旼컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴커 � HomeCraft's Small Business Journal 넴 � SPECIAL ISSUE 넴 � The 1992 Summer Shareware Seminar 넴 읕컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴켸� 賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽� 旼컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴커 � EXPERIENCED TRACK SESSIONS 넴 � 넴 � Hints From The Pros II 넴 � 넴 � Part II 넴 읕컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴컴켸� 賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽賽� MODERATOR: All right, we're going to get started now with the second half of Hints From the Pros. We've changed the panels to give another perspective or more perspective in the industry. People that didn't have a chance to ask questions before will have a chance to ask the same questions again or to ask more questions. We have, also, some more points that we're going to cover first off, just to get things rolling. First, again, I'd like to introduce all the panel, or have the panel introduce themselves. We'll start on my far left. MARSHALL MAGEE: Hello -- everybody out in the hallway, get in. My name is Marshall Magee from Magee Enterprises of Atlanta, Georgia, the makers of AutoMenu and TreeView's Screen Manager Professional, Network HQ, and so on. TOM RAWSON: Tom Rawson, with JP Software in Boston. We make 4DOS and 4S2. ED EDZACK: Good afternoon, my name is Ed Ezack. I'm with EZX Corporation out of Houston, Texas. We're the publishers of EZ- FORMS, DiskCopy PRO, Disk Clone, and various other products. ROZALIA DEBORDE: My name is Rozalia Deborde. I'm the Marketing Director for Hooper International. We're the maker of Taking Care Of Business and Check It Out. Taking Care Of Business used to be also known as Finance Manager. NORM PATRIQUIN: I'm Norm Patriquin of Patrisoft, Mega BAT, Patriquin Utilities, Stowaway, some others. RANDY McLEAN (MODERATOR): My name is Randy McLean. I am the President of FormGen Corporation, and we make FormGen and FormGen Fill and a whole pile of other programs of that nature. We do a lot of licensing. We also publish some entertainment software including the Commander Keen episode of Aliens Ate My Babysitter. All right, the first item on the list here was something that Marshall's got well in hand actually, and that's the terms of development issues and development timing. Marshall has a specific technique that he uses at Magee Enterprises to help keep the communications flowing through the different departments of the company. I'd like him to describe that for us. MARSHALL MAGEE: Once you get to the point of where you have more than 20 or so people, you have the big problem of information exchange with the various people that are responsible for various aspects of your company. You've got the development guys who are trying to develop your next great product. You've got your marketing people trying to sell it. You've got your PR people that are trying to tell the press about it. Then you've got your sales people trying to tell customers that it's just right around the corner. You've got your administrative people and people answering phones taking all the hits. And you've got your tech support. So one of the big problems we had was trying to communicate all of this information to everybody and give them a feel for how things were going. One of the big problems we all know is, nothing ever ships when you think it's supposed to ship. And so one of the big problems that a lot of companies seem to have is that they talk about something long before they should start talking about it. They announce Version 2 ten months before it can ship and their sales go to zero because everybody's waiting for Version 2. That's killed more than one company. So one of the things we do in our company is we have this thing called "The Grid". What it does is, every Tuesday our manager gets together with the heads of each one of the departments and he asks them, "Okay, what is the status of your particular deadline?" The development guys have many deadlines, but maybe their first deadline is what we call "All Features Implemented Deadline." That's the deadline when all the features are actually in the product -- maybe they're not working, but they're in the product. Now that's their deadline. Every week they have an opportunity to say that they're not going to make that deadline. Now, if they don't make that deadline, we say, "Okay, it's off another week." Then he goes to the marketing people and he says, "How are you going to go on your deadline?" They have an opportunity to say, "No, we're not going to make it. That mailing list is not going to make it." And then as soon as the grid is all filled in with all of the dates, it's mailed out on our E-Mail system to everyone in the company. Now everybody knows what everybody's deadline is and the communication is immediate. Everyone has a feel for what everybody's doing. When we started doing it, it was a good thing. But the thing that was really good was the fact that, when the deadline started slipping, everybody sort of got a feel that the product wasn't stable, and they knew that they couldn't count on the product shipping by that date, and therefore, they started building their own contingency plans for the date not happening like they would like it to. So they hold back the press releases. They don't make the mailings. They don't spend the money. They don't tell the press. They don't tell the customers until those deadlines actually hit and are passed correctly. That has really enhanced our flow in our company tremendously, when we make the deadlines. Well, we don't make the deadlines that are set by the first grid that comes out. But we make them closer to the actual time several months after that. So that's something that we do, and that really helps solve one of the big communications issues. Another thing that we do with development is that we're deadline- driven. We're not feature-driven. This is one of the big mistakes a lot of the companies make is that they say the product has to have these ten features before it will ship. Well, the problem is you might never get those ten features in before your sales go down the toilet. Set a deadline and have a list of features and head for that deadline, and then as soon as you hit that deadline that's it. No more new features go into that product, and let's roll that puppy out and let's make some money. MODERATOR: That would make a big difference in the way your customers would perceive you, I would imagine. Because they would get stable information. MARSHALL MAGEE: Right. PANELIST: Would you repeat the question, Randy? MODERATOR: Okay, the first item was that Marshall had some specific development techniques for tracking these kinds of things that he was going to share with us. If you have some comments on what he does or if you have some things similar, we sure would like to hear about that. PANELIST: Actually, I think that's very useful for me to hear. It's different when I've only got five people and you've got 20. The biggest thing we do, in terms of tracking getting the pieces out the door is that - we've gone essentially in the same direction as Marshall, within our small staff. I spend a lot more time in meetings, now, going over with the customer service staff -- who don't end up doing a lot on the new product until it's time to ship -- nevertheless, sitting down with them and saying, "Here's where things are at." What happens is that I learn a whole lot of things that I wouldn't otherwise have learned, because people say, "What about my piece of it?" So we've moved in somewhat the same direction, although it doesn't require the same level of infrastructure, because we're a smaller company. MODERATOR: So you have a less formal way of doing the same kind of thing, making sure everybody's on track and everybody understands what the real deadlines are? SAME PANELIST: Yeah, I'm not sure we're doing it yet, but we're a lot closer to doing it than we were a year ago. MODERATOR: Okay, anybody have anything to add to that? ANOTHER PANELIST: We actually do things a little bit simpler. I issue an edict, which includes myself, that we never talk about: NEVER TALK ABOUT when a new issue is coming out. Our standard line when somebody asks, "When's the next version coming out?" is to say, "6 to 9 months", even if we know it's coming out tomorrow. We never want to queer the sale. We don't send out press releases. We don't talk about it. We don't breath it to anybody but developers and people in the company - not even beta-testers - until we're ready to ship the product out and the manual is in hand. We're real sensitive to vaporware. We got caught by that a few years ago, and I recommend that everybody not even talk about unreleased products, because you will lose sales, like Marshall said, right now. And you won't know what happened. ROZALIA DEBORDE: I'd like to add something as well. There's a risk by announcing that you're coming out with a new version before it's out, but there's several benefits that you should take advantage of, as well. If you know a new version is coming out, there's several things you can do. Customers usually will wait until the new version is out, but you will lose that sale in the meantime, so your cash flow goes down. So what you need to do is possibly offer the old version at a reduced price and tell them when the new version comes out that you'll offer it at a very special price. So in effect, they're paying the same price as they would originally, and you've got the cash flow now, and you've got it later. That's what we've been doing, and that has been working very well. MODERATOR: That's great. All right, one of the things that everybody has to be skilled at in terms of moving the product into the channel and getting the revenue back, is marketing. There's a number of areas in marketing you can get, and there's a number of techniques you can use to get more press -- to get more mind space in the user base. I think that the panel can probably give you some hints on how to do that -- outside of the traditional advertising area. This means low cost promotion and PR. There's a number of avenues and areas you can follow to get yourself some advertising that is free or nearly free. Now, would someone on the panel like to respond on those areas? MARSHALL MAGEE: This has been harped on already, but I'll do it again. User groups - a lot of people have asked me what was the breaking point for me. It was never PC Magazine. PC Magazine never talked about my product in the early years. Well, there was one line: "AutoMenu, a good shareware menu system". But that was one line; next month they did a big roundup of menus and didn't even include it. It was very funny, the month before they said it was great, and then the next month they didn't even include it. But that was when they didn't even cover shareware. One thing I did that summer was I placed an ad in every user group newsletter in the country that I could find, back in the summer of '86. I got on all of the bulletin boards around the country, and that really helped people see the product and get a lot of notoriety for it. I spent like 1,500 bucks. It was like nothing. I mean you could blow that on one little ad in some other silly magazine or something. And then I did something else which I know still a lot of people do. I called all the librarians and all the Presidents of all the user groups I could find. Most of them had never even talked to a shareware author. It brought the level of awareness for my product, in relation to that librarian, to a new height -- and I mean, how much did that cost me - a long distance call and a little bit of time. Usually you do it at night because they're never at home during the day and because they list their home numbers. It was a simple low-cost way of getting a lot of people to know about your program. MODERATOR: Did you spend time speaking to user groups as well? MARSHALL MAGEE: Yeah, like I said a little earlier, I've spoken to over 43 different user groups in the last few years. I just did three, three or four weeks ago. I did Denver, Memphis, Knoxville, and I did it at my own expense. I flew out there. You get a lot of sales from that kind of stuff. I got this new product I'm pushing and I met a whole lot of corporate customers that want to buy it. I showed a little demo, and they eat this stuff up. Go ahead and do it. It doesn't hurt. You're saying, "Gosh, I don't have the name that you have, Marshall," or something like that. Well, go to your local group. You'd be surprised how your local groups like to promote the local talent, and that's where I went to. I went to my local user group, and they let me speak two or three years before any other group would. Another thing I did -- this is simple -- I wrote my own review of my product and I sent it to all the user groups. You would be surprised how many will print it. Well, I don't know if that's still true; this was many years ago. And I used to get on bulletin boards and start discussions about my own product. I mean, that's not too unusual. QUESTION FROM THE AUDIENCE: Did you use your own name? MARSHALL MAGEE: Yeah, under my own name. They didn't know who that was, when I was talking, so I'd say, "Hey, have you heard about this new menu program?" This is back in the summer of '85, you have to understand -- 300 baud modems. You've got to think. These are real low-cost ways. A lot of people don't do the user groups stuff, but you've got to. ANOTHER PANELIST: Two things to add... A lot of things were covered in the earlier session on PR and I don't think I'll go back into all of the issues about free publicity. But one thing to add about user groups, if you have a product that fits into a specific niche, a lot of user groups, especially the larger ones, have SIGS - Special Interest Groups. It can be difficult to get on the schedule of a main meeting of a user group when you've got a group that is very active and Microsoft and Borland want to come talk to them. It can be done, but they schedule them far in advance. The special interest groups, that meet usually before the main meeting or at a different time, are often very hungry for speakers. If you've got a product that fits in their niche -- if you know there's a WordPerfect special interest group and you've got a WordPerfect add-on, they'll probably be very glad to have you call up and say, "I'd like to present my product." The other point I wanted to make was about work on-line. We've developed a lot of important relationships with the press because the press editors -- many editors are very active on-line. And you won't do that contact just by getting on-line. And you can't in a lot of places, especially on CompuServe, the level of hype you can put on your messages can only get so high before the sysops say, "That's not what this is about. That's not what the forum is about." But if you put your product in a place like Compuserve or ZiffNet -- and I'm sure there are a lot of other places as well, but that's the primary ones I'm familiar with -- where editors of important magazines are active in paying attention. And you support it there and create an act of constituency there, you can develop important relationships and get it noticed by editors in a way that it would take you a hundred press releases to do. So that's a place where as a shareware author you have an advantage over a regular retail product. And it can be very important, because it's a fact that the kind of people who write for the magazines have a big overlap with the kind of people who like to be involved in the on-line community. You can use that to your advantage as a Shareware author. MODERATOR: Excellent. ANOTHER PANELIST: I've got a couple for you. One of the things you might look at is doing radio talk-show interviews. Most markets, I think, have news talk-radio shows. I've been on a couple in Houston. It might surprise you to know that, if you're willing to pay your own way out to San Francisco, it's not too hard to get on the Computer Chronicles. I don't know how many people watch that, but if you've got any kind of product at all, it's worthwhile. I've also been interviewed on National Business Radio by Bob and Sir Edwards -- during the middle of a hurricane, it turns out. It's not very difficult, once you find out who these people are, to get interviewed by them. Usually they're telephone interviews, so it's no hassle. You don't have to go anywhere. You don't have to do anything. There's also a community access show in the Houston area. I don't know if it's beamed up. It's supposed to be beamed up to a satellite somewhere. MODERATOR: How do you get to these people? Do you phone them up? PANELIST: No -- yes, if you're listening to a news talk-radio show. Find out what the phone number for the station is and find out who the editor or producer is. Actually, you want to talk to the producer of that show. Sometimes the radio stations are relatively small, and the fellow, J.P. Purcher, in the Houston area who interviewed me, he does his own production work and it was a telephone interview. We spoke about 15 minutes. We had about five minutes on the air, But you know, it got us some calls. We gave our phone number out, and so on. MODERATOR: And it raises your awareness. PANELIST: Yeah, it raises the awareness. The Computer Chronicles, it was shown at different markets at different times, but it's for one of our commercial products - our disk duplication. It generated a whole lot of sales. MODERATOR: Great. PANELIST: So you might consider that. MODERATOR: Okay, Rozalia? ROZALIA DEBORDE: Just some common sense ones. I'm sure everybody knows about them, but they haven't been mentioned yet, today. We talked about PR. There was no mention that you can find out what the schedules are through the editorial calendars. Some magazines don't send them out unless you advertise, so what you want to do is contact them and get a media kit -- as far as their rates and so on -- and they always send out an editorial calendar. So that's how you find out when the reviews are. Shareware vendors... I assume that most of you are authors. When a shareware vendor contacts you and wants a copy of your product, don't charge them for it, because they're really doing the advertising for you. I know a lot of authors charge $10.00 per disk set. To me, they're doing the work for you, why not support them as much as you can? Keep them current. If you have an existing user base already, and you come out with a new product, make sure that you contact your existing user base more than once to let them know about the new version. If you have the money, you might want to hire a part-time person to even call those people to have them sell other things. It's very inexpensive and they can work on a commission basis. You also want to consider calling the PC-SIG resellers who carry the shareware copies and see if they want to carry the registered copies of your product. Because those people already carry the shareware, why not be the one source for all of their needs? So the customer buys a shareware copy and they come back and buy the registered one; that just seems very simple to do. MODERATOR: Norm? NORM PATRIQUIN: The only thing I can think of is what we were talking about during the break. Ben brought to my attention that a lot of times we complain about getting feedback. Sometimes people will ask us, as authors, for information about our products. It gets put in the stack with everything else and we forget to respond. That's pretty bad when you forget to respond when people are asking you about your product. 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Also, if you have fax machines, faxing literature to the customer is one of the most cost-effective ways of doing your advertising, because you can get the information at the time the user is interested in reading it. I'm sorry, Marshall, did you have a couple of other points that you want to put on the list, and then we'll open up for questions? MARSHALL MAGEE: Yeah, three points. I would like to tell people to stop thinking of yourself as different. A lot of people, when they tell me they're a shareware author - that's not so bad to say you're a shareware author - but I would like to instill in your mind that you're a software developer. You're not something over here; you're a software company. Remember that. You're just like Lotus, with the difference of a few digits. You know? As long as you remember that -- I don't like people coming up to me and telling me that they're a shareware author. And I say, "No, no, you're not a shareware author. You're a software developer." Remember that. Because, you don't put yourself into another class, okay? Another thing is that I see a lot of developers getting caught up in all the hype in the industry. I mean, there is a lot of hype. Everyone says develop for this, develop for that. Go out there and talk to your customers. Develop what they need and what they want. You have some customers now. I know a lot of you may have a lot, some of you may have a few. Ask them what they need. Don't go out developing something you think everybody needs, without finding out what they need. Go out and ask, "Hey, Joe, do you need that program to follow the flushing of toilets in the building?" "Gosh, no, Marshall, I don't think that would be a good product." But it sounded really good. You saw this thing that said they wanted to monitor water usage or something. The last point I wanted to make is: sell what you have. Maximize your sales. I got a competitive product to Automenu and he does something that I think is really great, because it doesn't hurt me this way: he has the feature of the week. He comes out with a new feature every week. He spends more time developing than he does selling. He sells some, but it's always the feature of the week. Sell what you have. Now Automenu hasn't really been enhanced in some time. We spent all of our time trying to get dealers and corporations to buy the product, and we make a lot more money doing that than developing new features to the product. So a lot of people fail to realize: maximize what you have now. Don't try to dream up the new feature that's going to try to increase your sales. Go ahead and go for the sales that you can get now. MODERATOR: Very, very good point. ROZALIA DEBORDE: Oh, I do need to add a point to it -- that's something where a lot of shareware authors get caught up. A customer calls and says, "I want this feature in it." All of the sudden you think, "Oh my God, I have to add it." Forget about it, because you can't please everybody. You have to stick with the product you have. If people like it, then it's a good product. You shouldn't stop and add one feature because it's going to delay everything. ANOTHER PANELIST: I just want to give an enthusiastic second to the first point that Marshall made of not thinking of yourself as different. Paul said something earlier that I personally would disagree with, that we're shareware and we don't do advertising. Some of us do advertising and some of us don't. Maybe less of us, but that has to do with size, not whether we're in shareware or not. And I think that's really important. The other thing that goes with that, I think, is learn to do the things you're "not supposed to do because you're in shareware". The example that first came to mind was accept purchase orders, right? We're too small. We're a little shareware company. We don't accept purchase orders. Well, that will turn off a lot of corporate customers in a hurry. You may have just lost a few thousand dollars in sales, but that kind of stuff - that seems like it's not supposed to apply to us - because we're shareware. If you think about it the way Marshall's talking about, you'll take a different approach on that stuff that's very of important. MODERATOR: Ed, did you have anything to add? PANELIST: One more thing to add to that, if you're going to take purchase orders, get a fax machine and ask for credit references. MODERATOR: All right, maybe what we can do is to open up to the floor. I still have a couple of good questions I'd like to ask but I know that you do too, so we'll let you go first. QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: This just has something to do with public relations type of things. I didn't know quite how to handle it and I thought someone might be able to shed a little light on it. I'm a clip-art artist and I did my original pictures on a -- you know -- I got a mouse with my computer and it came with a paint program called Microsoft Paintbrush. So I went ahead and did my art work. I put it out there in the market, and then after it was out in the shareware market, it got spread everywhere. Microsoft comes out with Microsoft Windows 3.0, which has a paint program in it, and people bought the clip-art to use it in Microsoft 3 Paintbrush. Well, Microsoft Paintbrush and Microsoft Windows 3 Paintbrush files aren't compatible. So now I get all these complaints saying, "What can I do to fix this problem?" ANOTHER PERSON: Registered users, no doubt. << Laughter >> SAME PERSON ON THE FLOOR: No, but anyway, I was trying to figure out how to solve this problem. But I finally found an update program to basically fix all the files. But still I go and get a handful of disk distributors with this problem fixed and there's still a whole lot of them out there where - I don't even know their names or whatever. I'm trying to satisfy this problem. Is there anything that I could do? MODERATOR: I would suggest, very strongly, that what you could do in circumstances such as that, would be to get a good list of disk vendors and do yourself a group mailing or a mass mailing to all of the vendors. Certainly they'll update the packages, if they're already carrying it. But there is no way to completely eradicate a shareware program from the market once it's been released. PANELIST: I think you have a golden opportunity to get people to register or give them a conversion program or whatever it is. I mean, I wouldn't even worry about it. I'd leave the old ones out there. SAME PERSON FROM THE FLOOR: Yeah, of course, I made the mistake of mailing a few disks out there. I thought I'd never receive a registration after that. PANELIST: I was going to say that the answer to the question on the phone about it not working is, "We'll fix it, and here's how much it costs," if they're not registered. QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR FROM A NEW PERSON: I wanted to ask the panel if they know of any SIGs for handicapped people? MODERATOR: Does anybody know of any SIGs for handicapped people? FROM THE AUDIENCE: There's one in San Diego called the Disabled Interest Group. PANELIST: I'm pretty sure that the Boston Computer Society has one. I'm saying that because they're huge and they have a SIG for almost everything and I'm pretty sure that they do have SIG for handicapped people. Boston Computer Society. I'm a member and I have my membership card with me, which has their address on it, so if you catch me later, I'll give it to you. MARSHALL MAGEE: I was also going to say that I think there's a forum up on Compuserve for disabled folks. It has all sorts of software that meet all sorts of disabled needs. NEW PERSON FROM THE FLOOR: I think some of the national networks also have conferences on the subject. I have a concrete question which is about publicity campaigns. I think my question's not of general interest, but I hope your answer will be. I have not yet done a serious publicity campaign, press releases, and all that - shame on me. I have a new version due out in about three months. And on the one hand I'm inclined to just wait and do it when the new version comes out. On the other hand, I hear a lot of you telling me that you've got to hit them over and over. What's the right strategy in such a case, and if it is to put out a press release now, what should I say about the new version? ROZALIA DEBORDE: The way I would approach it is, send out a press release and give the release statement, and give it the date. That's perfectly fine. If it's not today, but you know it's going to be August first, then put down August 1, 1992. And what most editors will do is -- it's going to take them anywhere between two and four months anyway to put something in a magazine. By that time that date has come or they will put down, "This product is ready to ship August 1." There's no problem with doing that. Well, you have to be sure of your release date. QUESTION FROM THE AUDIENCE: You date your press release August 1, is that what you mean by your release date? ROZALIA DEBORDE: No, you have to let the editor know when your release date is. You can send it in today. Release day equals ship day, of course. So the editor then knows and he will print that, if that date has not come yet. MODERATOR: Okay, Tom, did you have something to add? TOM RAWSON: Yeah, two quick things to add. One is just to augment what Rozalia's saying -- differentiate between what in the PR business I think is called long-lead and short-lead publications. PC Week has a lead-time of about two weeks. PC Magazine has a lead-time of about three months. Because of other reasons we've talked about, you don't want that release printed in PC Week two weeks from now when it's announcing a product being released three months from now. You'll have the issue of: are you going to kill sales, and so on and so forth. Pay attention to what the lead-times of the publications are. The other thing I was going to say is -- what we've found is successful is ... we have a two tier strategy about this. Editors who have reviewed the product or [with] whom we have some kind of relationship... we do our best to keep our people very informed and very up-to-date, in a lot of detail. Other people (A) don't want that stuff, and you start to get a negative reputation. And (B) don't pay attention to it, anyway. We have a huge press list that we mail to very occasionally. We started with the ASP list and we've added to it. And that's like several hundred. We have a much smaller list of about 40 people that we keep up-to-date on a very different basis. You have to pay attention to what type of relationship you have with the people you're mailing to. MARSHALL MAGEE: One other thing about PR. One thing you have to consider when you're going out to the magazines is, you have to decide what you're looking for. If you're looking for just a news sound-bite on your product, that's one thing: new version update. Or if you're looking to get into the review process and line things up... When you start talking to magazines like PC Week, they have two types of reviews. They have the First Looks, and then they have the main line feature articles, and then they have the news section. You have to really think about this and work out with someone exactly how you're going to attack them. Like, for example, we came out with the new product last year and we had to time it just right to get PC Week to do the First Looks on it. We had to make sure they were the first ones to see it. Otherwise they wouldn't run the First Looks. And pretty much we have to do this good timing with all the magazines to make them all think the same thing. << laughter >> Because if you don't, you're only going to get one magazine with the First Looks. The thing that we did last year that was really good for us was those media tours. Now, I know a lot of you are saying those are real expensive. Well, you just fly to Boston, you fly to New York, you fly to San Francisco. I still remember Bruce Buzby, who had a program called InstaCalc a few years ago. He did have a lot of money, but he had somebody he could stay with in New York. He stayed over Saturday; he met with editors on Friday and Monday in New York; and then flew into Boston on one of the Pan Am shuttles and met with editors; and got his ad reps to help him find out what editors to make appointments with. He got tons of reviews, tons of press, and it just cost him a plane trip. And personal touch, if you have that capability, is much, much better than any press release you could ever send. MODERATOR: Good, thank you. Next question. QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: I have a two part question: Is technical support going to be handled later on? MODERATOR: I believe there's a session tomorrow on technical support. SAME PERSON FROM THE FLOOR: Okay, I won't cover that one now. The question is: many start-up authors, particularly working by yourself or maybe one other person, before you make a lot of sales - and hopefully you're working towards that... you can spend a lot of time after you've built the products. You start marketing them. And so you market your products, you start getting it out there. You get some reviews. And then you make 500 sales. But now you get technical support. Now, with a staff of two or three or whatever you don't have the ability to market anymore. It seems like the market drops right off, because you're on the phone all day with tech support or people that want your attention. The question really is, what do you do with your marketers? Do you say, "This is your job. I don't care, if you get tech support out through the roof, you're going to market and you're going to spend all your time doing that, specializing in that area, and developers, you're going to develop, period. We don't want you so busy on tech support that you stop developing at this point." Obviously, it's very difficult for a small company to do that, so when do you draw the line? When do you say as a developer, I'm no longer marketing. I've got 20 sales total, perhaps, and those people take up all my time, and I'm not getting any further, and I'm not making any money. So it's a complex question, but it's a ratio. When do you start breaking it down? Okay, my marketer... I did all my packaging myself, I did all my marketing, and now I have to hire someone. Now he's getting innovative with other things too. Should I make her a solid marketer the whole time or...? MODERATOR: I see. Does the panel have some comments on that? PANELIST: I think you answered your own question. It's very variable and it depends on your own unique situation. Some people may not have the tech support you have. If you have a lot of tech support and you want to service the product and you want to keep those customers for future upgrades or whatnot, you're going to have to take care of them. SAME PERSON FROM THE FLOOR: Essentially all the companies here are big, full time. That marketer's no longer doing other things now, you're doing essentially maybe packaging part of the time? MODERATOR: No. If I can address that, just in our own circumstance, we still don't consider ourselves big enough that everybody does one thing. I'm the guy that cleans the washrooms in our company. I'm sure that that's not a lot different from everybody here on the panel. I would suggest, if you have a situation where you're thinking of the importance of technical support, you have to remember that technical support is part of the marketing of the product because it helps ensure the long-term relationship with the customer. Outside of that, though, you should be doing everything in your company to reduce the amount of technical support you have to do. That has more to do with product development and product coding than necessarily it has to do with arrangements within the company and who handles what. There's no question that old customers are a lot easier to keep than new customers are to gain, so it's probably a very wise investment to keep them wherever you can. NORM PATRIQUIN: I'd just like to comment about technical support and not so much marketing. I don't have the luxury of having a marketing person, but what I've begun doing is using less high paid people for technical support. Mainly, I deal with youth a lot, so [I'm fortunate] to be around a lot of good, sharp college students who work for a lot less than I could sit on the phone for. So I recommend that you start nurturing young talent. And I don't mean just anybody who walks in the door. I mean, look at finding young people who are interested in computers; who are energetic; who are bright-minded, and bring them in. One guy who's now developing for me didn't know a computer when he walked in the door. Now, that was a big effort on my part, but now he's very, very sharp. So I think that you can save yourself a lot of grief by staying off the phone. It's not good for me to spend my time on the phone doing technical support. You need to somehow -- it's a big hurdle -- but you need to let someone else do that. MODERATOR: Yeah, and that ties in very closely to the marketing issue before, where things have to be sold first, before you can have your company exist. So it is a delicate balance and it's one of the critical issues. Off-loading it to people who are qualified to handle it, but also so you're not overpowering them. ANOTHER PANELIST: It's also not just a personnel and time- management or organizational question; there's a skill in dealing with people on the phone. The phone's only efficient at certain kinds of communication. Fax machines can save you a lot of technical support time. You know, "Why don't you fax me a copy of that file so I can look at it? Oh, oops. You had a space there where you thought you didn't." That kind of stuff can save a lot of time, and there's a lot you can learn, and I suppose there are places you can go to learn it. We've learned it on our own. It's not very hard. You just watch and see what you're spending your time on tech support on, and say, "Okay, how can I cut down?", both with the prevention kind of stuff that Randy was talking about, but also in terms of how you talk to people, and what you're willing to do for them. You also have to remember not to go as far as Rozalia was talking about, "Well, that feature doesn't do quite what you want, but we'll send you an update next week that does." That's sort of the extreme of it. But you can manage how much time you spend. MODERATOR: All right, if you take the microphone, this will be the last question. All right, your question please? QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: Yes, you've been talking a lot about marketing. I was curious as to what percent of your company's resources go into marketing and what percent goes into research and development of new products themselves? And how that evolved over time as you went from a small company to a large company? MODERATOR: That's a very good question. Who would like to handle that? PANELIST: I'll take it. I think you heard earlier that marketing is about 20 percent. Well, it depends on really what you want to do. We spend maybe 25-30 percent on marketing. It's real important that you keep the cash flow going, at whatever cost. So depending on -- if you're advertising, doing direct mail or whatever -- you're going to have to find your own level at which you're profitable. A lot of it depends on your product. A lot of it depends on the cost of your product; the cost it is to produce your product; whether or not you're paying royalties to somebody else for using some code. All those things. Your overhead etc., etc., It depends on other cofactors. I heard some talk earlier about a business plan -- you really need a business plan. A very simple one: Month A I've got X dollars and here's where I'm going to spend this. At least it gives you something to go by, so you know you're not wasting money. ROZALIA DEBORDE: I'd like to add something else to it. As your company grows, you need to constantly reevaluate the efficiency of how you're getting things done. If you're manually duplicating disks and all of the sudden your volume is so high you're spending two or three hours, you need to invest into a disk duplicator. That goes for many other things, because that saves you manpower. So constantly, as your company grows, reevaluate how you're getting things done and think of short cuts of how to be more efficient. MODERATOR: Good point. Question? QUESTION FROM THE FLOOR: Yes, you must have worked pretty hard to get to the places that you are today, but with the pace of technology, what are each of you doing individually to make sure that you can keep these positions, or move forward in the future? MODERATOR: That's a very interesting question. Marshall? MARSHALL MAGEE: That's real interesting, because I was thinking about the development/marketing expense issue and stuff like that, and trying to see if I could [quantify it] for you out of some report I've seen, or something. One of the things that we decided a couple of years ago, as we were trying to decide what niche to go into -- so we were talking about Windows at breakfast this morning -- I'm not a big Windows fan or anything, but I like using it for PageMaker and stuff like that... but at the time two years ago I couldn't decide if I was willing to bet my company on the future of Microsoft doing this Windows thing. So you have to sit there and think about this for a little bit. I know all the hype. Windows is a good thing. Well, I decided what other area could I work on? Well, me, personally, I was very interested in networking. We were selling a lot of products to a network. So I just kind of said, "Well, you know, I think I could do a good job in there. It's not too polluted yet, and I could go in there and maybe make a living." So I just took the company and we hung a left and wham we're going right in there. You have to think like that and come up with a direction and then say, "Let's not do that anymore, let's focus on this new target." That's the job that I have in my company. I'm the leader. I'm the dreamer. I decide the direction and my troops [go that way]. And that's what you have to do, and you have to think, "Well, what is the next market going to be?" MODERATOR: If I can just expand on that as well, or comment on that issue: it's our belief at our company that technology is not it. Technology is not the important thing -- it's marketing. We feel that we have a good, strong and bright future. And the reason that we do is not because we're married to any particular technology, and not because we're going to be any technology leaders. It's because we know how to sell things and selling things is what generates our income. Okay, that's it. It's 5:00 p.m. now. I want to thank the panel members - all of them on this panel and the previous panel - and I'd like you to thank them as well for sharing their time. << end of session >>