Rewards of being a Software CEO

"Software CEO", "runs his own business", this sounds really cool at first. My friends are jealous. My dad is proud.

Here are the rewards you get for being a CEO:

No vacations. I cannot leave home without my laptop and Visual Studio installed. I cannot spend more than 12 hours with no Internet in range. Wi-Fi is probably the most important factor when I book a hotel. A coworking site near the hotel with Internet access and a coffee machine is great luck. Or at least an internet-cafe. Even on vacations I spend 3 hours a day in it.

Last time we were on vacation with my wife, I ended up uploading a fresh build of Jitbit Network Sniffer to our website via the airport's wireless network. The network was so slow, that we nearly missed our plain (by the way, it was Egypt, and the Red Sea is the best place for diving/snorkeling/surfing).

No weekends. Weekends consist of nothing but studying, researching, coding, preparing tasks for the outsourcers and full-timers, reviewing stats, reading tech blogs... And a bunch of other things you had no time to fix during the week. Thank God, there's not much support requests from our customers on weekends.

No free time. I work 24 hours. Even when I go to sleep, I keep asking myself questions, like "how can I improve conversions?" or "what's wrong with this damn Vista that it throws errors with this COM-object?". And of course "why no one, never, ever pays for a 'free-for-personal-use' product?" :)

Automating customer support

The author of BlogJet wrote in his blog, that that nearly 80% of customer support can be automated. Recently I realized, that 80% - is a recursive value. I mean, after you have automated 80% of your support work, take a closer look at the remaining 20%. You will see another 80% to automate.

80% of support requests to Jitbit Software are "we-have-not-received-our-key" type of issues. Typically this is a result of improper spam-filtering on the customer's side (though there are exceptions: a guy from Poland wrote me today that registration email was lost because he exceeded the 2GB limit of his mailbox). So, we simply have to add a "Code not received" issue-type to our support-issue submission page and send a registration code form an alternate mailbox when this type of issue arrives.

Let's have a look at the remaining 20% requests. 80% of them are "we-have-lost-our-key" issues. This also can be automated. And so forth.

PS. All this sounds very cool, but to tell you the truth, we simply have no time to implement all these features :). So we still answer our tickets manually. Like 90% of our colleagues.

Welcome

Welcome to the Jitbit Software official business blog (oh yes, this is very serious :).

Actually, no boring business news. No official stuff. This blog is not "attracting key audiences". This blog is not "increasing transparency in the corporate image".

This blog is about mISV, entrepreneurship, software development, the Internet and, of course, about Jitbit Software and its products from the inside. Enjoy.

Recent Google bookmarks failure

Recently my Google-toolbar has gone mad. Without any reason it started to display all my deleted bookmarks, even those that were bookmarked by accident and removed ages ago.

One more witness that Google never deletes stuff.