Having a concrete goal and timetable for quitting my day-job has changed the way I prioritize things. The old me would look at my list of to-do’s and cherry-pick items to work on (I love writing code, so that usually gets done first). But now I ask myself “What things on the list will help me reach my financial goals the quickest?” - and I focus on those first.

So after I set my goal for quitting my day job, I created a list of my ideas, and merged it with a list of my on-line assets to figure out what would make money. Here’s how it went:

iKollect.com
At the top of the list was iKollect.com, my online inventory management system for coin collectors. It’s the same site that hosts this blog, and pretty much where I’ve spent most of my spare time this past year.

I created the application from scratch, pretty much by myself. I’ve spent as little money as possible everywhere I could, but I really believed in my little idea - and it has gone well. Lots of people have registered for an iKollect.com account and I get lots of hits daily.

The growth over the past year for iKollect.com has been pretty steady, and I receive at least one email a week from a user telling me how much they love the system and/or how to make it better. It’s all good! It feels good knowing that I made a decent system that people like. And all the kind words from iKollect’s users help to stroke my ego regularly. I can’t complain!

What’s that you say? How much money do I pull in from that venture? Well you should sit down because here comes the funny part. Believe it or not, I never really came up with a plan on how to monetize this application! Wow, that doesn’t sound nearly as funny as I thought it would. A newbie mistake, right? Yes, I agree. I never should have started the project without some sort of monetization plan, and I know that now. Chalk it up as another lesson learned.

Important Note: I’d like to make it clear that I have learned so much about running a microISV, and met so many nice fellow microISV folks over the past year, it’s amazing. If you are thinking of starting a project like I did with iKollect.com, and don’t have a good plan for how to make money, you should still go ahead and do it! My only advice would be to do it “on the cheap” like I did, that way you won’t lose your shirt if it fails.

Show Me the Money!
So now here I am, ready to start cashing in. How do I make money off of this website? There are of course a couple of options, but I have unintentionally made some decisions in the past that have additionally limited how I can make money with iKollect.com.

For instance, from the beginning, my catch-phrase has been “Free Inventory Management for Collectors”. This has served me well in building a following. When people hear about what iKollect is, the “Free” part of the catch-phrase stands out, and they know right off the bat that they won’t be paying to use the site.

So I can’t just go and send out an email to all of my users saying that starting on March 1st, “iKollect - Free Inventory Management for Collectors” will be offering a paid option that is not, well “free”, right? I guess I shot myself in the foot a little with that part. I have a few options on how to remedy that, but it’s just not an easy fix. Yet another lesson learned! Moving on…

So it seemed the best choice for me at this point is to go with the easiest of options and slap up some Adsense ads on the site. I am really against this because I don’t really like advertising. But I do recognize that ads are everywhere, and that’s just a fact of life. So that’s what I did! I added some fairly unobtrusive Google Adsense ads on the site and crossed my fingers….

Good News!
Right away I found myself meeting my financial goal several weeks ahead of schedule. I was pleased - to say the least! I literally have some “almost-passive” income being generated (I say “almost-passive” because I still do the customer service stuff, but otherwise the site requires very little work for me to operate these days).

Bad News!
After I finished patting myself on the back, I took some time to see what kind of growth I could expect. It wasn’t awesome. Even during my best iKollect months, my number of active users was still only growing about 12% per month (I didn’t count people who sign up for an account and rarely come back).

I also expected that my haphazard placement of the ads would initially be bad since I have very little experience with advertising. So I read up on the topic and played with the placement of the ads. I also tweaked things to make sure they were displaying for content appropriately. But my ad revenue either increased marginally or went down. Ugh! (I could go on about how much work and research I put into the ad thing - but I won’t bore you with all those details). It wasn’t long before I came to a conclusion…

Conclusion on iKollect.com
My final determination is basically that iKollect.com has advertising showing up in a category (coin collecting) that really just isn’t all that lucrative (for advertising anyway). So even though I had a decent number of users on my site, and it was a growing number, the ad revenue wasn’t going to have me retiring any time soon.

And this lesson in online advertising was pretty major, yet so obvious that I am kicking myself: Either pick a type of advertising that pays well when people click on the site, or have like a jzillion users clicking on your cheap ads.

And the Summary
I spent a year building iKollect, an online application that has a decent following, requires very little time to administer, now brings in “okay” revenue, but in it’s current form, won’t grow to make me accomplish my financial goals.

But along the way I learned so much about running an online business that even if I had zero income from iKollect.com, it would still be a winner to me. But the best part is that as a bonus, running iKollect.com has introduced me to a different idea for a product that I believe I can put together fairly quickly and painlessly. Which is what I plan to write about in my next post!

As a fellow or aspiring microISV-er, I’m sure you’ve read over and over about how important it is to not only set goals, but to review how you’ve done so you can decide if you are headed down the best path. So a couple of weeks ago, I dedicated some time for analyzing iKollect.com’s past year (actually a little less than a year) to see how we’ve done. Here’s some of the highlights.

The History First
My wife and I came up with our plan for the iKollect.com website after some serious soul-searching. I wanted to be around my family more so we were aiming for the micro-isv lifestyle that might make that possible. We also knew that the venture needed to eventually replace (and hopefully exceed!) my day-job’s salary+benefits. So from the get-go, it was mostly going to be my baby.

The decision on what to build was made by doing lots of research, and following that with a process of elimination on the dozens of ideas we had thought were decent. After all was said and done, we had narrowed our list down to two items. A Windows based app (I’ll tell you more about that in a future post), or an online application. Because the world is being dragged towards online apps, we decided that was the way to go.

We had several web based application ideas, but in the end, we decided to build an online application for collectors to store their inventories. This decision was based on several factors including (but not limited to)

• lots of potential users
• a fragmented market
• and an inexpensive start-up model that would meet my personal needs (i.e. being able to work on it sporadically, while still having decent output on a very demanding day-job).

Designing the Application
For the day-job, I write Java code mostly against a DB2 database, but for this venture, I decided to go with the PHP-MySQL combination. I found PHP to be super easy to pick up, easy to find cheap hosting, and for my long term plans, I believe it will be easy to farm out some of the work with this technology. I have never second guessed this decision.

In designing the actual application, I did a lot of research into what other inventory applications looked like. I’m a big proponent of programs being easy to use (over adding lots of doo-dads), so I spent a while on this detail. And since I had no money to spend, I made my loved ones become be my guinea pigs (poor them).

For instance, while researching different applications, I had my grandmother tell me if she could figure out how she would enter data into a screen. For screens she could figure out, I would dissect to figure out what made them simple. It was a great process, since most of the designs I showed her easily frustrated her, and were easy to rule out.

Before long, I had a working prototype limping along on my local windows machine. When I showed it to Grammie (without her know that it was a my application, and not just some other app I wanted her to try), she said that this was “the best one yet”. I was happy, and so was Grandmother - I think she was mostly happy that it was over!

So I think my approach in designing and building the application went well, and I stand behind the decisions made in that phase too. It cost me next to nothing (I used an old laptop that I already had laying around, and development tools that were free). And from when we went live in June to date, we have received literally dozens of compliments from our users who like the system and find it easy to use. So I think these early design and build decisions were good ones as well.

Marketing
Marketing. Ahh crap. I wish I could say I’ve done something well in this area. I have tried everything I could from advertising on Google AdWords to contributing on forums to writing a bunch of articles, and lots and lots and lots of other things in between. Yet nothing has given me the results I was looking for. Sure, they all worked a little. But they all were a lot of work, with very little reward.

The only reason I’ve had a steady stream of customers being added every day is because I have a lot of great users who tell their fellow collector friends about our website. Those friends come and sign up and tell their friends, and so on. Thank God for nice people, or I would have maybe 50 people signed up for accounts (instead I have a many many times that).

My wife gives me some of the credit on this one (she tries to make me feel better). She says that it’s the easy to use application and great customer service that has our users referring others to the site. I can see her point, but I feel that all the other work I put into marketing should have paid off at least a little!

To summarize, I suck at marketing. Hey, at least it’s not as much as I used to suck! (just trying to be positive!)

Also, in my defense, unless you are hiring someone to do it for you, traditional Internet marketing (the type of marketing that you read about in every “10 tips to blah blah blah” article) really requires a lot of your time. I feel like I’m whining when I say that my defense is “it’s just sooooo hard”, but there you go. I’m a whiner.

When I was little, my grandfather said something like, “when you are just learning, every failure is worth five successes”…so I may have had several failures in this area, but I’ve had a plethora of successful learning experiences. ‘Nuff said.

Note: Although those traditional internet marketing methods haven’t worked for me, I’ve been taking some different approaches to marketing lately that have worked really well. I’ll share more about these lately, but I can certainly tell you that it’s less about the types of marketing you read about every day, and more about thinking like inspiring and wicked smart guys such as Patrick McKenzie
of Bingo Card Creator.

There’s Money…
I have been excellent about not spending much money on this venture. Even though I have a lot of things going on with this project, there are very few things that have cost me anything. If I had to just fold it up tomorrow, it would not be a big loss. Really! I feel I can pat myself on the back for this one. I didn’t want to bury myself in debt along the way, and I didn’t. In fact, just for the silly little PageRank of 4 that iKollect currently has, the site is probably worth more than I have spent on it. But hold on, it gets bad…

Then There’s Monetization…
There’s a stupid thing to have to admit. During all the early phases of planning out this project, I never thought out exactly how to make the money. I knew I wanted to make money, but I never created a plan on exactly how to monetize the site. Yup. For some reason, I figured that once I had a successful site running (success being measured by having lots of users signed up for accounts and lots of traffic), it would be easy to monetize it. At a minimum, I could slap some AdSense ads up there and be rolling in the dough, right?

What did Ben Franklin say? By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail? Something like that…sheesh. Looking back, I can’t even begin to explain why I skimmed over this important detail. Talk about a rookie mistake!

If my time machine wasn’t broken, I’d go back to the beginning of this project and do just this one thing. I’d spend a lot of time on this task too, as it is extremely important. I’d say to myself things like:

“Okay, I’m planning on having lots of traffic, and if only a small percent of those people click on my ads, I’ll have a lot of clicks, but wait - how much profit will each click bring in? Am I going to earn an easy $5.00 from a click like some of those financial sites get, or am I going to earn just pennies with every click?”

If you are just starting out your microISV, do yourself a favor and don’t be stupid like me. Plan out how you are going to make the money, and especially, how much!

Summary: Hindsight is 20/20
I think you’ve heard enough of my lessons learned, so here’s the summary of my analysis of the past year:

I can tell you honestly now that if I had done a better analysis on the money topic, I might not have picked this project at all. Yeah, seriously. Because in a nut shell, what I have right now is a lot of users, who visit my site a lot, who tell their friends a lot, who seem to really like my site, a lot. That’s great! Except it’s not. Because when they click on the ads, I earn, well, *not* a lot. I’m obviously covering my costs, but in order to be doing really well, I’ll just need another gajillion (or so) users to sign up. Which puts me back on marketing. Did I mention that I am not so good at that?

So although in hindsight I wouldn’t have started this project in the first place, I do recognize that some good things have come out of it as well.

For example, I have learned so much it is unbelievable. No joke. Way more than any book could have ever taught me. If you are a newbie microISV-er and are hesitant about diving in, I think I could give no better advice than “Go for it!” followed by my second piece of advice “It’s okay to Be Cheap!” (sorry, I can’t help it)

Another example of a “good thing” that has come out of this is the rather large list of email addresses of users that actually like hearing from me. That’s worth something right there if I wanted to use it a certain way, right? When I sent out my bulk mailing to all my customers saying that I had made some major updates to the site, I received some outstanding replies. What an ego stroking that was!

But what’s really got me excited lately is the realization that I have a tremendous amount of data gathered about a group of a certain kind of people (data which I have been spending a bunch of time analyzing lately). Put that together with all the emails from people asking me “do you have the ability to do x?”, and you have the recipe for several, even more exciting products. Which is exactly what I’ve been spending my time on lately!

You see, before he came over to get his daughter, I had just posted an entry to my iKollect.com blog outlining my goal for the year.?? In that entry, I explained my year end and weekly goals, which were both aimed at my quitting my dreadful day-job.?? I had posted that blog entry for one reason and one reason only; I wanted to put pressure on myself to succeed.?? If I had merely told myself that I was going to quit my job by the end of the year, it would be easy for me to to make excuses for why I was failing.?? But if I communicated that same goal to *the world*, then I would in some way feel the pressure of other people laughing behind my back, calling me a failure.??

But there was a problem with that plan.?? Many of the people who read my little blog don’t actually know me, so I don’t hold their opinions too highly.?? If they snicker at me, it hurts a little, but not a lot.?? And the other readers are close family who would not make fun of me anyway (at least not *that* kind).?? And in fact they might let me off the hook even easier than I would let myself off.?? So although at the moment I was feeling the pressure of the outside world watching me, it wasn’t feeling like enough pressure.?? I needed more pressure.

So (whether he wanted it or not) I went into a long explanation?? to this dad about what my little business was doing and what my main goal was (resign from the day job by the end of the year).?? This dad is someone I respect greatly and have known for a long time.?? In fact, he had just finished telling me details on how he is leaving his current “safe” job for a harder and slightly riskier one, but one that had potential to benefit his family greatly if it worked out.

I even threw in the story about that Spanish Conquistador, Hernando Cortez (of course I couldn’t remember that name when I was telling the story) who ordered his men to burn the ships after arriving in Mexico in 1518, ensuring that they had to make it work.?? Returning to Spain was just not an option for Cortez and his men.??

I’m pretty sure that the other dad thinks I am a nut case and a little unstable.?? He’s probably right.?? But just like good ole Hernando, I’m committed to this mission.?? And staying at my job for another year is just not an option for me.?? I won’t allow myself an easy escape route, and I’m going to continue to burn the ships!

• There hasn’t been a new bug reported in I don’t know how long
• I’ve frozen my code as of that last release
• I have been providing full support for the application for a long time now.

So why am I still in Beta?
In building client-server applications, the alpha /beta /release-candidate stages were so much more obvious to me. It was obvious when an app was in beta, because only my beta testers would have a copy. But web apps are new for me so I need to change this way of thinking a bit. Also, I think I’ve gotten so used to seeing releases of some web applications which seem to stay in Beta forever (like Gmail), that I started ignoring the Beta tag on my own site. Whoops! So as of this evening, iKollect is out of Beta. I suppose I should be celebrating or something, but I’m up to my eyeballs in marketing stuff tonight…so I guess I’ll party later!

What Changed?

One year ago we had exactly one user (me). And closing out 2007, we have, well, lots of users. Mind you, it’s not “Google lots” or “iTunes lots”, but considering our niche market of “hobbyist who like to computerize their inventories”, we are doing pretty darn well. Our users seem to really be sticking with us, and they keep on sending us compliments and feature requests.

The other thing that changed was my attitude. After a relaxing holiday break with the family, I went back to the day-job and realized how much I didn’t want to be there. Nagging Boss to deal with. Time sheets to fill out. Worthless meetings to attend. All that usual big-company jazz. Yuck.

You’d think I’d be relaxed and able to deal with all that easier, right? Nope! On my first day back it was just too much and I snapped. So I looked at my list of goals for the year ahead and made a serious change. Right up at the top is now “Hand in resignation for the day-job by end of 2008″. I rolled up my sleeve and wrote that goal on my forearm. It was now official! I had a real goal that I was excited about again…and I had ink all over my arm.

From Baby-Steps to Bigfoot-Steps

After covering my arm with graffiti, I started adding up all the benefits I received from my current employer. Of course there’s the salary, but there’s lots more that they give me that have me in those corporate hand-cuffs. There’s the 401(k) match, the health insurance, the portion of the taxes they pay, the discounted car insurance, etc. etc. etc. I added it all up and went “holy crap! How am I going to go from zero to that off in less than a year?”

After calming down, I decided to break the amount down as a month to month goal, gradually increasing throughout the year. My annual goal was about $100k which is about $8300 per month before taxes or any other deductions of any sort. I made up some other guidelines for the goal which included:

1. No consulting. That’s not much different from my day job.
2. I want to be averaging the minimum of $8.3k/month for 3 months straight before giving my employer proper notice
3. I would give myself the first couple of months to get geared up, so I wouldn’t already feel behind schedule on day one

I wanted to increase the amount gradually, and not make an unreasonable goal that would have me feeling defeated straight away. So I started out gently, increasing by .2% every week for the first month and then gradually moved up from there, settling at an increase of 4% every week until I got to 100% of my goal. It looks like this:

week….% increase….$ goal
03/03………0.2%……..$17
03/10………0.4%……..$33
03/17………0.6%……..$50
03/24………0.8%……..$67
03/31………1.0%……..$75
04/07………2.0%……..$150
04/37………4.0%……..$300
04/10………8.0%……..$667
09/15……..92.0%……..$7666
09/22…….96.0%……..$8000
09/29……100.0%……..$8333

Is that a bit overzealous? Yeah, probably. But that’s my goal and now that I’ve just announced it on this blog, I am committed to making that goal a reality. And that means I need to think about how to turn a profit as my number one priority. What do you think?

The latest feature the folks over at Jott have added is the ability to call up Jott from my phone, speak a plain English message regarding an appointment I have coming up, and have it appear in my Google Calendar.???? I honestly love this idea!?? How brilliant is that??? I’m with??someone and set up an appointment with them (perhaps it’s the dentist for my next 6 month cleaning?), all I have to do is pick up my phone and speak the new appointment into my phone and it appears in my calendar.?? Genius!

The only bummer is, I don’t really like using Google Calendar.?? My problem is that during the day job I use an older version of Outlook, and keeping a Google Calendar and Outlook synchronized is really time consuming.?? I use my Outlook calendar to keep track of all my appointments for simplicity’s sake.????

However, I think with a little creativity, I can get this to work.?? If I set up my Gmail to forward the invite to my other email automatically, it would show up in my Outlook Inbox similarly to if??someone invited me to a regular meeting.?? I would just have to accept it (and maybe tweak it a little, which I normally do anyway).?? So I think this feature may still help me out and make it possible to work on the thing I am really passionate about…which is of course my day job with the big corporationmy iKollect.com micro-ISV!

But that was part 1, and in all honesty, not all of my time reading online was eliminated.? I still spend *some* of my time reading blogs and other articles related to small business and technology, right from my desk.? So this post is about another feature built into Text2Go, the ability to speak the text of a web page directly from the browser.

When I started this part of my experiment, it was pretty simple.? I just found an article that I would normally read from beginning to end, tell Text2Go to start reading the text me, and then I would go about doing some other work.? Since I already had great success with the Text2Go tool, I knew before I started that the tweaking was going to be more on the side of what was read to me and what I was trying to accomplish while it was read to me, rather than how the Text2Go software performed.? The Text2Go software is already top-notch in my book.

My first test involved me finding an article that I find inspiring and/or motivational for a MicroISV.? I started with this excellent article on Ian Landsman’s blog over at UserScape.? ? I surfed on over to his site, highlighted the text, right clicked and selected Speak.? The sound was immediately oozing out of my computer’s speakers.? (Too easy!)? Then I went about trying to tackle my list of to-dos for my iKollect application.

At first I found the voice a little distracting, but mostly because there was a new person talking to me, and I was actively listening to the voice to see if I liked it.? But since I had been listening to Samantha in my car, I found that I got used to it rather swiftly.

(In my previous post, I had already determined that I found the default voice to be? pretty annoying, and I had downloaded and switched to the female Samantha voice, which I think is not bad at all)

I went through my list of to-do’s pretty quickly, without being distracted much by the voice.? I created my daily objective list on my whiteboard, listing out the high priority items in order of importance.? The computer generated voice did not do much to distract me and I was able to perform this little ritual of mine without any problems.? And I got to listen to a great article that has some great advice for newbie-entrepreneurs (of which I still consider myself).

At the top of my objective list for the day was to squash some bugs in the next release of iKollect I am currently working on (two weeks behind schedule…so sad).? So I pulled up an article in my browser from Pam of Escape From Cubicle Nation (which I thoroughly enjoyed reading recently and had noted to myself to go back to when I had a moment).? Then I dug in to the bugs.? I cannot say I had as much luck with the “listening-while-I-work” method this time.? I found myself constantly stopping my work to listen to the article.?

So I tried switching things a bit.? I tweaked the voice a little to slow it down and I reduced the volume a bit.? That seemed better.? So back to bug squashing!

But no luck.? I was still distracted.?

So I again tried tweaking things a little.? I put on some quiet classical music at the same time as the text (I love classical as much as I love Tool, and waltz’s in particular seem to help me get into a groove).? But that still didn’t work.? I still found that having Samantha read to me while I tried to work to be detrimental to my task.? It had to be Pam’s fault.? Maybe the problem was that she wrote an article that was too damn good!? Grrrr…in frustration, I picked something else off of my objective list for the day - answering emails.? And click!? I was back into productive mode again.? ? (Turns out Pam wasn’t to blame after all!)

Over the next several days, I tried many different variations of this and I consistently found that when I was doing anything with my source code, I just couldn’t listen to a spoken article and still get things done on my application.? Everything else, sure, no problem.? But whenever I tried to get my head around a piece of code, I ran into trouble.

So in the end, I stopped using Text2Go’s tool to read me blog entries and articles? while I worked.? I am disappointed that this didn’t work out for me, but I am definitely not disappointed in the Text2Go tool.? It’s still a top-notch program that? gives me back? 45 minutes of everyday.? You should check it out!

So last month I was trying out a service to help reduce the amount of time I spend typing my blog entries, and this month I am trying out a tool to help reduce the amount of time I spend reading blogs (without reducing how many blogs I read).? And that tool is Tumbywood Software’s Text2Go software.

Text2Go is a tool that allows you to capture text from the web, convert it to speech and then listen to it, either easily and directly through your computer’s speakers, or on your iPod.? The current production version that you can try and buy is designed to work with iTunes and your iPod, but since I didn’t have an iPod, Text2Go didn’t really interest me.? And although my teenage nieces make fun of me for not having an iPod (behind my back, of course)? , I have argued that I like having a straight MP3 player with a built in FM radio, and I’m not changing my ways darnit! ? (call me crazy, but I still like to listen to the radio).

But On Halloween, Tumbywood Software quietly? announced a beta release of their Text2Go software? which supports MP3 players in addition to iPods.? This caught my attention (I was giddy!), and I promptly moved this tool right to the top of my list for things to try.? I wasn’t even going to wait for the final release; I was going straight away? to the beta version (which is unusual for me).

Installation was a breeze and before I knew it I was ready to start using Text2Go.? So I opened up my browser to Andrey Butov’ blog, Antair Achievement? (hmmm, that’s odd, he hasn’t written for a while, he must be getting ready to release something new again).? I? highlighted the text, and clicked on the Text2Go menu bar option to create an audio file from the text.? That was pretty much it.? Relatively quickly there was an MP3 waiting for me in my “to car” folder.? For comparison’s sake, I quickly downloaded and switched to the female voice and saved the same MP3 also in my “to car” file.? I moved the MP3 files over to my MP3 player (along with some other music I had wanted to move (keep in mind that the process is even simpler for those “cool” kids with iPods) and went on to do some work on the next release of iKollect.

The next morning, I tried out listening to the blog entries in the car.? Ugh, I found the? default male voice to be? quite annoying.? But the female voice is really quite easy to listen to!? At the end of the blog post, I was elated and I could already conclude that Text2Go was going to be a home-run.

Later that day when I was ready to read some blogs again, I instead chose to create MP3s out of all of the blog entries in my RSS reader.? Well, not all of them.? If they were visibly small entries, I just read them.? And if they had visuals (i.e. embedded JPGs or what-not), I chose to read those also.? I did all of this directly through my Google Reader, which is quite handy.? I was sure to include? Gooogle Reader’s header for the post as well, because I wanted to be able to tell which blog entry I was listening to in the car when it started playing.

For my ride home, I listened to each and every one of the blog entries in the female voice and it was great!? At times, the blog entries caused me to think of other things I wanted to do or research further, at which point I just grabbed my phone, hit the Jott speed-dial and spoke a message to be emailed to myself.? Brilliant!

All in all, Text2Go is just plain awesome.? And I don’t use that word often.? Oh yeah, and I don’t have any relationship to anyone at Tumbywood Software that would make me say that.? It’s really just a great tool, and I expect it to save me quite a bit of time, period.

I am excited for the final release of this new version that creates MP3s.? Tumbywood Software has an easy sale with me, no joke.? And on top of that, Tumbywood is only charging $25 for this product, which is unbelievably cheap.

As if that’s not enough, Text2Go also makes it easy to? play? web page directly through my PCs speakers without creating any MP3 files.? So over the next couple of days I am going to toy with playing the pages directly through the browser while I do other work.? I’ll write about how that goes in my next post.? But honestly, even if that’s a dismal failure, shifting my daily blog reading time to my commuting time will already add hours of possible productivity to every week.? No joke!

It’s also worth mentioning that Tumbywood Software is a MicroISV run by an Australian bloke? named? Mark Gladding.? If you too are a fellow MicroISV-er, you might enjoy reading Mark’s blog, in which he talks about his experiences running his MicroISV.? Or even better still, use Mark’s Text2Go tool and *listen* to his experiences on running his MicroISV!

The feedback can easily be organized into 2 categories: (1) people who are seriously using the system to maintain their inventories, and (2) everyone else. The funny thing is, I expected that in this age of Web 2.0 and all, it would be really important for our site to look pretty and do fancy things. But the interesting thing is, the people in group (1) above don’t seem to care about the site being kinda “rough around the edges”. But the folks who do not use the system, seem to have a lot of interest in telling me how I should redesign the site, or change the colors, etc. (many of those people have been very nice to me, I don’t mean any disrespect!)

I can only get so much work done on the site at a time, and I still need to do lots of other small business related things. So what do I do? Do I put my effort and/or money into improving the way things look on the site? Or do I instead put my efforts and cash (if I can find any) into adding features that our customers are craving?

As a microISV, we realize that it’s important to analyze everything to determine what is and isn’t working. One of the things I was looking at recently was where my new users were coming from. There was a pattern that I almost missed. The folks who use the system seriously are telling their friends, and those people are using the system quite seriously as well. On the other hand, the people who critique the graphics and lack of fancy javascript either send me no customers at all, or just merely more newbies who are only using the system so they can tell me what they think of it. You can see why I’m so concerned about the first group of people.

My “power users” ask for new features that are not easy. Prior to our most recent release, the most requested feature was the ability to look up a coin’s value. So even though that was a doozy to implement, I went for it. And it has really paid off. How do I know? It’s all in the numbers baby!

Prior to implementing this new coin lookup feature, I had a very consistent number of customers who would use the system and then stick around and continue using it. I guess they must have liked the site and thought it didn’t suck too much.

But after implementing that new coin lookup feature, I saw an instant increase in the number of people who tried the system and then stuck around. And it has been pretty consistent. To me, the only explanation was that they too (just like my existing customers) wanted to know how much their coins were worth, and I provided them with a successfully working solution. And this wasn’t a 2 or 3 percent increase either. This was a 29% increase in this reported figure. I wonder, if the site was instead improved to look prettier, but didn’t provide this feature, would I have seen this same positive response? I doubt it!

So right now I’m still not working on the graphics, and instead I’m working on feature #2 … and it’s another doozy. This feature should be interesting because it gives my customers a cool feature they are asking for, but also will help me on the marketing front. So I’m excited to finish it and see the results it generates (hopefully positive ones!).

You see, I have been trying to get more efficient with my time lately and I have been known to read and write articles during the 35 minute drive home from my day job.?? So you can imagine how thrilled I was about the idea of being able to speak my blog entries instead of trying to write while I drove … or even worse, using my blackberry while I drove - and my wife was even more thrilled, for safety reasons!?? Well after two weeks of using Jott.com’s free service, I’d like to officially go back on my recommendation.

As with most any new technology these days, I figured that it would take me a little while to work out the kinks.?? I imagined myself cruising down the highway, speaking my blog entries and they would be delivered automatically to my blog.?? It was gonna be awesome!?? But it wasn’t awesome at all.?? I had expected it to make me more productive, when in fact it only made me better at figuring out what Jott.com thought I was saying.

As an example, I’ll share part of my first blog entry I tried to create on my way home from the my day in the rat-race.?? It started out pretty well.?? I dialed up the Jott.com hotline.?? The phone rang and was greeted by a friendly “Who do you want to Jott”… so far so good.?? I responded “blog”, which was a shortcut I had created in the Jott.com system, pointing to one of my email addresses that I set up to post directly to my blog (just another one of those nice features in WordPress).?? This was all going very well I thought.

Then the Jott.com operator lady signaled me to start talking.?? So I did. ?? I said something very important, and then I paused just for a moment (to make a right turn on red, I was of course driving).?? And suddenly “beeep”… the Jott lady assumed I was done talking and was ready to whisk my message off to my blog.?? I was almost home, so I decided that the quick sentence I had spoke would be good enough for the blog entry, and I could elaborate on it when I was logged back into WordPress again.?? No worries (or hakuna matata, for my under 8 readers).

When I got online that evening, after all the kids were asleep, I decided to go do that “elaborating” I had planned on earlier.?? So I logged into WordPress only to see “Would there be syke if the video sites had the ability” as my blog entry for the day.?? WTF????? Was I drinking on the drive home too (not serious of course) ??? I racked my brain trying to figure out what I was saying, but I couldn’t crack the secret Jott code.???? That blog entry was lost forever.

My two later attempts blogging and driving were also dismal failures.?? And I found myself yelling into the phone, over enunciating my words, like I was talking to a deaf person.?? And since I was afraid to lose an important point, I would keep repeating my sentences.???? It went something like this:

“TODAYS BLOG ENTRY IS ABOUT MARKETING.?? MARKETING IS WHAT I AM WRITING ABOUT.?? THIS ENTRY IS ABOUT MARKETING.?? OKAY.?? HERE I GO.”

Then later, I had to read through this mess, and clean it up before it was published online.?? Ugh.?? Talk about a royal waste of time.?? So I’ve given up using Jott.com to create my blog entries.?? I still use Jott.com to send myself a quick email when I have an idea.?? Or when I have something I need to add to my to-do list.

But I certainly mean it when I say that there would be syke if there was a service that could do this properly!