Preparing a functional spec is a lot of work, but it is all worth it. After the spec was completed I created a project schedule in FogBugz. I am aiming to get a private beta out by the end of the year, according to FogBugz I have a 85% probability chance of reaching the deadline.

But I am now happy to let the world know that production has started on project XNL. The focus of V1 is to get a very simplified solution out there that is not complicated to use and very easy to distribute. There is a lot more to come after V1 and I can’t wait to get started on it, but we need to build this foundation first.

Happy coding.

“If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.” – Romans 14:8

While working on the spec for Xenotar’s next big product, it came time to decide which features need to be included in version 1.0. I am all for release early and release often approach that is why I am at this point deciding which features to cut to make an early release.

While I was wondering if the features that I pinned down for v1.0 is enough, I came across a saying (can’t remember who) “If you are not embarrassed with v1.0 you waited to long to ship”.

I am happy with the feature set now for v1.0, still need to touch up here and there on the spec. I am hoping to have a project schedule up by the end of the week, so that development can start next week.

Marketing strategy is in place for Direct Sell Assistant, Xenotar’s bookkeeping software for direct sales businesses. I have spend a lot of time putting this in place, so now I am on monitoring mode.

New Product Idea

I am also starting a new project for a new product. It is a licensing solution for .NET applications. While working with the ones that is out there I found there can be a bit of improvements.

We all know that when delivering software we don’t want to inconvenience the honest customer using our software. We also know if an user is not going to be willing to pay for our software he is going to try to find a workaround the licensing scheme, and if he does not get one, he probably will find another software solution. The best would rather focus on paying customers and keeping them happy then to try make your software uncrackable.

As a developer I would want to focus on the features of my software and not to worry about the licensing scheme that the application is using. If I can use the easiest possible way there is to implement the licensing scheme the better and more productive I can be. I also want my code not to get messy with licensing code and business rules code.

These are the most important parts I want to cover in my solution. Hopefully I can address them.

Let the planning begin.

How? Yes how do you do it? I have no idea, but I am trying to find out and learn. Last week I tried to get some bloggers to give some feedback on Direct Sell Assistant and got really good feedback from one, I gave 4 free licenses to other bloggers that was interested, but have not heard anything from them. So for a week I got some traffic to the site, but now it is dead again :(

Kind of back to the drawing board for marketing Direct Sell Assistant. I have a list of things to try, and will be trying them in the coming weeks, of which one is to get on that 1st page result for my keywords. Before the realization that it is going to take some time to get there, I wasted too much time on checking the results everyday and watching Google Analytics to see if a change worked or not. I’ll do the best I can for SEO but am going to leave that ranking goal as a long term goal, and focus on the other things I can try to promote Direct Sell Assistant.

Not to much development work has been done the last week, but there is a few things in the pipeline after the feedback I received.

Happy week ahead!

This post should have been out last week, but I wanted to finish the last bit of lose strings on the web site and testing on Direct Sell Assistant.

I am very pleased with the website at the moment, and it should go up by the end of this week. I actually learned that there is CSS selectors after reading tutorials of jQuery. Not that I was not using style sheets, I knew the basics of style sheets but never realized when styling a html tag that I was using selectors.

After adding content to the company’s page I felt a warm fuzzy feeling, a feeling of knowing that great things are about to happen. I can’t wait to get the new site up and running.

Direct Sell Assistant is ready for release and should be expected by the end of the week.

While reading the Business Of Software forum there was a product release post that was asking for feedback, I was amazed by the comments about the site. You see I have also used the same free theme as this person for our direct sales software, when I asked for feedback I got 2 comments about the “wordpressy” look of the site, but for this guy he got rave reviews about his site. Not that I am jealous because I did not get a review like that ;) but it is quite interesting.

Let me get back to work and focus on my new marketing strategy.

Last week I decided to rework a few things a bit, change the course of how I was thinking and am really excited about the future, and this lead to having a weekly update post about the progress of my doings.

I sometimes fall into traps where I just follow and never think outside the box, so last week I took a step back and started thinking about it after not feeling too great about how things were going. So I came up with one motto that I want to live by with Xenotar Software and that is to Keep it Real. With that in the back of my head I started planning out what I wanted to do for Xenotar Software, and I am feeling very excited to put this plan into action over the course of the next few months.

After about a month of learning about SEO and implementing it on http://www.directsellassistant.com I soon realized something is wrong, because I want to promote Xenotar Software more and not the product itself. The first things I want to change is the company’s website and to put up this blog so I can share my journey with all in bootstrapping this company. Last week I was spending about a 3rd of my time on a new layout for the site, I now need to put my little SEO knowledge into action and create the content around the site. I am also going to move Direct Sell Assistant’s site to http://www.xenotar.com/products/direct-sell-assistant and start building my products on the company site rather than having a different site for each product, but I still think that to have a URL for a product that redirects to the company product page is not a bad idea.

I also dumped a Direct Sell Assistant twitter account, and replaced that with a Xenotar Software twitter account. After reading Balsamiq’s startup marketing post I followed Peldi Guilizzoni excellent article on Making RSS Work for your Micro-ISV and setup everything in my Google Reader to watch the world react and talk about Xenotar Software ;).

I was also spending a lot of time implementing a new feature for Direct Sell Assistant and is ready for Q&A, I am hoping to release it with the new product site on the new Xenotar Software’s site before the end of the month.

Because I am doing this part time, I sometimes feel I am just not moving fast enough, but I am learning to be patient and take this one step at a time. Rethinking the whole process has made me more positive in reaching the goals I have set for myself. I am learning as I go a long and enjoying this journey and I am hoping that this will last for a long time.

WEEK AHEAD

The plan:

1. Test Direct Sell Assistant
2. Update Direct Sell Assistant documentation
3. Add content to Xenotar Software’s site

Excellent! My first post on the new company’s blog, this feels great! Expect many more.