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

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

Why reinventing the wheel? You can find a lot of code that may already have resolved your specific problem in the open source world. And now it’s much easier to find thanks to the code search engines.

Krugle
http://www.krugle.com

Koders
http://www.koders.com

Google Code Search
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Technorati Tags: code, code search, programming