From the "You Gotta Be Able to Take Hate Mail If You're On the Internet Dept"...

For some reason this email cracked me up this morning. I get things like this every now and then:

So far as I can see, this is the most miserable site on the internet. How would I go about looking for ads for Toyota Siennas within, say 1200 miles of New Mexico?

Most miserable site on the Internet! That's pretty impressive IMO!

Lesson Learned? + New Employee!

Ok, so like a year ago, I announced that ChimSoft was finished...but I still left the website up, and heck, I wouldn't turn down someone that wanted it. But I did zero marketing, and zero development during that time. People however, kept inquiring about it and purchasing it. So far this year I've sold more of ChimSoft then ever. Up until now, I'd even been turning down tons of sales because people insisted on talking on the phone, and it just wasn't worth it to me to deal with phone sales and support.

So...I've decided to start supporting and selling it again, with a twist. First, my partners in SearTech wanted to shut the company down, they had no interest in continuing with ChimSoft or putting the time in. So we agreed that my mISV would buy the intellectual property and SearTech would go away. So sometime this month ChimSoft will officially be a 2see Technology product.

Ok...but these people want phone sales? Yeah. So now I have 3 products to support, and it seems like phone sales and support would be useful for all of them. So my wife is officially a 2see Technology employee now! I'll be launching the 800 number by the end of the week, and hope this will help all business grow and provide better support for customers, as she will also take on email support.

This blog address is not really relevant anymore, so I'll probably be moving it, and lets face it, I haven't been the best blogger as of late. I saw something about the mISV "class of 2007" recently, and it's hard to believe this blog has been around since 2005, time really flies!

New House/Corporate Headquarters

On an un-mISV related note (but hey Real Estate is business), I recently purchased a pretty house in my new home of Pittsburgh

A positive for my mISV, this SFH in the hip part of the city cost much less then my small townhouse I had in the suburbs of DC :)

Walking down the cost of AdWords

So January was my first experiment into the mISV world of advertising through AdWords. Technically I had used these previously for ChimSoft, but clicks for "chimney sweep software" cost me almost nothing, and I was already number one for all of my search terms.

I began the month somewhat confounded by AdWords. I put in 5 and 10 cent bids, which Google estimated would give me some clicks for, and yet never would I get any clicks or impressions. Google told me to up my bid. So I upped it to 20 cents a click, and still they told me to up my bid. It was looking like AdWords would not be a feasible source of advertising for budget software.

So just to see it work, I upped my price per click to 50 cents! Sure enough, this got the clicks rolling in, but obviously I was hitting my meager daily budget by about 9am each day.

I then tried some new keywords, but kept the original ones running at 50 cents a click for a while until my click through ratio was quite high. Then I decided to start lowering the cost per click. 45 cents got me around the same amount of clicks. 40 cents started getting more more clicks for my budget... I kept this up, each day lowering the price I was paying per click. Until I was finally down to 10 cents per click, which was basically my original bid. The difference now however, is that I was receiving tons of clicks. My overall position was slightly lower then when I was at 50 cents a click, but my impressions and total clicks were significantly more.

I believe what happened here is that Google had assigned me a high quality score based on the CTR at the higher price. Since my ad was "valuable" I've then been able to take the price down significantly. This may be a helpful tip for those who are continually told by Google to raise their bids. We'll see how it does this month.

Vista

I finally upgraded my primary development PC. I decided to get the most expandable PC that would last me quite a while, so I opted for a Dell XPS. The only problem with XPS is that they only come with Vista. That's fine I thought, I could use a Vista system to test with... this is the future of Windows.

Overall Vista isn't as bad as people have made out. It is EXTREMELY frustrating to use out of the box, for those that are long time Windows Power Users. Just getting it to find a WinXP share on the network from my old PC took forever. Everyone whines about the parade of warnings, but with one click UAC is easily turned off.

The biggest problem I had with Vista is that Visual Studio 2003 (my primary dev environment) does not run on Vista. I think I had heard this, but didn't remember. So this weekend was spent upgrading to 2005 (which I preferred as a dev environment anyway), and changing my installers to check for .NET 2.0. I think .NET 2.0 now is at least as installed as .NET 1.1 was when I started ChimSoft, so I'm reasonably comfortable requiring it. Also 2.0 comes pre-installed with Vista.

So my planned 1.1 release is a little delayed, but I hope to have it out by the end of the week. It's the first release that had some "tricky" problems to solve.

I've also been playing with AdWords, and see why people obsess about this so much. Is it better to have 11% CTR on a cheap keyword, or 3% CTR on an expensive keyword? I'm trying to find the right balance of clicks to money spent, with conversions being the major factor.