The Business of Software

Please evaluate my web site:
www.xponentsoftware.com

I am about one month from the commercial release of the software. Please comment on my sales plan which is as follows:

Use PayPal.

Have a 30-day trial version for download. When the 30 days expires a nag screen will display with a "Purchase online" button. The program will continue to launch, but the nag screen will display every time it launches with a ten second countdown delay  and  the top of the main window will always have "Trial period has ended. Please upgrade." Allowing the program to launch forever is a marketing strategy based on the idea that the longer someone uses the program, the more they will talk about it.  Should I restrict functionality after 30 days?

When someone purchases, they will be directed to a page after payment where the commercial version may be downloaded. This way I don't have to mess with unlock keys. The setup program is less than 400Kb so having to download the commercial version after previously downloading the trial will not, I hope, be a source of irritation.

Since the product is an editor, I have created a read-only version for viewing xml files and am thinking of offering it as a second product, also with a trial version, and launching both products simultaneously. One reason forthe  read-only version is that all of the browsers are horribly slow displaying large xml.

I was also thinking of a totally free version of the read-only product but with a file size limit of maybe ten or twenty megabytes. However, I read a couple posts here suggesting that people who might purchase business software are not interested in free stuff  and that the trial should be sufficient.

I have several competitors and there are a slew of free products that dont work well or have limited features. However, I have one feature none of them have, namely, the ability to load any size xml into a treeview. How can I best expoit this capability?  I think it is an important feature because with each new release from the major competitors, they point to it being able to handle much larger xml than before, so perhaps it is something their customers are asking for.

The website has some technical articles relating to the product and I plan to add more. Then maybe a blog. I have read that both of these are good strategies.

I have some personal background in the Company link -is that a good thing?

BTW, I have applied for a patent for the treeview control this product is built on.

Bill

Bill,

For my inexpert eye, the website needs lot of work:
- old / amateur look.
- layout and graphics must be improved
- very small font
- too much text

The product itself looks interesting. Good luck.

My first thought was "Oh god, another XML editor." Then I read "In five seconds XMLMax will parse, syntax check and display a 150 Mb xml file in its virtual treeview."

In the era of slower is better, I applaud you! Now you need to find bloggers who deal with big xml files (maybe enterprisey blogs) and ask what they think.

But yeah, fix the website dude :-)

I echo the previous comments. It doesn't matter how good the product is, if the website looks like it was built, then abandoned back in the 90's you will have problems convincing most people to part with money for it.

Try to find a good website template (Google for free ones if you don't want to pay) and include some useful screenshots.

Maybe some comparison graphs too, showing relative performance compared with other similar products.

I wonder how good your hardware has to be to pull 150Mb off a drive, or the network, in 5 seconds? Conversely, I wonder how quickly my new PC could do it, with my shiny new 15k drives?

Also, is is scaleable across multiple processors/cores? I ask because I have two quad-core processors, so it'd be great to use all that power.

How and where are you marketing it?

In your requirements you state 600MB of memory.  Is it actually using that?  I'm guessing not after reading your 'how it works' page.  If it isn't, then I'd get rid of that statement, it'll only serve to confuse (don't believe me, we had a component at version 3.5.1 and customers thought it only worked with .NET 3.5...)

As already said the web site is terrible. My guess is this will be a tough sell as there is a limited market which is likely hard to get to and already has existing products, both free and commercial.

You also need to be careful about overstating claims. I can't see anything great about "In five seconds XMLMax will parse, syntax check and display a 150 Mb xml file in its virtual treeview.", nor about your treeview control. I wrote a virtual tree view control from scratch about 10 years ago and use it extensively in my products. Further last time I checked, loading a 1G XML file into the tree control took < 1 second.  And it doesn't have the drawbacks you mention.

Regarding Neville's comments:

1. I agree the website looks awful and am working on it.

2. My beta is freely downloadable. Please try it and then comment.

3. Regarding your treeview, can you back up the performance claim?
Can I get a demo?

4. I have beta testers using it with huge xml. One guy is an xml book author, and several are  xml solution providers  and they know of nothing that comes close to my performance.

@OP : Just out of curiosity, what kind of people load 150MB xml files in treeview and edit them ? Most enterprise I have seen use either Biztalk or other EDI stuffs.

So can you pls explain kind of people/situations you are targeting ?

The human genome project has its data in xml format, and  the Wikipedia online encyclopedia,  the US tax code, and US patents, and on and on. Researchers want to slice and dice these files and my program does that. For better or worse, xml has become a data repository.

One of my beta testers is an EDI services consultant. He receives large xml via EDI and dumps them into a database. He receives some xml that is malformed and needs to fix it. He needs a tool that loads the xml, shows him where the error is, and lets him fix it. My program does that. While he could tell the client to fix it and resend it, that costs time and by fixing it himself he provides an added service The other xml editors are too slow loading large xml, and none can handle gigabyte size files -they die on the vine at a few hundred megabytes. Most EDI files are single line, i.e., no carriage return or linefeed characters. All the xml parsers I have seen, including Java parsers, fail to give the correct position in single line xml files for certain types of xml syntax errors so I added extra  code to locate them. It is another unique feature.

There is a lot more to just displaying large xml when it comes to editing. Xpath and XSLT have become expected features of a good xml editor, and no other product supports them for large xml.

A WWW search for "large xml", "large treeview" or "split large xml" gives an idea of the extent to which people are using and having problems with large xml .

>I have applied for a patent for the treeview control this product is built on.

I can't see you can possibly justify patenting anything relating to XML parsing or a treeview control.

I don't like the idea of software patents and am doing this as a defensive move in case a large company sues me for patent infringement. 

I dislike the patent subject so lets change it: I really like the marketing advice on your website. I have read a lot lately on software marketing for microISVs and the most common recommendation seems to be Google Adwords, so I plan to research it.  How high a priority would you give it for a microISV?

Bill

>I don't like the idea of software patents and am doing this as a defensive move in case a large company sues me for patent infringement.

That argument doesn't really cut it with me. If you don't like it - don't do it. If we all filed defensive patents 'just in case' things would be even more of a mess than they are now. The only people who can gain out of this are the lawyers. And they are rich enough already.

>I dislike the patent subject so lets change it: I really like the marketing advice on your website. I have read a lot lately on software marketing for microISVs and the most common recommendation seems to be Google Adwords, so I plan to research it.  How high a priority would you give it for a microISV?

Quite high. It is one of the quickest ways to get targetted traffic. But you need to know what you are doing and be prepared to spend time tweaking or you will be wasting a lot of cash. Also it might be impossible to get a positive ROI in some markets - esp if you have a low ticket price and lots of competitors bidding on the same keywords. But you won't know what the ROI is until you try.

I gave it a try and so far it works much faster than what I was trying to use before (Visual Studio & Notepad++).  N++ virtualizes it so it loads fast but collapsing a large node takes forever.  Granted neither of these are specific programs made for handling large XMLs, but they've been pretty good with the small ones I normally deal with.

Some things though:

You're writing temp data to the install directory which is first of all not recommended, and 2ndly crashes on Vista if it's not run as admin.

Scrolling (with mouse wheel) scrolls too much (or something, it's kinda jarring and I lose my bearing.

Collapsing a node moves the node you just collapsed to the top of the screen which is also annoying because it makes me lose my place and breaks my flow.

Otherwise I might consider it if I was working with large XMLs all the time, but then I haven't really tried any of the alternative for programs specifically made to deal with XML.  I just happened to be working with one a few days after reading this post.

Thank you for your feedback, which automatically qualifies you for a free license to the commercial version when released. Please E-mail me so I will have your contact information to notify you, or you can fill out the beta registration form at http://www.xponentsoftware.com/BetaReg.aspx

I will address the issues you described.

What version of Visual Studio are you using?