Save time and money with the most powerful macro automation tool for Windows.

Our good friends at Mjtnet are offering, today only, a super 45% discount on their macro automation tool, Macro Scheduler.

This is a great software that can automate almost any operation and save you a lot of time. Mjtnet has recently released v.10 of Macro Scheduler which sports some amazing new text capture functions and a super fast image recognition.

With 45% off Macro Scheduler Home is only $32. Macro Scheduler Standard would be only $63 and the Professional version only $133!

To grab your copy, order it online using coupon code SDOD550802

Hurry up, the offer is valid today only, 4th February.

Picky domains is an innovative and kind of unique service for finding an original domain name. Differently from other services like nameboy or Domainsbot which suggest a number of domain names given a list of keywords, PickyDomains works very differently. It uses real people, expert at domain choosing, to come up with memorable and easy to pronounce domain names according to your indications. The service costs 50$ and they offer a money back guarantee. As your domain will be with your company for all its life, it’s very worthwhile spending some time and money getting the right one.

Technorati Tags: pickydomains domains microisv

Direct Access, on the 3rd May, was featured on Giveaway of the day. This is a Russian website which, each day, offers a special deal on a software application. Here’s a brief report on how the thing works and how it can help market your software. I got convinced on using it after learning the experience of my Italian friends at Incomedia with their web authoring tool Website X5 and our fellow entrepreneur Chris Thompson with GoCRM.

What is Giveaway of the day

When you list your software on Giveaway of the day you are basically offering it for free to anyone that requests it for one day only. Your software is listed on the main page of this site (which really gets a lot of traffic) for one day. The licensing process ensures that people get your software for free only for the promotion day.

The licensing can be handled directly by Giveaway of the day or you can create your custom registration system (which I warmly suggest). They package your application with their executable so that it installs only on the day of the promotion (users have to install and activate that software that day).

Why would you want to give your software for free? Basically to increase your visibility and future referrals. So, the idea is quite different from other deal of the day sites, like Bits du jour, which are meant to increase your sales for a day.

Normally, the license you offer has the following limitations: no support, no commercial use, no upgrades.

My experience with Direct Access

The Setup
I have my website hosted so I was a little scared not being able to handle the traffic, especially as I decided to use my own registration algorithm that generates the licenses and sends them via email to the users. So I asked my good friend Marcus Tettmar to host a backup of the registration server application which ended being handy as I had a couple of problems with the main server (very slow DB).

As you can see, the traffic is consistent: almost 12,000 visitors and about 37,000 page views and about 15GB bandwidth. As you can see from the charts, the peak is at 9am (Italian time) when the promotion starts with people who are lurking to get their giveaway: then traffic decreases to rise a bit around 3pm when Americans get up. I got a big number of users from Italy, too. Maybe it’s time to start localizing Direct Access.

Data for the 3rd May

Data for the 4th May

Comments arrive at bunches as they are approved by the moderator. I replied promptly and it looks liek that very appreciated by the community. In fact, although, the term say no tech support, I and Marcus – who helped me answering the comments –  walked every user through the registration process (which proved more complex than I anticipated). Also the number of email I received was conspicuous: more than 400. Fogbuz along with Direct Access proved to be of great help to quickly answer emails.

Andrew Klein, of BladedThoth.com, wrote a mini review of Direct Access (he reviews all the software listed on Giveaway of the day). He made good comments and gave me good starting point for future improvements of the product.

The problems I got
Fortunately, things went pretty smooth and the vast majority of users got their registration email in few seconds. The major problem I had was, as expected, with the license file delivery. My license is delivered as a lic file (which is a signed XML file). A number of support requests were related to license problems (email not received, spam filters, corrupted license file, license file embedded into the email instead as shown as attachment, people not proficient with using their pc and requesting assistance…) and some others to installation problems (mainly, people not having the .NET framework). In addition to that, as I used the term “register on my website” a number of people went to the register link on the nagarsoft.com website instead of the specific page for Giveaway of the day.

The Results
I still need to finish analyzing the data, but about 3,500 people registered Direct Access and got their license (which registration coming at a rate between 120 to 180  per hour). I assume that a number will stop using it but it will nevertheless give me a solid user base that will help me discover new uses of the software and shaping the development of the product and provide useful support and a number of them, hopefully, will upgrade to the future versions.

What kind of software performs best

Giveaway of the day is visited by people with different IT background and you get a lot of novices with very little experience. So it looks like that the software that work best is the one with no learning curve where the user can immediately start using it. Niche market tools won’t probably work very well and will get you overwhelmed with support questions.

How to get your software listed

To get your software listed, just write to the support team of Giveaway of the day and you’ll get a reply in few days. If they are interested in listing your software, they will be back to you in a few days and you will even get paid for it. You will send them a brief description of your software (and optionally a description of other software of your company) and you are all set.

Here are some suggestions to make things smooth:

1. Get your server ready: prepare to handle a peak of traffic (I got 12.000 unique visitors in 24 hours). So check with your provider (especially, if your website is hosted) if this will be ok with them or if you need to do anything. Fortunately, your application will be hosted by Giveaway of the day so downloads will not suck up your bandwidth. The Giveaway of the day people will package it in their own executable which will work on the promotion day only.

2. Monitor the forum and your email: people will come up with any kind of question about your software. If you are unresponsive, it’s very easy to get bad comments. Be ready to promptly answer by email and monitor the forum. I replied to each message and sent step by step instructions on how to complete the registration process if necessary. If you sending the registration code via email, problems will happen so be ready to handle things manually.

3. Have a backup ready: if you are implementing your own registration system, if you are on a hosted server, have a backup ready on another server, just in case. My server at webhost4life managed the load pretty well: I just had a couple of problems and having the backup registration server on Mjtnet server worked perfectly. Things can and will get a bit crazy!

4. Make things as simple as possible: try to simplify the procedure to register your software and provide instructional material on your website (screenshots and video tutorials work best). The video tutorials I have at http://www.nagarsoft.com/VideoTutorials.aspx convinced many people who were a little skeptic to download and try the software.

Conclusions

I think that Giveaway of the day is a valuable marketing tool. It will put your software in front of thousands of people. If you are a startup and would like to give your business a boost, this is a tool you should definitely try.

Technorati Tags: microisv, giveaway of the day, nagarsoft, direct access, promotion, software

Today, 1st May 2007, my good friend Marcus Tettmar of Mjtnet is celebrating the10th anniversary of Macro Scheduler. And he’s doing it with a super offer at Bits du Jour.

All version of Macro Scheduler are offered at 58% discount, today only.

• Macro Scheduler Standard at $40 (instead of $97)
• Macro Scheduler Pro at $81.24 (instead of $197)

Take advantage of this offer and start saving time, automating your repetitive tasks.

We send Marcus our warmest congratulations for the brilliant result achieved!

Technorati Tags: macro scheduler, automation, bits du jour

This is the second time Direct Access has been featured on Bits du Jour. Here’s a report of my first Bits du jour experience with the site.

For those who don’t know it, Bits du Jour is a deal of the day website for software. Every day you can get a different software deeply discounted (from 30% to 70%). Bits du Jour keeps 30% of the sale.

I offered Direct Access at 40% and the promotion ended with 40 licenses sold from Bits du jour plus other 9 that were generated directly from my website or my blog.

Bits du jour generate about about 6000–7000 visitors / day.

 Here’s how I managed the promotion:

• A couple of days before the event, I announced the discount via email to my customers.
• I displayed a banner on both my website and my blog announcing the promotion a few hours before the promotion started pointing the users directly to my sale page. This helped me to distinguish from the users who got to my homepage, discovered the discount and ordered the software from those purchasing from Bits du Jour (I got the idea from Nick Hebb. I also removed the promotion link from my website a few hours later (which resulted in a couple more sales)
• Watch the comments at Bits du Jour. A couple of users had questions and responding to them, resulted in few other sales.

From what I saw from my weblogs, on the 12th April, I got about 100 visits on my website from Bits du Jour. That means that many people tried the software before or purchased it on impulse without visiting my website. Traffic however, started to rise about a week before, when Ellen Craw (who manages the site) published the list of the new software on her blog. I’m still getting traffic from from it right now.

I think Bits du Jour is a great promotional tool to get the word out and increase the visibility of your product. Ellen writes the copy for you (which you can freely reuse on your website) and she’s a very talented copywriter.

So, my suggestion is to try it, both to find great software at discounted price and to promote yours!

Technorati Tags: bits du jour, direct access, nagarsoft

Playing with Photoshop, I created a couple of buttons with Vista style that I’m using them at Nagarsoft to redesign my site for the upcoming version of the email automation software Direct Access. 

I’ve created the Download and Buy buttons that almost every microISV needs. Feel free to use them. Of course I do appreciate a link back or if you just drop me an email (but it’s not required).

I’ve included the transparent PNGs and the photoshop source (PSD) so you can freely to edit them. If you come up with variations you wish to share, I’d be happy to post them here. Enjoy.

Vista style orange buttons (PSD, PNG)  

Technorati Tags: buttons, photoshop, freebies, web design, glass, vista

Bitbox contains a number of Windows Vista glass style graphics elements that you can use for free in your website.

The best thing is that it offers all the pictures in their native format (Illustrator or Photoshop) so you are free to customize them to your needs.

Vector glass buttons

Vector badges

Numbers

Technorati Tags: web elements, Aero glass

After a long pause, I’m back again. A number of things have hindered my blogging, among which a new day job and hectic working on the new release of Direct Access (currently in beta) which is expected to be officially released the next week. You can read more and download a beta version of Direct Access from the Direct Access Beta page

1000 Inspirations is a blog run by Alex Choo is a MicroISV: as he says in his manifesto, he wants to give a voice to ordinary people working on their MicroISV. He’s also the cofounder of TipTap and has developed the TicTap Amazon Contextual Ads to show Adsense-styles Amazon product ads in your webpages.

I had the pleasure to be the first to be interviewed. You can read my story at  http://1000inspirations.wordpress.com/2007/01/28/question-time-with-andrea-nagar/

If you run a MicroISV and would like to be interviewed, Alex will probably be very interested in publishing your story.

1000 Inspirations
http://1000inspirations.wordpress.com

Technorati Tags: microisv

I’m working on a new version of Direct Access which, among other new features, will add full support for Windows Vista. Thanks to the help of my good friend Marcus Tettmar, I found that the reason why in some cases drag and drop from Explorer to Direct Access didn’t work was due to the privileges Direct Access was running with. The behaviour happened only when launching Direct Access directly from the setup application.

The “Run the program now” checkbox that appears in many setup installations present a security risk with Vista: as all the processes that setup spawn inherit the same privileges as Setup (normally full administrative privileges) your application will be run with full administrative privileges as well.

This will not only create a security problem but may also cause other interaction problems between applications (for example, drag & drop from explorer to Direct Access doesn’t work).

The suggestion, therefore, is to remove the “Run the program now” from the installation final screen, as it’s suggested in the Innosetup FAQ at http://www.jrsoftware.org/iskb.php?vista

Technorati Tags: Vista, Installation

A fellow ASP member mentioned the Virustotal website. You can submit any file and have it scanned with many different antivirus, so you can be sure that you application is not mistakenly identified as a virus or malware.

You can upload the file to the site or alternatively, send it via email. The service is free.

Virustotal
http://www.virustotal.com

Technorati Tags: antivirus