going to have to ‘go with your gut’. It is tempting to pick the same trial model as your competitors. But remember that part of successful marketing is being different.

So there are no easy answers. But don’t just choose a 30 day time-limited trial because that is what everyone else is doing. Have a think about what fits best with your product, market and customers. Be creative.

Source: What type of free trial should I offer for my software? By Andy Brice

Other Articles by Andy Brice: Failed Software Launches

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I have tried a lot of different things. I have been on twitter, facebook, youtube and other video sharing sites, social bookmarking, and much more trying to build social contact with a business purpose.

The outcome can only be described as mixed but mostly poor result.

I love the social aspect of it. It’s fun to get to know new people with shared interests, but when doing it for business purposes you have to see some results. That’s why it’s so important to do it right.

I just watched a video by Don Crowter. He claims most people (like me) are doing social media all wrong. Their systems make them lots of friends, but little money. In this video Don shows you the deceptively simple, but highly effective secrets that will hopefully put you and me on the right track with social marketing.

Watch the “Social Media Doesn’t Work” video here

Until next time

Peter – Your Software Marketing Secrets Guide

PS. Check out the downloadable PDFs to get a bearing on how you are doing with your Social marketing. Hint

PPS. In the interest of full disclosure the above links to the video are affiliate links.

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Software launches can be a scary business…

I am just in the works of launching a new software title. Can’t reveal much at the time but below you can read some of the marketing material or head over to the launch site and check it out.

I have to tell you something, but I don’t have much time…

Something strange has happened here. I started experimenting with Snagit and I discovered something. Something horrifying I cannot fully comprehend or even begin to explain. And I am afraid my time is running out.

I will try to get more information to you shortly, but I think they are watching me…

I am scared, very scared.

I warned you but look for yourself if you dare…

No related posts.

The most interesting case is when Paypal competitor PayNow dropped a 600 pound of ice block filled with cash in front of a Paypal conference.

Until next time

Peter – Your Software Marketing Guide

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Increase Your Productivity with Software

I love software and I personally work with a lot of different programs. Right now I have 47 different titles pinned to my Quick launch menu. Some of these saves me a lot of time every day.

Today I’ll cover a few of my favorites. I am guessing you heard about some of them, but I hope you’ll find something that can boost your daily productivity when working with selling your software.

And if you have some tips about software that saves you time, please do let us know by posting a comment below.

1. Snagit

Snagit is really The screen capture tool. I have tried many different and none comes close to Snagit’s functionality both when capturing, editing or sharing my images.

One of my absolute favorites to work with and also a huge time saver. I use Snagit for virtually everything in my business and personal life. Right now I am planning a work/vacation trip to Hong Kong and Thailand. I use it to grab and store information about the hotels, plan the different stops, copy maps online and then add annotations and stamps to clarify parts of the screen captures.

For work I use Snagit extensively, and this may sound over the top but I work with two monitors and my second monitor is basically used as my Snagit Editor monitor.If you try it I am pretty sure you’ll soon realize that it helps a lot. If you look at this website most of the graphic work is done with Snagit.

Check out: Snagit screen capture software.

When on Mac I use Voila for the same purposes. Check out: Voila Screen Capture for Mac.

2. Outlook

I am guessing no further introduction is needed. I also use Gmail for certain things but it’s hard to beat the time-saving functionality Outlook brings when I use the email templates (now called Quick Parts). If you are using Microsoft Office and is not using Quick Parts you are wasting time. You find a good tutorial on how to use Quick Parts here. You will not regret it.

3. Google Desktop

I do most work on Vista OS and I am sorry Microsoft, but your search functionality is not very good (the exception is the new faster search in Outlook). Google Desktop search saves me bundles of time locating critical files when working. Check out Google Desktop and save some time.

4. Camtasia Studio

If Snagit is the ultimate sceen capture tool, then Camtasia is The screen recording tool. In our organization we use Camtasia extensively to create demos and reviews of software as well as tutorials for our staff. To not need to explain the same systems to our new staff over and over again is a huge time-saver. Check out Camtasia Studio screen recorder.

5. Firefox

I used to be a die hard explorer user up until I tried Firefox. Firefox in itself is faster than Explorer so there’s a bit of a time saver there, and when I add using a few add-ons to firefox the productivity goes way up. Check out Firefox. I have also tested both Google Chrome and Opera, and although they are fast, Firefox outperforms them based on all available add-ons.

6. Bonus tip: SuperStamps

When I write articles or want to add professional graphic content to my work quickly, easily and make it look real good, I use SuperStamps. It’s a collection of 654 graphic images that can be used directly from inside Snagit. Check out SuperStamps Snagit Stamps.

I have a few more excellent software titles but I will save them for a future article. I hope you enjoyed this article and that you got something out of it.

Please post your comments, ideas about software that saves time for you below.

PETER GILLBERG is the owner of www.SoftwareCasa.com and responsible for millions of dollars in software sales. He also owns a consulting business for software publishers, teaching them how to implement online marketing and sales strategies. You can reach Peter by visiting his website: www.SoftwareMarketingSecrets.com

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Increase Your Software Sales with Twitter

Did you know you can increase your software sales by using the Social Media tool named Twitter in your marketing and sales efforts?

I will come to the “how to make money” part shortly, but first I will tell you a little bit about the phenomenon Twitter, in case you haven’t heard about it before or are unsure of exactly what’s going on.

Imagine the coffee machine or lunch restaurant at your workplace. The place most people meet up and share both gossip and hopefully get some work talk done too. If you can picture that, then you have an understanding of what twitter is about. It’s a gathering point for a lot of people online. It’s a dialog between people and as you will discover shortly it opens fantastic opportunities both socially and for creating business. And you don’t need a website, blog or marketing funds. It’s all free.

So how can Twitter assist you in selling and marketing software? As you soon will see links are a big and natural part of the conversations going on in Twitter. People are also much more inclined to click your links in Twitter than for example in email marketing, links on websites or blogs. And it will also take you very little time to write your Twitter messages. I spend about a minute to write a twitter message.

So, I just told you why you can make money. Now let’s dig into the how…

Step one, sign up to twitter. Go to twitter.com and create a new account. This will take you a couple of seconds.

Step two, sign up to a bunch of twitters. You find Twitters in twitter. The process is very simple and you will understand it as soon as you have tried. The easiest way to find interesting Twitters are through people that are already authorities in your marketplace and other interest areas. Authors, bloggers and so on.

Twitters you may find interesting to follow: @gillberg, @colligan, @softwareguide (this is an example of a business twitter with messages related to software). If you want to follow an example of a twitter dedicated to one software you can follow me on @snagitguide as well.

My initial tests suggest you can get a ratio about one to four, e.g. for every 4 people you follow one will follow you. And if you follow me, I will follow you

Step three, after signing up and subscribing to a few Twitters it’s time to set up your account. For people to sign up to follow you it’s important that you have a short bio and if you have a website or blog, include a link too.

This should help you get a higher ratio of followers and the followers will also be more targeted. Say you are interested in affiliate marketing. If like minded people see you in Twitter and check out your bio they are more likely to subscribe to your Twitter messages.

When setting up the account I recommend you use a picture of yourself. This will make you more trustworthy and human.

Step four, listen to the communication. Twittering is pretty straight forward process, but it’s good to get a feel for the general communication.

And finally, step five — time to start twittering.

Some Twitter tips.

• Be personal. Tell people a little bit about yourself, this will make you more human and trustworthy.
• Use mystique to get the click. For example; Check this out: [link], Wow, this is cool: [link] and so on. I think you get the picture.
• When it’s appropriate, interact with other Twitters using the reply button.
• Share valuable information, if you spam you will end up without anyone reading your posts pretty soon.
• Don’t talk about yourself too much.
• Use tracking for your links. I use klikdeal (klikdeal.com) for to set up my twitter links. This will pretty soon give you an overview of what is being clicked and what’s not. Avoid tinyurl as this doesn’t give you tracking capabilities. When measuring the results of your links with klikdeal you get an understanding of what subjects your audience is interesting in. This can be very valuable for your other software marketing efforts as well.

Looking forward to see your Twitters and click your links. A big thank you goes out to Paul Colligan for introducing me to twitter.

PETER GILLBERG is the owner of www.SoftwareCasa.com and responsible for millions of dollars in software sales. He also owns a consulting business for software publishers, teaching them how to implement online marketing and sales strategies. You can reach Peter by visiting his website: www.SoftwareMarketingSecrets.com

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Andy Brice, Successful Software

Andy Brice from Successful Software blog just released an excellent article where he is featuring 13 examples of software launches gone sour.

The article cover thirteen different software products and their launches that didn’t turn out like the software creators expected.

There are many lessons to be learned and if you are serious about your Software Marketing I suggest you read through the whole article.

Some of the bigger takeaways are that the software authors failed to research the market enough before venturing out and creating their software and the failed to market it when the product was released.

Take it away Andy…

Software entrepreneur culture is full of stories of the products that succeeded. But what about the products that failed? We rarely hear much about them. This can lead to a very skewed perspective on what works and what doesn’t (survivor bias). But I believe that failure can teach us as much as success. So I asked other software entrepreneurs to share their stories of failure in the hope that we might save others from making the same mistakes. To my surprise I got excellent 12 responses, which I include below along with one of my own. It is a small sample and biased by self selection, but I think it contains a lot of useful insights. It is an unashamedly a long post, as I didn’t want to lose any of these insights by editing it down.

Case #1: DRAMA

Contributor

Andy Brice.

The product

DRAMA (Design RAtionale MAnagement) was a commercialization of a University prototype for recording the decision-making process during the design of complex and long-lived artefacts, for example nuclear reactors and chemical plants. By recording it in a structured database this information would still be available long after the original engineers had forgotten it, retired or been run over by buses. This information was believed to be incredibly valuable to later maintainers of the system, engineers creating similar designs and industry regulators. The development was part funded by 4 big process engineering companies.

Why it was judged a commercial failure

Everyone told us what a great idea it was, but no-one bought it. despite some early funding from some big process engineering companies, none of them put it into use properly and we never sold any licences to anyone else.

What went wrong

• Lack of support from the people who would actually have to use it. There are lots of social factors that work against engineers wanting to record their design rationale, including:
  • The person taking the time to record the rationale probably isn’t the person getting the benefit from it.
  • Extra work for people who are already under a lot of time pressure.
  • It might make it easier for others to question decisions and hold companies and engineers accountable for mistakes.
  • Engineers may see giving away this knowledge as undermining their job security.
• Problems integrating with the other software tools that engineers spend most of their time in (e.g. CAD packages). This would probably be easier with modern web-based technology.
• It is difficult to capture the subtleties of the design process in a structured form.
• A bad hire. If you hire the wrong person, you should face up to it and get rid of them. Rather than keep moving them around in a vain attempt to find something they are good at.
• We took a phased approach, starting with a single-user proof of concept and then creating a client-server version. In hindsight it should have been obvious that not enough people were actively using the single-user system and we should have killed it then.

Time/money invested

At least 3 man years of work went into this product, with me doing most of it. Thankfully I was a salaried employee. But the lack of success of this product contributed to the demise of the part of the company I was in.

Current product status

The product is long dead.

Any regrets?

It was a fairly painful experience. I would rather have spent all that money, time and energy on something that someone actually used. But at least I learnt some expensive lessons without using my own money.

Lessons learned

• Creating a new market is difficult and risky.
• Changing people’s working habits is hard.
• Social factors can make or break a product. The end-users didn’t see anything in it for them.
• If the end-users don’t like a product, they will find a way not to use it, even if their bosses appear to be enthusiastic about it.
• Talk is cheap. Lots of people telling you how great your product is doesn’t mean much. You only really find out if your product is commercially viable when you start asking people to buy it.

Case #2: CleanChief

Contributor

Sam Howley.

The product

CleanChief was to be ‘The easy management solution for cleaning organisations’. Managing assets, employee schedules, ordering supplies, you name it CleanChief handled it. Essentially it was light weight accounting software for cleaning companies.

Why it was judged a commercial failure

A small number of copies were sold. No one is actively using it at present. Once I realised that it wasn’t a complete product and that additional development was required I moved on to other product ideas. I had basically run out of enthusiasm for the product.

What went wrong

• I am not an accountant.
• I have never run a cleaning company.
• I developed it for more than two years without getting feedback from real cleaning companies. I was arrogant enough to think that I knew what they wanted (or could work it out on my own). Or maybe it was that I was just where I was most happy and comfortable – writing software. Talking to real users was new and to be honest a bit scary for me.
• A successful cleaning company operator, a friend of a friend, offered to become involved for a 30% share. This was a gift from the heavens, exactly what I needed. I refused.
• In a way, even though I spent so long on the product, I gave in too soon, I was just getting feedback from real users, just getting my first batch of sales when I decided to move on.
• I developed the application in VB6 even though I knew it was outdated technology when I started the project.This meant there was no ‘cool factor’ when discussing it with other developers, I told myself it didn’t bother me, but it probably did.

Time/money invested

I worked on it at night and weekends for about 2 1/2 years. I paid for graphic design work, purchased stock icons and images. I probably spent a couple of thousand Australian dollars in total and an awful lot of time.

Current product status

I moved on to other products that have gone much better. My newer products were released in months rather than years and I looked for real feedback from real users from day one. they are:

• QueryCell – an Excel add-in making SQL in Excel easy.
• QuizNightChief – the easy way to organise a quiz Night.
• CustomerCradle – The easiest way to record and report on where your customers come from.

I do occasionally ponder returning to CleanChief and trying to raise it from the ashes.

Any regrets?

No. Looking back I learned a few lessons from a huge amount of time and work, it was a very inefficient way to learn those lessons. But when you are new to something like starting a business or creating useful software being inefficient at learning lessons is the best you can do, it’s a thousand times better than not learning lessons at all.

I learned so much more in my two and a half years of trying to develop CleanChief than I did in the two and a half years prior to that, during which time I really wanted to start a software business but didn’t take any action.

Lessons learned

Hearing or reading some piece of advice is totally different to living it. Here are some of the ideas that I always agreed were true but didn’t fully understand the implications of until I had lived them out:

• Force yourself to get out and talk to people. Ask their advice. Almost everyone will help if you ask them for feedback.
• Force yourself to cold call a few businesses in your target market.
• Create a plan of how to market your product.
• Try and use your product as much as possible as you build it.
• Get out of your comfort zone from day one
• Do not have the mind set that the day you release version 1.0 is the finish line, it’s the starting line, so hurry up and get there.

Case #3: Chimsoft

Contributor

Phil Anderson.

The product

ChimSoft – Software for Chimney Sweeps.

Why it was judged a commercial failure

I believe this failed for two reasons:

• Focusing on too small of a niche
• Me not being able to work full time on it.

I don’t consider it a complete failure because I sold two copies when it retailed for $2k, and maybe 10-15 more copies when I lowered the price to $200. Those sales proved that I wasn’t completely off base in thinking there was a market for the software, but the cost of customer acquisition and the size of the market were too small. Customers wanted to have a bunch of phone calls, face-to-face etc… the type of stuff you only see with much more expensive software. The problem was that for a niche this small we had to charge a lot of money to make it worthwhile for us, but the customers were small businesses where this is a major investment, so the fit was never right. The other issue was the people that did buy it were not super tech savvy, so there was a high cost of support that made even a $200 product not worth it.

What went wrong

• Having all partners who were not full-time, and had equal equity.  I ended up doing most of the work and this is the main reason I didn’t force success is I felt I was in it alone.
• Focusing on too narrow of a niche.  The plan all along was to expand for all service industries, but it was much harder to make that move than we expected.
• Not researching pricing more, we knew small businesses made major purchases for things that really helped their business, but I think it would have been better to have a cheaper product with wider appeal than an expensive product with narrow appeal.

Time/money invested

I invested maybe a year of time and $3k into the company. I did not take any huge risks on it, so there were no big negative outcomes.

Current product status

The company folded in 2007, I refocused my efforts on my existing companies (AUsedCar.com and BudgetSimple.com) and both have been doing well enough that I quit my day job.

Any regrets?

I don’t regret it entirely, I think I learned several valuable lessons about working with other people, small business sales, trade-shows and software development.

Lessons learned

• Pick partners wisely. Don’t try to be even-steven with equity. Use restricted stock to ensure everyone does their part.
• Know what your customers expect (24/7 phone support?) to determine if you can do this while working a day job.

Case #4: PC Desktop Cleaner

Contributor

Javier Rojas Goñi.

The product

PC Desktop Cleaner. Simple software that cleans your desktop and archives your files.

Why it was judged a commercial failure

My goal was to sell 10 units per month. I’ve sold less than 1 unit per month.

What went wrong

• I think that the product concept is not useful enough. It’s not a thing that people would pay for.
• The market exists (some people buy) but it’s too little or difficult to reach.
• I didn’t do any market research. I just got in love with the idea and did it. Later, I’ve learnt to use “lazy instantiation marketing” and have trashed a lot of embryo projects.

Time/money invested

I think I wasted near $500 in development tools and some freelancers. Not too much.

Current product status

I’m still selling it. I’ve thought about others products, but not really decided yet.

Any regrets?

No, it was a lot of fun and I learnt lot of things. In my “day job” I own a small firm that sells software for production scheduling. I’ve learn a lot of SEO and AdWords in the DesktopCleaner project that now I’m using with great results.

Lessons learned

Go for it, maybe you win, maybe you fail, but you will grow and get tons of useful knowledge on the way.

Case #5: Smart Diary Suite

Contributor

Dennis Volodomanov.

The product

Smart Diary Suite.

Why it was judged a commercial failure

It sells and the profits cover current investments in the product, but there is little left over on top of that.

What went wrong

If I had a chance to do anything differently:

• Take it seriously from day one.
• Never stop developing and supporting.
• Invest as much as possible in marketing early on.
• Don’t stop believing in your creation.

Time/money invested

Up to this point, I have spent 13 years on Smart Diary Suite and a lot of money went into buying hardware, software, hosting, marketing, etc… All of that money came from my day job, but at this point SDS has recovered all of that back and is now making a small profit. The actual amount is hard to calculate (over the 13 year span), but we would be talking in tens of thousands of US dollars.

Current product status

For a while it may have seemed like SDS is not going to be successful, but that’s probably my fault – I stopped believing for a little while. Now I am back, starting again and this time I’ll make sure it doesn’t fail.

Any regrets?

I do not regret doing it. I regret allowing myself to stop working on it, basically bailing out on it for a while – that is my biggest mistake.

Lessons learned

If you want a successful product – believe in it and let others know that you believe in it.

Case #6: Highlighter

Contributor

Mike Sutton.

The product

Highlighter. A utility to print neatly formatted, syntax highlighted source code listings.

Why it was judged a commercial failure

I earnt a grand total of £442.52 (about $700 in todays money) in just over two years, so I guess it paid for itself if you exclude my time.

What went wrong

Since it was my first product and I was very green about both marketing and product development. I would suggest the following would have made things better:

• Get feedback from potential users about the product (eg from the ASP forums). Some parts of the program where probably too option heavy and geeky.
• Diversify. If people didn’t want to print fancy listings, maybe they would have wanted them formatted in HTML.
• Better marketing. I’m not sure this would have saved it, but all I knew in those days was uploading to shareware sites. I never even sent a press release.

I figure it failed simply because it was a product nobody wanted. Actually, more importantly than that,, it was a product *I* didn’t want to use, but it developed from a larger product I was working on, on the assumption I could earn some money on the side from part of the code.  Since then I’ve stuck to products which I’ve actually wanted to use myself. There’s a lot to be said for dogfooding, not just for debugging, but for knowing where the pain points are and what extra features could be added.

Time/money invested

I would guess a couple of months of evening/weekend development time. Financially there was little spent, except that I offered the option of a printed manual and CD for an extra charge. One customer took me up on the offer, so I had to get 100 manuals printed and 99 of them went in the bin.

Current product status

I moved on to another product which has sold over £50,000 and a third which has earnt even more than that. Not enough to retire on but considering I only do this part time it must work out at a great hourly rate. There’s a lot to be said for not giving up…

Any regrets?

Nope. I figure every failure in life teaches you valuable lessons. Of course if I’d made a large financial investment I may feel differently, but that’s one of the big advantages of software over physical product sales.

Lessons learned

Just to reiterate – develop something which you find useful, instead of second guessing others.

Case #7: R10Clean

Contributor

Steve Cholerton.

The product

R10Clean. A data cleaning and manipulation tool.

Why it was judged a commercial failure

In the 18 months or so it’s been on the market I have sold 6. It has been £199, £99 and £19 – with no effect on sales !

What went wrong

Not sure what I did wrong ?  The product is maybe too techie ?

Time/money invested

No effect financially as at the time I was in a strong financial position.

Current product status

I still have it for sale but do not market it at all. I have other products.

Any regrets?

I don’t regret it as it saved me a ton of time when I was working with legacy databases a lot, as a commercial product it has been raved about (once!) and received a good review from the Kleper report, but has failed totally.

Lessons learned

Advice to others ?  Just because you need it personally, don’t assume the rest of the world does too.

Case #8: nBinder

Contributor

Boghiu Andrei.

The product

nBinder, packs multiple files into a stand alone executable with over 50 advanced output and file unpack options, conditional run and commands.

Why it was judged a commercial failure

It was the first product I began selling. It sold to 300+ customers in 4 years. But for about a year the sales began to go down and have finally stopped completely.

What went wrong

• The biggest problem was that because it was a packer intended for people that wanted to pack their products (software or games) into a single package (compressed and encrypted) many have used it for creating malware by binding malware files to legit files and then distributing the output so it isn’t detected by antivrus software (although it would be detected at runtime). Because of this I had lots of problems with antivirus companies that flagged files create with nBinder as malware. This was of course affecting legit users as their files would be falsely marked as malware. I used virustotal.com to see which antivirus detected it and contacted the antivirus manufacturer as soon as I detected the problem. In most cases they would remove it from their definitions. But it was an uphill battle because it would appear again in a matter of weeks. Some small AV companies didn’t event bother to reply to my emails to fix the problem. Others were using heuristics to flag files create with my applications and AV developers were reluctant to whitelist files created with nBinder. You can imagine it that it was enough for an AV such as Kaspersky or Norton to pick my files as malware for a day and customers would be affected and not use my product any more, especially that it took about 3 days for AVs to remove the false positive.
• Infrequent updates. Due to lack of time I only updated the product once or twice a year and this affected the product a lot.
• No marketing. I decided that I didn’t want to invest money in marketing so, except for a short AdWords campaign, I invested no money in marketing.
• My decision to develop 3 products instead of concentrating on one or two affected development time and quality. I have worked on 3 products simultaneously instead of concentrating on making a single good one. The reason I worked on 3 is because I enjoyed developing different software in different categories. I didn’t start this for money but for the fun of development.

Time/money invested

I invested almost no money (except for hosting costs). Time invested I can’t really say exactly, but not too much as I only worked on nBinder in short bursts like 6 hours a day for a week or so before releases.

Current product status

Still for sale. My other products are:

• nCleaner – a free system cleaner that has gone quite well (over 2 million downloads).
• nMacro – an automation tool that has seen some limited success (bought by over 100 customers in a year or so).

Any regrets?

It’s not a total failure as I did make some money out of it with no investment, so I don’t regret starting it, but it could have been much better.

Lessons learned

Words of advice for others trying to make money from software development:

• Study the market and the current trends very well.
• Before deciding to take on large competition make sure you have something better (at least from one point of view) than the competition ( for example you might not have the same features but you have a better GUI and general presentation).
• Do not get scared of an overly populated market segment. For example with nBinder I picked a segment with very little competition but also few possible users and the results were not so great (I didn’t have many users). With nCleaner I went head-to-head with lots of already established products but also the market is very big. Although nCleaner is free it has had the most success because there are so many potential users (anyone with a PC actually), so it had over 2 millions downloads and I still receive lots of mails regarding it, even if the last update was in 2007. So it is possible to have success in a market with lots of competition with no investment but it’s hard to reach the level of more established products.

Case #9: Net-Herald

Contributor

Torsten Uhlmann.

The product

Net-Herald – a monitoring application for water supply companies. It was a complex client server application that would receive monitoring data from specialized hardware and store that data inside a SQL database.  The client displays that data in different graphs, provides printable reports or sends alarm messages via SMS if a monitored value is not within its specified limits.

I developed Net-Herald as a perfect fit for that specialized hardware that is provided by a local manufacturer. That way, so I hoped, I could profit from their sales leads and would find a smoother way into these water supply companies. The downside of course, was that my software would only work with their hardware.

Why it was judged a commercial failure

I sold a first license fairly soon after I had a sellable product, although it took the customer nearly a year until they finally bought. But since then I sold only one more license within the last 4 years or so.

What went wrong

• I didn’t do my own marketing and the hardware guys weren’t really concerned with selling my software.
• Water management companies have a terribly long sales cycle. Other vendors monitoring applications usually cost tens of thousands and are geared toward large suppliers. Whenever a supplier buys into such a product he is unlikely to change within the next decade or more. I tried to position my software towards small suppliers but even then most of them were already locked into another vendor’s solution.
• My software only worked with a specific hardware. That narrowed the marked down substantially.
• In the end the software became too complex for one poor mortal to maintain. Because the software didn’t produce any substantial income I had to stop adding new features which would make it attractive for more prospective clients.
• This kind of software is not sold over the Internet. Rather it needs very active sales people that nurture clients over a rather long period of time.
• All these facts indicate that software like this should not be developed by a one man show.

Time/money invested

The development time for the first sellable version was maybe about 9 months. I didn’t have a job income at that time, but got funding due to government support for small start-up businesses. So I didn’t drain our family’s personal finances. But I did of course invest a great deal of time and sweat.

Current product status

Now, I have drawn a line and stopped active development of Net-Herald. I still do some custom extensions for my first clients. But I no longer market the software. I have instead focused on my consulting services. I also try to learn developing and selling software with my cross-platform drag and drop product Simidude.

Any regrets?

I didn’t succeed yet selling my own software (which is still my goal) but I do not regret doing it. I developed Net-Herald using (Java) technologies that now give me leverage at my consulting gigs. All in all it was a heavy ride. But it was fun and I would do it again.

Lessons learned

• My biggest mistake was the lack of market analysis. I trusted the word of the hardware manufacturer without verification.
• I have written more about the above and some other failures on my blog.

Case #10: HabitShaper

Contributor

Adriano Ferrari.

The product

HabitShaper – set and track daily targets for your goals (weight loss, quit smoking, jogging, writing, etc…).

Why it was judged a commercial failure

I sold a few copies, but not enough to make back the time I invested in it and my conversion numbers and traffic are below average.

What went wrong

• Did not do enough pre-production research (talking to customers, etc).
• Did not do a large enough beta to make up for lack of initial research.
• Ignored gut-feeling that my product is better suited to being web-based and multi-platform (incl. mobile).
• Did EVERYTHING myself (logo, web design, video, software, AdWords, etc).

Time/money invested

I worked on it two years, part-time, while doing Masters/PhD in Physics. It had no impact on my finances (very little money invested) or circumstances.

Current product status

I am relaunching as a web-based product this summer.

Any regrets?

Not in the least! I learned about as much from making HabitShaper as I have from my MSc thesis and PhD work.

Lessons learned

• Most important: PAPER prototypes, minimum viable product, and iterate.
• Don’t be afraid to launch early.
• Launch a little bigger than you’d expect (it’s harder to find those initial customers than you think).
• Don’t be afraid to change directions, especially early on.
• Doing things yourself is a great learning experience, but if you want to get your product out to customers as fast as possible, don’t be afraid to invest money and outsource your weaknesses.

Case #11: BPL

Contributor

Jim Lawless.

The product

BPL – Batch Programming Language Interpreter.

Why it was judged a commercial failure

I sold about 10 copies.

What went wrong

• I didn’t really do enough research to find out if the target market was in existence. I was hoping that network admins and support staff members would find it easier to use than batch files and less complicated than any of the free scripting language options available. So, I just rushed to get the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) out the door.
• I never did provide a compiler that would build a stand-alone EXE. I think that might have met with more success.
• I didn’t do much as far as advertising the existence of the product.

Time/money invested

I only spent a few weeks coding and documenting it in my spare time. Support issues sometimes took a whole evening, but nothing major. It did not have any impact on my finances as I had invested nothing but my time.

Current product status

I will still address support issues with this product for registered users, but I don’t actively sell it. I’ve open-sourced the program and it still really isn’t seeing heavy use.

I was more successful with other products. I have a few retired products that saw some good bulk-purchase deals ( command-line DUN HangUp, command-line scheduler ) and I still sell the following (for Windows):

• MailSend – Command-line SMTP mailer.
• MailGrab – Command-line POP3 reader.
• CMD2EXE – Packages up a batch file into an EXE.
• ScreenKap – Command-line screen capture.

All of the above still bring in a modest passive income.

Any regrets?

Not at all. “Nothing ventured,…”.

Lessons learned

Had I not attempted to bring the BPL product to life, I might still be sitting here wondering “what if?” I think it was very beneficial for me to invest the time to try out this idea.

Case #12: Anonymous

Contributor

Anonymous.

The product

A time tracker.

Why it was judged a commercial failure

Because it is not my primary income. I have about 150 customers in one year.

What went wrong

• No marketing.
• No real thought into features.
• I don’t spend any time on it.

In my defense, the reason I do not spend much time on it is that the market became saturated with ‘me toos’ right after I released, which was quite expected. In fact, as I was looking for users, I got an email from a competitor suggesting that I don’t enter the market because they are working on the same thing! I don’t know what I would do differently. Maybe spend more time on it? I think the law of diminishing returns applies quite early in this space so I am not sure.

Time/money invested

Since inception (Nov 2008), I’ve spent close to 250 hours total. Total cash outlay was something like $500.

Current product status

I never tried to make it succeed, to be honest. It was only a learning experience for me. What I probably need now is to go all in. Quite frankly, if I double the sales for this product, I can quit all consulting work. But I really do not think it is a good idea to work on this app full time as it is too simple.

Any regrets?

Definitely not.

Lessons learned

• Do it!
• Solve a problem people know they have.
• Don’t invest too much time and money at the beginning.
• Don’t be wedded to a particular idea.
• Don’t only listen to your customers. Listen to yourself. After all, you created the idea which attracted the customers.
• Never promise a feature for a sale. I’ve never done it but the pressure is really great. My stock response is always: “While such a feature may be available in the future, I recommend that you only use current features when deciding on your purchase.”
• Do use Google to your advantage.

Case #13: ScreenRest

Contributor

Derek Pollard.

The product

Why it was judged a commercial failure

What went wrong

• Not doing market research first.
• Creating a prevention rather than solution product – people generally wait until they have a problem and then look for a solution.
• Creating a product with medical associations – the SEO and PPC competition for related keywords is prohibitive for a product with a low purchase price.

Time/money invested

Current product status

Once the product was complete and we started learning SEO it became all too apparent that organic search traffic for related keywords was going to be insufficient.  Research into PPC then revealed that the price point was too low to support purchasing medical terms. Planned features for ScreenRest have been put on hold and no further marketing is planned.  We continue to support new and existing ScreenRest customers and plan to do so for the foreseeable future. Rather than create another software product we chose to use what we had learned about marketing, copywriting and SEO to create a series of websites targeting a range of topics (often known as niche sites).  The most successful of these sites we are expanding in value and functionality to fill gaps not serviced by the competition.

Any regrets?

No.  ScreenRest succeeded in every way intended, other than commercially.  Creating it was a rewarding learning exercise that started us down a path to finding the intersection of our skills, experience and market opportunities.

Lessons learned

• Start with market research – creating a high-quality product you believe in is not enough on its own.
• Make sure you can identify a specific target market, that you can reach that market and that it is large enough to support your financial goals.

Conclusion

Analysing the above (admittedly small and self-selected sample) it is clear that by far the commonest cause of failure were:

• lack of market research
• lack of marketing

With the benefitof 20/20 hindsight it seems blindingly obvious that we should:

• spend a few days researching if a product is commercially viable before we spend months or years creating it
• put considerable effort into letting people know about the products we create

Yet, by my count, a whopping 6 out of 13 of us admitted to failing to do each of these adequately. Probably we were too busy obsessing over the features and technical issues so beloved of developers, which actually contributed to far fewer failures.

It is also noticeable that, despite the failure of these products, there are few regrets. Important lessons were learned and no-one lost their house. Many of us have gone to develop successful products and the others will be in a much stronger position if they do decide to try again.

A big thank you to everyone who ate a large slice of humble pie and submitted the above. I hope we can prevent other budding software entrepreneurs making the same mistakes. Even if you don’t succeed, you will learn a lot.

Source: Successful Software

Feel free to add your own hard-won lessons from failure in the comments below.

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You say: “But I am a B2B Marketer…”

If you are selling B2B software you may feel inclined to follow industry standards and use a somewhat higher flying language, and throwing in some buzzwords is never wrong, right? Well, I am here to tell you that you’re wrong. The difference between B2B and B2C is mostly existing in university literature and when it comes to selling software your end users and clients are people. And people are people.

How are you talking to your customers and clients? What language are you using communicating about your software? Take a look at this video, it will perhaps set off an alarm somewhere in the back of your head – Mind Your Language!

Also check out the guy 1:18 into the video. Find out why he switched software…

In fact, I felt that the message of keeping it simple was so brilliantly conveyed by Google that I immediately sent out an email to all my support staff asking them to check out this video. I also asked them to think about this when communicating to our software buyers. To make it easy to understand for everyone. The people in this video may very well be clients of yours and mine. Think about that.

Until next time

Peter – Software Marketing Secrets

TAKE IMMEDIATE ACTION: Ask your staff to “Keep It Simple” and ask them to check out this video:
http://www.softwaremarketingsecrets.com/sell-software/mind-your-language/

Thanks goes out to C Collins (see our Software Marketing Directory / Software Marketing Blogs ) for alerting me about this video.

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Video Marketing

Are you marketing your software via video. You should. And naturally you should be on the biggest video sharing site of all – youtube.

Julie Perry has written an interesting article filled with tips on how to effectively market via Youtube. Thanks Julie, we will be designing our own channel soon

I recommend you go check the article out, but here’s a quick summary of my takeaways…

1) When linking to your youtube videos, use the user portion.
2) Choose a relevant and keyword rich username for your youtube account.
3) Edit your channel
4) The channel description should be done like a mini-salesletter

An example of a professionally designed channel, see Youtube user horrorfest. You will not believe you’re still on Youtube.

And don’t forget to read Julie’s post on how to effectively market via Youtube!

Until next time

Peter – Software Marketing Secrets

PS. See what I’m up to on Twitter.

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