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I See Markup, Part 6 - Satisfied Customers
This is the story of my C++ XML parser product CMarkup.
A Chai Wallah is a person who sells tea on the street corner in India pouring it in a tall narrow stream from pot to clay cup with great aplomb. India is the world mecca of small business and there the business owner whether selling chai, fruit, fish or clothing, often does it with evident glee. That is because (there especially) if you don't have great customer relations someone else will gladly take your place. But aside from that, there really is something universally exciting about selling a product for significantly more than the cost of the raw expenses and having happy participants on both sides of the transaction. There is also an accompanying joy in displaying your craft to your customers.
You might think making money would be a sustaining force for the person behind a Micro ISV, but I would submit that satisfied customers are an even more powerful force. As an inspiration, money leads to burn out (and very very quickly) while positive customer feedback helps you enjoy the work itself. Don't get me wrong, the desire to get money is a useful motivator, but once you get money, it can take you away from your work and customers rather than renew your interest in them.
A regular theme in software developer discussions is losing your drive. Gavin Bowman wrote about Not Getting Things Done, and others said "I cannot get started, I procrastinate quite a lot" and "I absolutely, positively, cannot get myself to actually do any programming". Often people are wondering "Why can't I work the hours I used to?" It is not that they have never been a successful programmer and are giving up (in fact, it is the opposite of that); it always accompanies a certain level of success. Joel's wonderful article Fire And Motion gives advice on how to move forward despite these doldrums. But the point I am making is to be aware of what is going to sustain you in your enterprise.
At the heart of your Micro ISV is the excitement of providing a service, yes: being a servant.
In my experience, the ISVs that thrive are the ones that that are founded in the desire to serve and that feed off the joy of service. For those of us dissatisfied with problems in a large corporation, the Micro ISV platform is a chance to reconnect with real live customers and be able to provide them with a product directly and immediately. The cynical and despairing attitudes so well expressed in Dilbert comic strips represent the lack of inspiration that sets in at the opposite end of the spectrum, when you are stuck in a large malfunctioning institution and don't feel you can make a difference.
This was the most important guiding principle in setting up my Micro ISV: I want all my customers to be very very happy. Of course this does not mean handing them the world on a silver platter, this means finding that balance in a suitable niche so that my customers know what to expect and get what they want. In the end, succeeding in this regard pays me back by sustaining me through the times I might otherwise have gotten fed up.
An issue I have always struggled with is how much to promote CMarkup. Though it has matured over these years, it is still a humble product in a very specific niche.
In my observation of the software industry, promotion and hype can attract customers for whom the product is not yet well-suited. This can result in negative publicity when the preconceived notions of potential customers are disappointed. In the "Marimba phenomenon" (Picking a Ship Date), Joel Spolsky describes how brilliant PR (Public Relations) backfires when the first release is met with disappointment that is "so thick you could cut it with butter." Of course big companies like Microsoft can mitigate this disappointment through sustained hype and sheer momentum. But it can wreck a tiny company and undercut resolve to press on with the product.
In Mouth Wide Shut Joel says "the best way to avoid breaking promises is not to make any". That was back in April 2002 when Joel was arguing that he wanted to avoid massive PR for his product CityDesk until release 2.0. It turned out that CityDesk never became their flagship product, and massive PR might have created even more negative attention than he imagined at the time.
As the creator of CMarkup I am super excited about future features but I do not tell details to customers because I don't want someone buying the product for something it will be rather than what it already is. This takes restraint on my part but it is necessary because a customer waiting for a feature may become unhappy, as might a customer with disappointed expectations. As a small software vendor, I can't afford to spend time dealing with unhappy customers.
I put a great deal of energy into the CMarkup website and documentation at firstobject.com (never enough though), to attract customers but also to help turn away potentially unhappy customers too. The first goal is to make sure the customer tries the product before buying it. To do that, everything is geared towards impressing him/her that it is easy to try it. This involves screen shots, small descriptive blurbs, an easy download without any sign-up, easy installation, and minimal 3rd party or platform dependencies.
Positive response from customers is what keeps my operation going and gives me the inspiration to keep improving it.
Here ends the "I See Markup" series which took us through "Yet Another Parser Is Born", "XML Industry Prone to Lack of Productivity", "Transition To Commercial Product", "Productization", "Not Chasing Standards", and finished here with "Satisfied Customers". To avoid dilluting the subject of CMarkup I left out the firstobject product suite that has grown up around CMarkup (the XML editor, News Reader, and Messaging); I can talk about all that later. This has been a summary of the themes that have impacted me during the first 7 years (wow!) of the life of the CMarkup class, and I hope to expand on these ideas in a more disorderly way going forward. I hope you enjoyed your chai break. Thanks for reading!
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