The Swiss Army Knife CRM for mISVs* The all-in-one application to manage your clients, licence keys, products, sales, product issues (bugs), and client communications. It even records your expenses!

What started me on the 30-day thing was a posting in the BOS forum about writing an application in 30-days. The responses were quite encouraging i.e. people were interested in keeping track of what will be happening. A couple of weeks before this posting I've told myself that from June 1, 2008 I'd start writing my misvCRM application and try to have something in 30-days. It started as a personal challenge. I challenged myself because I've had been procrastinating in starting the development of this application. In short, the 30-day challenge came at the same time of my own challenge. Even if the 30-day challenge did not occur, I would have done my 'own' 30-day challenge.

What started me on this? Well, as they say 'scratch your own itch'. I've been looking around for a while for an application that will allow me to manage things relating to the sale/issues relating to my time tracking application. I've looked at some but they were an overkill to what I was thinking of. What I was looking for was an application that targeted the single software developer (which was me) and the ones I came across were targeting development teams. The other reasin that spurred me to write this application was that I've encountered or read questions in BOS and in other fora regarding the existence of an application that did exactly what misvCRM does and reading through the responses and checking out the suggestions I came to the conclusion that there might be a need for such an application out there.

In some way I think they did especially in terms of the comments that some of my positing received. On the other hand, the overall effect on my effort was minimal simply because I've already decided on my own 30-day challenge and blogging about it. But it is nice to know that there are others in the same boat.

At the end of the 30-days I had a usable product but not in the quality that I really wanted. I revisited some of the portions opf the application and found them wanting. Most of the fixes or changes I did after 30 days were related to the user interface i.e. I subscribe to the idea of having the least number of mouse clicks as possible. What I mean by this is to make it really easy for the user to use the application especially if my target market are software developers themselves. Yes, I did give myself another 30 days to get it out of the door and I think I may just make it.

I have to stop myself from tweaking the code or adding minor nice to haves e.g. hot tracking the controls. I suppose with Delphi this not very hard to implement. There are a few things that I already consigned to version 2.0. The next step after the code freeze is to do the documentation - the help file. I'm going to use Dr. Explain in developing the help file and I wll blog about this as well. I'm also planning to make a few video tutorials although this is not high on the list. I think (I hope) having software developers as a target market they will be able to figure out how to use the application. Of course, there is also the question of the website. I think what I shall do with the website is something very basic because I think a lot of people who purchase software do not really read everything that is on the site. They read a few salient points, download the trial, and then decide whether they will buy or not. So the website will simply contain a brief info about the product i.e. what benefit will this product bring, the price, download area, and tutorials. I still have to get my feet wet in the whole SEO thingy simply because I do not have the funds to really get into it. It is some sort of a catch-22. I need the sales to have some funds for Adwords etc. As for target groups, I will look at software development groups e.g. OISV, the Delphi newsgroups etc.
Also, my future plans for this application is to move it away from software developers and make another version geared towards people who sell manufactured products and also have to do some defect tracking but this is another story.

None really. I used to use Regsoft and Northstar Solutions as payment processors but the cost of redeeming the cheques were a pain not because I did not get them but rather our banks here charge quite a fee so I started using PayPal. All my sales now are via PayPal. I think nowadays people are more Internet savvy and do not mind using PayPal compared to a few years ago.