Category Archives: The Business of Software

Get Better Results by Flipping the Funnel

Working Backwards Lately I keep running into instances where different worlds coincide with a common theme. The theme I’m running into lately is flipping the funnel. Sometimes when you hit a stumbling block, it helps to flip the funnel and … Continue reading

Posted in Business Process Improvement, The Business of Software | Leave a comment

[Mis]Information Technology

Following MacWorld, Reg Developer started a rumor [1] that VBA would be going away from future versions of Microsoft Office for Windows. The speculation was based on Office 2008 for Mac dropping VBA (a big blunder by Microsoft, IMHO) and … Continue reading

Posted in Excel, The Business of Software, microISV | Leave a comment

Lifestyle Business vs Software Startup: How One Company Got Screwed

[This is a story about Bob. Bob is not his real name, but he is a real person. The events here were gleaned from intermittent conversations and pieced together as accurately as I could.] I’d never heard the term “lifestyle … Continue reading

Posted in The Business of Software, software | 3 Comments

StumbleUpon Advertising Review

I’m always looking for new avenues to get the word out about FlowBreeze, so recently I ran an experiment using StumbleUpon’s advertising program. If you’re not familiar with StumbleUpon, basically it’s just a random site re-director. StumbleUpon users are served … Continue reading

Posted in The Business of Software, internet, marketing | 1 Comment

Building to Schedule vs. Building to Features

Fog Creek released a new version of FogBugz this week with something called Evidence Based Scheduling. It feeds project tasks and developer characteristics, along with historical data, into a Monte Carlo simulation then builds a probability distribution for project completion. … Continue reading

Posted in The Business of Software, microISV | 2 Comments

How to Stop IE6 Caching Downloads

Update: The method described below will cause IE7 to drop the extension. Until recently, I had no idea that IE6 cached downloads. I knew page and image caching were issues, but I didn’t know if affected exe’s and zip’s as … Continue reading

Posted in The Business of Software, microISV, software | 2 Comments

How I Finally Got AdWords Tracking To Work

Until this past week, I’ve never been able to tell whether AdWords was paying for itself or not. Somewhere between my ads and the payment processors, my tracking lost its way. It all hinged on a) the tracking working through … Continue reading

Posted in Google, The Business of Software, marketing, microISV | 7 Comments

Software Conversion Benchmarks

Fireclick has published some interesting numbers on software conversion rates on their site: http://index.fireclick.com/fireindex.php?segment=9 Fireclick is a web analytics company owned by Digital River, which owns a huge chunk of the payment processing market for software vendors. The data is … Continue reading

Posted in The Business of Software, marketing | Leave a comment

Seven Motivational Techniques for MicroISV’s

Someone on the Business of Software forum asked how others motivate themselves to get working. This is a timely question. The jump from FlowBreeze 1.x to FlowBreeze 2.0 has been a long struggle. The code base has grown 3X and … Continue reading

Posted in General, The Business of Software, software | 4 Comments

MicroISV Survey Results

The Business of Software blog posted Part II of their microISV survey. (Part I van be found here.) I have to admit that I was surprised by some of the low revenue numbers. But I’m one of those obstinate people … Continue reading

Posted in The Business of Software, business, microISV, software | Leave a comment