"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 criteria 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 our Hosted Help-Desk to our website via the airport's wireless network. The network was so slow, that we nearly missed our plain.
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. Plus coding coding coding. 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?" :)
Rewards of being a Software CEO Jul 14, 2007
Automating customer support Jul 4, 2007
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.
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 Jul 2, 2007
Welcome to the Jitbit Software blog ™ © ® ℗.
What this blog is NOT about
This blog is not "attracting key audiences". This blog is not "increasing transparency in the corporate image". This is not a corporate blog. And we can't afford a dozen copywriters doing the blog, so we forced our CEO.
What this blog IS about
This blog is about running a startup or a mISV, about entrepreneurship, software development, the Internet and, of course, about Jitbit Software and its products from the inside. Thanks for stepping by.
subscribe to my posts or follow me on Twitter
What this blog is NOT about
This blog is not "attracting key audiences". This blog is not "increasing transparency in the corporate image". This is not a corporate blog. And we can't afford a dozen copywriters doing the blog, so we forced our CEO.
What this blog IS about
This blog is about running a startup or a mISV, about entrepreneurship, software development, the Internet and, of course, about Jitbit Software and its products from the inside. Thanks for stepping by.
subscribe to my posts or follow me on Twitter
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.
One more witness that Google never deletes stuff.