What Happened To Supermike?

So what happened to me?

I'm taking a break to relax. A big load has just lifted off my shoulders. I'm on my way to financial freedom.

Well, besides a painfully severe reddit addiction, the wife gave me an ultimatum to get this 4 year CRM software project written by the end of February 2007.

I'm now down to the last 2 minor features and then it's serious bug fixing time for the app. After that, it's the installer, docs, GPL licensing (Q&A plus implementation), LLC incorporation, website, and whatever else needs to take place after that.

Here's what makes this CRM unique:

• The 4 years was also a time of study, where I watched user reaction to an early alpha, conceptual fork of the app, and learned what worked and what didn't, and what users wanted or didn't care about. All of that interest has been put into the final app.
• Most CRM products are designed as if they are finished products. They put an unbelievable amount of bells and whistles into their app so that they feel that no stone is left unturned. Unfortunately with such a design you end up with a complex mess that no one wants to extend. Since no CRM fits all and every CRM must be customized, this complexity does not help the cause of most CRM products. My CRM, on the otherhand, was designed through careful study. It has the least amount of features I feel it needs in order to fit in many environments, and the programming under the hood is designed so that one can get started immediately in understanding how to extend it.

Meanwhile, I had to upgrade the app as I went. I felt it needed CSS "skins" because people get tired of looking at the same old app every day. It needed a sort of Web 2.0 look to make newer users appreciate it more. (It doesn't have AJAX in it at this time, but that may come in a later release.) I felt it needed a complete rewrite from scratch at least once, and then I ended up rewriting it two more times beyond that! It needed a search engine, a report tool, a knowledgebase, a project calendar, a customer rolodex with ticket linkage, a billing system, a way to grab a set of tickets at once, a web-based admin system, and linkage to a department intranet. And there are other small features inside that simply make the product a delight to use such as recently edited flags to let you know what stuff someone has worked on recently, or a similar tickets feature to try and match keywords of existing resolved tickets to what work you've done with a ticket.

What can I say. The FOSS market is growing and so are opportunities. Optimism helps.

Those seem like some good points there. Some may even be somewhat applicable to my business.

Anyway, I wish you best of luck.

I guess I'm wondering, what now? What's the smoothest way to get the word out? I managed to get myself listed on Freshmeat.net. Freshmeat also had a nice category called "Issue Tracking" that seems to fit my product properly. Google doesn't seem to pick up my site even after I posted it, but I think I can swing that eventually. I know that if I post the site to Reddit it won't get picked up because it's impossible for me to get anything listed on Reddit. Digg used to be easy, but now Digg is about as hard as Reddit.

I need downloaders of the product, because it's out of those downloaders that eventually someone will want the disc media, the developer manual, the consulting, and perhaps want me to build a rackmount server.

I'm currently working in the "Volo Labs" on the rackmount server software. It's a web interface very much like ebox-platform.com's product to control most of the basic functions of managing an Ubuntu Server. I then plan to turn the web interface around as a free download as well. I've also already figured out that the rackmount server will boot up on DHCP by default, then ping all 255 hosts on the subnet every 30 seconds for at least 2 hours and then stop. Any user with an 'arp' command in a loop (BTW, did you know that even Windows has 'arp'?) in that subnet will eventually see this MAC address and IP address so that they can connect to the web interface and administer it. Most will want to switch it to a reserved, static IP.

I've decided that I'm going to do some Press Releases for Volo Milestone, yes, but I think something else might be more effective as well. Have you ever seen one of those articles that was not an advertisement but kind of was? The article talked about why you need a certain kind of product, and what to look for, and at the end it has one of those bio blurbs about the President, the company and website name, and a product name that the company makes. These articles are often very edgy and slightly humorous for today's hip, new, online readership, such as what you might find at Wired.com or Salon.com. Moreover, they can often make jabs at other products very effectively without naming a single product name. (Trust me -- I've received more than one Cease and Desist legal letter in my past. I don't want to go there ever again.)

Volo Milestone is an Issue Tracker. I thought I'd make wisecracks about organizations that still don't use one, jabs at CRM products and portals, and so on. For instance, many CRMs and portal products sure do look pretty, but at what expense when you have to use them all day? Just how many clicks does one need, and fields to fill out, to complete a task? Pretty can sometimes mean frustrating too.

I thought I'd stress the importance of free software and open source, but not make that the entire focus of the article. Last, I thought I'd talk about why it's important not to get a product that has every feature you could ever want thrown in because of how terribly off-mark and slow that product will usually be, or how hard it would be to install and get connected to your backend systems at the office for things such as login authentication (such as single signon), email hookup, and so on.

Many products make me either bust out laughing or cry. Have you seen ones such as these? I mean, management get all jazzed up about something that met everything on their feature list and price range, but when they bring it in, no one is smart enough to install all the pieces of it, it's slow enough for grandma, it requires a ton of clicks or fields to fill out in order to use it, it's not just tedious but downright baffling as far as its intuitiveness, the so-called features are heavily off mark or implemented in a completely detestable way, the source code looks like someone dropped a tab of acid, much of it is broke or vaporware, and/or everything is locked up in proprietary binaries that require high-paid vendor consultants to rework in just the right way.

Enter the beauty of open source and Bazaar-style programming. Instead of being locked into the maniacal world of the vendor of proprietary Cathedral-style software, the open sorcerer world is a glass palace that's just getting started, and you have a hand in growing it up from the grass roots and into something cool.

Ugh! Discouraged today. After a week of being out there, here's the stats on the Volo Milestone project:

In one week and two days, with some buzz in the middle of that on lxer.com, I'm looking at 332 visits, a peak of 177 one day, now trailing off to about 15 visitors a day. Out of that, I had 30 downloaders for Milestone (the issue tracker) and 14 for Fixer (the bug tracker). I've had zero purchases, but I guess I can understand that because it's so new and because I'm not getting enough visitors.

It seems that my post on lxer.com created the most buzz, and now people are finding me mostly from Freshmeat.net and Wikipedia.

As for software downloaders, we've had 30 for Milestone (the issue tracker) and 14 for Fixer (the bug tracker). So, for every 300 visits, let's assume I'll have 10% of them actually download the product.

The stats show that 50% of my viewers hit the site from Linux. 40% from Windows. The rest come from Mac and Sun.

The stats also show that 70% of my viewers have Firefox, IE has only 9%, and the rest of browser stats show very small numbers for several other kinds of browsers.

It looks like I need to branch out and speak to those guys who have the cash -- perhaps an online place where business analysts, stock traders, and financial people hang out. Perhaps then the thing will get momentum. I've written a draft of an article and an outline, and I need to submit the outline to some of these online magazine places for these types of people and see who bites. Then, I can rework the outline just for them and rework the draft into a finished work.

I found a discouraging link on Wikipedia that compares other products. The other products are really good in some cases. Some are awful, but some are really interesting, like Unfuddle.com (which isn't a product, but, rather a hosted site or SaaS).

So, unless I get any action on this project, and especially after the article posting, I'm going to have to consider it as a tool, go and find some project sites on the web where people want to hire me, and use customized versions of this tool to solve their problem (as long as they know I used GPLv3 code and must comply with that).

Other options are the server appliance, which I think might have a taker here or there, and the various government and university contracts I might be able to pick up to use this product. And I still yet have to get Google AdSense on the site -- just a matter of time for me to get that worked out.

So far, though, it's discouraging to have all this vision, spend 5 long years of my life making this product by myself, put so much stress on my wife and family, think that this product was going to explode on the market once it is discovered, convince my wife and myself that I'm going to give it away for free, and yet at this point still I can't get a single person to pay me for the CD media within a week and a half. Yet, if those downloaders were to actually compare my product and see how much faster it is, bug free, and easy to install compared to other products, and look at the price for the media + manuals, I'm sure they would realize I'm asking a fair price and pay it. But I haven't hit that point yet.

Latest:

* I've been trying to get some decent programming time. Between audits at my office, huge bouts of performance monitoring improvements, and other major project and trench work with Linux, it's been tough to get some time in with my site to satisfy my customers. But I'm trying hard. I make changes every weekend and plan to have a release soon on Fixer, the bug tracker. From that, I plan to eventually fork it so that I make Volo Stat, which will be a Fixer-like Issue Tracker that runs on SQLite.

(An aside: by the way, in the interim, I've learned great things about SNMP with the Net-SNMP project for Linux, and I've been using HP Mercury SiteScope to plot this stuff. I would have used MRTG, Cactus, and Nagios -- stuff like that -- but unfortunately my employer wanted me to use HP Mercury SiteScope. It's got it's quirks -- one of them being that it can't do much math at all and requires another Linux box for cases where you need to do math -- but darn if it's not easy to install! Wow! I also found out how much more I prefer SNMP monitoring than I do monitoring via SSH -- so ask away, should you want that. (Ask in the appropriate Nuxified forum, of course. Note, in the spirit of Nuxified's emphasis on free software, I will only provide advice about free software regarding this.))

* I got verbally beat up by a good friend who finally came out and told me the truth. He told me that the sad truth is that MySQL's marketing engine is too strong, that PostgreSQL is wonderful and all and puts the slam down on MySQL but darn if it doesn't have weak marketing and has poor tech support options. (Actually it has great tech support options, but nothing like MySQL where a central group supports you and, should that change require a programming fix, the actual product is changed. Instead, using PostgreSQL requires a paradigm shift in what you expect from a tech support solution for it.) He also said that many newbie programmers don't like having to figure out how to unlock the security mechanisms of PostgreSQL before they can use it. (Well, I actually /like/ that.) He said that where it's at is MySQL and SQLite right now, no matter how badly I prefer PostgreSQL over MySQL. So, anyway, this was all the more impetus for me to introduce Volo Stat, which will be based on SQLite. Right now, like I've said, "simple is white hot right now."

* When starting a F/OSS business, I didn't realize how important it is to build relationships for value-added reseller opportunities. I had no idea I would get any traction with this, but there's been some interest here. Whenever you build a new software project, you should definitely keep in mind the VAR angle, as well as partnerships where you make your product plug into other products.

* Don't give up on press releases. Keep up your faith in yourself. Release one quarterly. Keep it very short and to the point, with something enticing in every one. Keep the marketing language out, and don't say junk like "free offer" either. As for me, I landed a place on Ubuntu Marketplace for my efforts, and you can do that and more with yours if you work at it and strive to make the best F/OSS product for your customers.

* Again, in case you missed that, Volo got carried on Ubuntu Marketplace. Yay!

* Others are telling me that F/OSS projects take perhaps as much as two years before they take off or become profitable. In that time, they tell me that it takes a heck of a lot of listening to your customers and giving them what they want, and release often or stand the threat of being forked. Keep a positive outlook because F/OSS business growth is a slooooooow process, initially. If you listen to your customers and give them what they want, how can you not look at that positively that someday that's going to switch into a profitable mode? It can.

* Again, remain positive. If you have 40 visitors a day, and 10% download the product, and they come even on Sundays, and still no one purchases -- don't give up. I mean, at that point, you're getting mixed results that show promise. Listening to those customers is key. At least the downloaders are doing the free marketing for you, telling others, and you can see that's the case because why else would you be getting 40 visitors a day (on average)? (Note, the stats above are my current stats, which is why I use these numbers. I also filtered out the spider traffic to come up with that number.) Anyway, surely a track record like that is going to hit a paying customer eventually. And when you find out why they paid, that's the magic formula for getting others to do the same.