The programming Language by then was QuickBasic and we were writing nicely structured, easy to maintain code. When a bug report came in we would fix it and start mailing out new floppies within 24 hours!
Soon sales were about $1 million, we had 10 employees, and had expanded our product line, although AnonyCAD was still the best seller. Profits were excellent and everybody in the company was working hard. We bought a diskette duplicator, a high speed photo-copier and order professionally designed boxed and manual covers, but they were still loose leafed binders in the then popular IBM small page size format.
Was life perfect? No, as the number of users grew, so did support and training issues. The "early adopters" were tech-savvy people who learned how to use the programs very quickly and often gave us useful suggestions for improved functions and features. But as the user base grew we sold systems to "bosses" who expected their underlings to be able to use the program almost immediately, with little training. The phone rang a long, email not yet having come into use.
We set up a BBS using an old 286 with a fast (19200 bps) modem for support and it caught on pretty quickly. This also allowed us to offer updated versions for download, but although the files were tiny by today's bloated standards, download speed and broken connections were constant issues. Most clients were happy, despite quite a few bugs, because we were quick and responsive to solve problems.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Friday, August 21, 2009
Web Marketing Today
The world of computers has changed greatly since the 80s. Back then I spent a lot of time on graphics drivers for expensive hi-res (1024 x 768 was very high res!) graphics boards, The customers would pay $1200 for a 19" monitor and almost as much for a graphics board.
Today I don't worry about all that, everybody has a decent screen with 24 bit color, and Windows takes care of the drivers.
The internet didn't really exist back then, and we relied on direct mail, phone calls, and trade shows for marketing. It worked well because we had a product with a defined market, and little competition.
Using VB.NET and a varity of graphics tools such as Corel Draw, Solidworks, and 3D studio, I managed to complete and test my first product (which I'm calling ShipDash here) in less than a month. Amazing.
ShipDash also has a defined market, but I'm not planning direct mail. I set up a web site, advertised on Google, and offered a free downloadable demo. I got thousands of clicks, hundreds of downloads, but few sales. The problem is our the product is not really a do-it-yourself installation. Actually, the software is but there is specialized hardware involved that most potential users would need help to install.
Then I realized my Google ads were largely wasted. I had allowed Google to use automatic placement on their "content network". Don't ever do this. They placed my adds on a lot of free file sharing sites, none of which were relevant to my product, and I got a lot of clicks from un-qualified users. A waste of money. I changed the ads to "managed" and I select the sites to advertise on. More work and more effective.
Considering these factors, I decided to sell through dealers, and set about establishing a dealer network. The criteria was pretty loose, they just had to be in the Marine field, and willing to represent us. I changed the Google ads to say "dealer wanted" and did direct email to a couple of hundred companies I thought qualified. Within a week I had 25 dealers, although only one actually placed an immediate order.
Today I don't worry about all that, everybody has a decent screen with 24 bit color, and Windows takes care of the drivers.
The internet didn't really exist back then, and we relied on direct mail, phone calls, and trade shows for marketing. It worked well because we had a product with a defined market, and little competition.
Using VB.NET and a varity of graphics tools such as Corel Draw, Solidworks, and 3D studio, I managed to complete and test my first product (which I'm calling ShipDash here) in less than a month. Amazing.
ShipDash also has a defined market, but I'm not planning direct mail. I set up a web site, advertised on Google, and offered a free downloadable demo. I got thousands of clicks, hundreds of downloads, but few sales. The problem is our the product is not really a do-it-yourself installation. Actually, the software is but there is specialized hardware involved that most potential users would need help to install.
Then I realized my Google ads were largely wasted. I had allowed Google to use automatic placement on their "content network". Don't ever do this. They placed my adds on a lot of free file sharing sites, none of which were relevant to my product, and I got a lot of clicks from un-qualified users. A waste of money. I changed the ads to "managed" and I select the sites to advertise on. More work and more effective.
Considering these factors, I decided to sell through dealers, and set about establishing a dealer network. The criteria was pretty loose, they just had to be in the Marine field, and willing to represent us. I changed the Google ads to say "dealer wanted" and did direct email to a couple of hundred companies I thought qualified. Within a week I had 25 dealers, although only one actually placed an immediate order.
Success in 1987
In 1987 we were contacted by a Scandinavian firm who wanted to represent us in Europe. Up to then all sales were direct. I flew to Sweden to meet with them. Great guys. By then I had given a few demos to American clients and knew what to expect. They had filled a room with potential users, and I gave a demonstration. No questions, very serious faces. At lunch break I said to the dealer "They really are not impressed, are they?"
"You're wrong." he said, "They're very enthusiastic!"
You could have fooled me. Americans would say "Wow!" and ask a lot of questions when I gave a demo. But anyway we sold 7 or 8 systems that day, and more followed. having realized the overseas potential I traveled to Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea as well as the UK, France, Italy and other places. The second year sales reached $250K and I had hired 2 employees, one programmer and one support person.
We began to feel rich, but concentrated on paying off debts and expanding the business. We bought our first house (I was 36 years old but had never owned my own home) in a quiet suburb. It had a good sized above ground basement, which we had finished off as an office. We had twice the normal number of electrical outlets and phone plugs installed, and it still wasn't enough. After less than a year we had to rent a proper office in a commercial area when the neighbors complained about number of FEDEX trucks and the employees cars. The business was humming!
"You're wrong." he said, "They're very enthusiastic!"
You could have fooled me. Americans would say "Wow!" and ask a lot of questions when I gave a demo. But anyway we sold 7 or 8 systems that day, and more followed. having realized the overseas potential I traveled to Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea as well as the UK, France, Italy and other places. The second year sales reached $250K and I had hired 2 employees, one programmer and one support person.
We began to feel rich, but concentrated on paying off debts and expanding the business. We bought our first house (I was 36 years old but had never owned my own home) in a quiet suburb. It had a good sized above ground basement, which we had finished off as an office. We had twice the normal number of electrical outlets and phone plugs installed, and it still wasn't enough. After less than a year we had to rent a proper office in a commercial area when the neighbors complained about number of FEDEX trucks and the employees cars. The business was humming!
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Starting Small Now
I'm in a completely different situation from those early days. I'm still married to the same lovely woman, and she still looks great. The kids have grown up and finished college, and are pretty much self sufficient. I have enough income to live on, so the sense of urgency I had back then is not there. A good thing too, as my energy level is nowhere even close to what it was 30 years ago, although I'm in robust good health.
This time I have a business plan. My application will be a "Virtual Instrument Panel" for ships, replacing a hodge-podge of mechanical instruments. It will be marketed via the internet. Users will download it and pay me with Paypal. Once I get it running, I can advertise on Google, and the cash will roll in. At least that is the plan...
So, after 15 years of not programming, what language and tools would I use? When I stopped writing software (because I sold the company) I was using Visual Basic 4, which I believe cost$99. It turns out that VB is still around and the latest version, VB.NET 2008 is free, at least for the most "basic" version.
Naturally I downloaded and tried to install it right away.
Problem one: It insisted that I already had a "beta" version installed, and it would not let me install until I uninstalled the beta. Maybe I did download and install a beta version of VB.NET, but I didn't remember doing it and it wasn't listed in the control panel installed list. After 3 days of messing around I finally succeeded in purging the registry of all VB references and the language installed.
Unfortunately when I fired it up, It looked kind of strange. Since I last used it, VB has become a true object oriented language, like C#. I was aware of the concept but had no experience. Surprisingly that wasn't a big problem, and within a few hours I had written a couple of utility program. Nothing commercial, just stuff I could use myself to help me find my way around the IDE.
I love VB.NET! It turned out I can whip out an app in no time, and publish it with a setup program, at a single mouse click. You can publish to a web site, or to a file system for use with a CD or DVD. I decided on the latter as my app will not need the internet.
This time I have a business plan. My application will be a "Virtual Instrument Panel" for ships, replacing a hodge-podge of mechanical instruments. It will be marketed via the internet. Users will download it and pay me with Paypal. Once I get it running, I can advertise on Google, and the cash will roll in. At least that is the plan...
So, after 15 years of not programming, what language and tools would I use? When I stopped writing software (because I sold the company) I was using Visual Basic 4, which I believe cost$99. It turns out that VB is still around and the latest version, VB.NET 2008 is free, at least for the most "basic" version.
Naturally I downloaded and tried to install it right away.
Problem one: It insisted that I already had a "beta" version installed, and it would not let me install until I uninstalled the beta. Maybe I did download and install a beta version of VB.NET, but I didn't remember doing it and it wasn't listed in the control panel installed list. After 3 days of messing around I finally succeeded in purging the registry of all VB references and the language installed.
Unfortunately when I fired it up, It looked kind of strange. Since I last used it, VB has become a true object oriented language, like C#. I was aware of the concept but had no experience. Surprisingly that wasn't a big problem, and within a few hours I had written a couple of utility program. Nothing commercial, just stuff I could use myself to help me find my way around the IDE.
I love VB.NET! It turned out I can whip out an app in no time, and publish it with a setup program, at a single mouse click. You can publish to a web site, or to a file system for use with a CD or DVD. I decided on the latter as my app will not need the internet.
From rags to...decent clothes. Then
In early 1986 my family suffered a financial setback. We were broke. Actually, worse, we owed $30,000 or so and had no significant assets. Our income was pitifully low. We found enough work to pay rent on a dumpy house and feed our two rugrats, but no way could we get ahead. So, I thought I would try and sell a few more copies of AnonyCAD (as I'll call it here). We had an Aplle Mac by now and a Laserwriter from another failed venture, so we revised and improved the manual. I bought a cheap Taiwan PC clone and improved the look and feel of the program.
We compiled a mailing list from professional journals and other sources of about 900 potential clients in the US and Canada. I estimated that we might sell 15 or 20 copies if we priced it at $999. I designed a flyer and we printed 1000 copies, and mailed it to the list.
Response was much greater than I expected, and in the first year we sold 75 copies. This may not seem like much, but I had no employees, and operated from the basement of a rented house. It cost us about $30 to photocopy a manual, put it in a loose leaf binder and include a floppy disk. So we netted about $70K that first year. My consultant income that year was less than $20K. So we realized we were in the software business!
We compiled a mailing list from professional journals and other sources of about 900 potential clients in the US and Canada. I estimated that we might sell 15 or 20 copies if we priced it at $999. I designed a flyer and we printed 1000 copies, and mailed it to the list.
Response was much greater than I expected, and in the first year we sold 75 copies. This may not seem like much, but I had no employees, and operated from the basement of a rented house. It cost us about $30 to photocopy a manual, put it in a loose leaf binder and include a floppy disk. So we netted about $70K that first year. My consultant income that year was less than $20K. So we realized we were in the software business!
Monday, August 17, 2009
Becoming a Software Company -- Now
We have run a consulting firm now since 1995, with a reasonably popular web site, and have had some excellent success, until 2008 when the phone stopped ringing and emails(except spam) stopped coming. With time on my hands I took a long vacation, cleaned up the garage, painted the house, and so on.
I even learned to cook (my wife says I'm great at it but I suspect she's afraid if she complains about the food I will give her back the job!), do laundry and grocery shop.
No money coming in though, so I decided to see if I could repeat my earlier software success.
I even learned to cook (my wife says I'm great at it but I suspect she's afraid if she complains about the food I will give her back the job!), do laundry and grocery shop.
No money coming in though, so I decided to see if I could repeat my earlier software success.
Becoming a Software Company - Then
My specialized 3D CAD progam (I'm not naming it as the company is still going today, and may not appreciate my story of humble beginings) was just for my own use. But a trade magazine wrote an article about me, and mentioned that I had this program. It generated a few letters and phone calls which I pretty much ignored. I didn't intend to sell it, just use it myself.
That changed when a persistent Seattle firm insisted on visiting me for a demo, then demanded to buy a copy. I thought I would make them go away by quoting a high price. The most expensive program I knew of on a micro-computer was priced about $400. So I quoted $4000, ten times more. They agreed, as long as it ran on an IBM PC, which had just come out. All I had was the Trash 80.
Also, there was no user manual. Since I wrote the program I knew how to use it. So I hired a high school kid to translate the program to IBM-Basic and whipped up a manual in the Radio Shack word processor. I had to rent a PC for a month for the translation. We transferred the code through a serial port as the floppy drives were not compatible then edited it in the PC until it worked. We did have a working version in a month, and one customer. So it stayed for a year or so.
That changed when a persistent Seattle firm insisted on visiting me for a demo, then demanded to buy a copy. I thought I would make them go away by quoting a high price. The most expensive program I knew of on a micro-computer was priced about $400. So I quoted $4000, ten times more. They agreed, as long as it ran on an IBM PC, which had just come out. All I had was the Trash 80.
Also, there was no user manual. Since I wrote the program I knew how to use it. So I hired a high school kid to translate the program to IBM-Basic and whipped up a manual in the Radio Shack word processor. I had to rent a PC for a month for the translation. We transferred the code through a serial port as the floppy drives were not compatible then edited it in the PC until it worked. We did have a working version in a month, and one customer. So it stayed for a year or so.
Sunday, August 16, 2009
My Latest Computer NOW
Last month I decided to start programming again after 15 years of doing "other things".
The computer I have on my desk now is one of 3, and a total of 6 in my household. It is an HP Quad Core CPU with 3 GB of RAM and terabytes of disk space. The flat LCD screen is 24" wide, and the whole thing cost less than my 1983 TRS-80.
It runs Vista Ultimate, and despite all the bitching, I find the system stable and reliable. However, I do regular backups!
The computer I have on my desk now is one of 3, and a total of 6 in my household. It is an HP Quad Core CPU with 3 GB of RAM and terabytes of disk space. The flat LCD screen is 24" wide, and the whole thing cost less than my 1983 TRS-80.
It runs Vista Ultimate, and despite all the bitching, I find the system stable and reliable. However, I do regular backups!
My first computer THEN
Way back in 1984 I was a design engineer in my own consulting firm, drawing widgets on a drafting board. I had a background in the servicing of mainframe computers, and had been watching the development of what were then called microcomputers. I started investigating the possibilities of doing CAD (Computer Aided Design) on a computer with the aim of improving my own productivity. 2D CAD was just beginning to appear on micros, but I wanted 3D or nothing.
I found what I needed, in France, a system used in Aircraft design. IT ran on a Unix mini-computer, and cost $500,000! Unfortunately my budget didn't have that many zeros. Or actually, all it had was zeros. So I decided to write my own (having never written any sort of software, I had no idea what was involved, but I did have the confidence of youth!). I decided on a computer, a TRS-80 model III (affectionately called a trash 80 by many) with a whopping 48K of RAM, two 5" floppy disks and optional "high resolution graphics"
This computer plus a printer/plotter which "drew" characters and graphics with a ball point pen refill cost $2600. I had to take out a bank loand to buy it, and convince my wife that it would be a good investment. It turned out to be the best investment I have made so far in my life.
The computer had a 12" monochrome screen. When I turned it on withe the TRS-DOS disk in the floppy, I got this on the screen:
A>
I typed a lot of stuff including swear words with no result other than "syntax error". At least I think that is what happened. Remember this was nearly 30 years ago...
I went back to Radio Shack and bought a book on TRS-Basic programming. After going through the book and most of the exercises in it, I began to catch on, and wrote some simple engineering calculation programs. These were nothing you couldn't do with an HP programmable calculator, but it turned out the computer was much easier to program and test.
After 6 months of programming in my spare time, I had a workable specialized 3D CAD program, which did only one object at a time, and plotted the result in 3 ortho views plus a perspective, with the "ball point" plotter. I would then trace the result on my drafting board to make a finished drawing. It sounds absurdly primitive now but a drawing that used to take a week took 4 hours, a 10 to 1 productivity increase.
My "business plan" was non existent. I had a vague idea that a powerful tool, which none of my colleagues had, would give me an edge and so my income would increase. However a problem immediately surfaced. I made the mistake of bragging about the productivity increase to some clients. The response was, "Wow, with these great tools you will be able to do the work for much less money!"
Not quite what I had in mind.
I found what I needed, in France, a system used in Aircraft design. IT ran on a Unix mini-computer, and cost $500,000! Unfortunately my budget didn't have that many zeros. Or actually, all it had was zeros. So I decided to write my own (having never written any sort of software, I had no idea what was involved, but I did have the confidence of youth!). I decided on a computer, a TRS-80 model III (affectionately called a trash 80 by many) with a whopping 48K of RAM, two 5" floppy disks and optional "high resolution graphics"
This computer plus a printer/plotter which "drew" characters and graphics with a ball point pen refill cost $2600. I had to take out a bank loand to buy it, and convince my wife that it would be a good investment. It turned out to be the best investment I have made so far in my life.
The computer had a 12" monochrome screen. When I turned it on withe the TRS-DOS disk in the floppy, I got this on the screen:
A>
I typed a lot of stuff including swear words with no result other than "syntax error". At least I think that is what happened. Remember this was nearly 30 years ago...
I went back to Radio Shack and bought a book on TRS-Basic programming. After going through the book and most of the exercises in it, I began to catch on, and wrote some simple engineering calculation programs. These were nothing you couldn't do with an HP programmable calculator, but it turned out the computer was much easier to program and test.
After 6 months of programming in my spare time, I had a workable specialized 3D CAD program, which did only one object at a time, and plotted the result in 3 ortho views plus a perspective, with the "ball point" plotter. I would then trace the result on my drafting board to make a finished drawing. It sounds absurdly primitive now but a drawing that used to take a week took 4 hours, a 10 to 1 productivity increase.
My "business plan" was non existent. I had a vague idea that a powerful tool, which none of my colleagues had, would give me an edge and so my income would increase. However a problem immediately surfaced. I made the mistake of bragging about the productivity increase to some clients. The response was, "Wow, with these great tools you will be able to do the work for much less money!"
Not quite what I had in mind.
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