Musings about Entrepreneurship, Technology and Software Development

Accidental Technologist

Smile Software Launch Tries to Turn That Frown Upside Down

software launch

Last week must have been a terrible week for Smile Software and their software launch, one I never want to experience.  In case you missed it, you can do a bit of searching around the web to see the result of a new and not well-planned one.  The announcement was for a new version of TextExpander for Mac (v6) and iOS (4) along with a new backend service for syncing snippets.

We’ve updated our pricing model to match our new service. Instead of license purchases and upgrades on an irregular schedule, we’ve switched to a subscription model where you pay monthly or annually for your TextExpander service. This lines up with the regular costs to provide an online service. It also frees you as customers and us as developers from the “upgrade treadmill.” We can offer our apps free of charge. We can deliver incremental improvements as they’re ready rather than wait and package them all into a new “big” upgrade release. We’re really excited about what this change will allow us to offer our customers, and we hope you are too.

The problem being the new backend with monthly subscription, replacing the previous upgrade pricing. The result is a yearly fee that could be quite a bit higher than Smile Software customers were accustomed to. They welcomed feedback, and they got it.

I wasn’t happy and tweeted about it, as did many others. It appeared existing customers would be shut out from support of previous versions; either pay up, stick with unsupported software or find an alternative.

It would have been appreciated if existing customers were notified of the planned changes prior to reading a MacStories post. It seems I receive an email from Smile almost weekly, but this important news never hit my inbox.

Initial Reaction Triage

I would liked to have been a witness in the Smile headquarters as the immediate feedback started pouring in. I can only imagine there were some surprised faces. Smile did take the feedback and announce some revisions to their plans, a bit reactionary but an attempt just the same.

With regards to pricing:

Discounted upgrade pricing is available to customers of any past version of TextExpander. The details are found here. To take advantage of upgrade pricing, sign in to TextExpander.com, click your avatar at the upper right, choose My Account > Billing, and enter any prior serial number or license code. If you have any trouble, please contact support and we’ll help get it sorted.

For those happy TextExpander 5 customers:

For those who prefer to stay with TextExpander 5 for now, we intend to support it on El Capitan and the next major upgrade of OS X (…Humboldt? ?). Beyond that, neither we nor anyone else know what to expect of Apple or OS X. We also hope to encourage you to join the new TextExpander at some point in the future.

It didn’t seem to go far enough:

Loyal customers are passionate and vocal when they feel they weren’t treated fairly. In a very short time Smile realized they had a passionate customer base.

Doing the Right Thing

One week later and I’m sure after some thoughtful conversations at Smile, I received an email with additional refined plan for the new TextExpander launch.

Our changes to TextExpander last week made a number of you unhappy, and many of you shared your passion for the product with us. We are equally passionate about TextExpander and have made these changes so that we can expand the customer base and continue to enhance the product for all users.

To some of you it may seem we don’t care about our individual customers any more and only care about business use. We care about both, and in the changing software world a single focus is not a viable long term strategy for TextExpander. We did not make these changes easily or lightly, but for the long term life of the product so we can all enjoy it and engage with it for many years to come.

Change is difficult, and we didn’t get some things right at the start. Our pricing for Life Hackers was too high. Our upgrade pricing was too high and did not extend long enough. We didn’t offer an option for users who cannot use third party cloud services or cannot purchase subscription software.

We’re listening to your feedback, and are making adjustments, effective immediately.

Standalone TextExpander:

TextExpander 5 for Mac and TextExpander 3 + Custom Keyboard, the most recent standalone releases of TextExpander, will continue to be supported, and available for sale.

We understand this is important if you need: – private-network snippet storage – sync via Dropbox or iCloud Drive

New Pricing:

You, and other current TextExpander customers, receive a 50% lifetime discount on the new TextExpander. This brings the yearly cost of the Life Hacker plan to $20, which is comparable to previous upgrade costs ($19.95). If you aren’t sure about the new sharing features, or just want to test the waters beyond the demo period, you can pay $2.08 monthly to experience the new features before committing to the discounted $20 annual plan. The cost for new purchasers of the Life Hacker plan is similarly reduced to $40 per year.

If you’ve already purchased an annual upgrade plan, we’ll apply two months of credit to make up the difference. Please give us a few days for this to be reflected in your account.

From our team to you, thank you for being part of the conversation that makes the community around TextExpander what it is, and helping us continue to develop and improve TextExpander.It seems Smile could have avoided the unnecessary criticism with a better planned launch. Of course, it easy to tell someone else what they should have done. I’ve handled or been part of a few software product launches myself and try to do things a bit different.

This email probably contained most of what should have been sent to customer before the MacStories post was published, days before the launch.

My Software Launch Checklist

This should be common sense, but maybe not:

  • Communicate well from the beginning –  Once you have a plan for a new release, make sure everyone is on the same page. This doesn’t just include those people on your team and in your company but, more importantly, your customers. Make them aware early, before the press and social media gets ahold of it. Hopefully your customers can give you feedback before the larger world has a chance to tear you apart.
  • Step into your customer’s shoes – Given the plan, how do you think your customers will react? Maybe there’s nothing to react to, but maybe there is. In the case of Smile, there was a lot to react to. Current customers are why you are where you are now and they should be treated as such. In the case of a pricing change, loyal customers should know their appreciated, reward them for their loyalty.
  • Be clear why the update is better – Again, this is about the customer and not about your company. You may be changing things to improve your aspects of your business such as cashflow or support, but give current customers the reasons this will be better for them. “We screwed up our pricing and need more money” is not a very good reason, unless of course you want to reset your customer base and start over.
  • Provide a special offer, if applicable – If pricing or service terms are changing then reward the loyal customer. Give a discount or even grandfather existing users. They will appreciate you are thinking of them and in-turn know you appreciate them.

My approach isn’t magic. It isn’t revolutionary but reflects what I’ve learned over the years. Planning and communication trump bad surprises every time.

I still haven’t decided if I will upgrade to the new TextExpander. I’m not clear on why I should; features aren’t better than I have now but the pricing is fair. The story from Smile isn’t complete, they are still busy fixing things.

Don’t Treat Your Customers Like Adobe Treats Theirs

Adobe

I received this email from Adobe today. I will not be downloading their trial software.

I trialled Adobe Illustrator a few months ago and Adobe has been chasing me ever since. Trying to get me to sign-up for their SaaS offering. A lot bothers me about with this email, but here are the highlights:

  1. Who ever sent this has my contact details but decided to keep it generic, pretty cold. They could have used my first name to personalize it a bit.
  2. They’ve sent this email to me several times since my trial has run out. It’s assumed I don’t mind the spam because there is no way for me to unsubscribe from their list. Please give people on your list a way to get out and make it easy.
  3. Notice the text circled in red, ”Please do not reply to this email.” What is up with that? They want me as a customer but they’re too busy to take replies from me. I can call them or “Find” them online.   Don’t do this, be grateful to anyone who might be interested in your product or service. Accept any way they might want to reach out to you.

I will likely never buy an Adobe product just based on this email alone. It’s important to value all potential customers.

Podcast: Thoughtbot – Giant Robots

I have an addiction to podcasts.  There, I said it.

According to my podcast player, I am subscribed to 38 podcasts. Definitely too many to keep up with very easily. I am constantly rotating new ones in and old ones out but always keeping my favorites queued up. One of my favorites of late is The Giant Robots Smashing into Other Giant Robots from Thoughtbot. It’s not a new podcast but recently has taken on a new format, where the topics focus more on building and running Saas products within Thoughtbot.

Recent episodes chronicle Upcase and FormKeep. Topics include:

  • Pricing
  • Customer acquisition and retention
  • Churn
  • B2B vs B2C
  • Choosing Features
  • Etc.

The format of the show reminds me a bit of agile weekly stand-ups. The hosts take turns discussing goals for the week, how they made their products better for users, what could be better.

Lots to learn and take away from this one. Well worth subscribing if you’re building and launching your own products.

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Are we fighting ads, or are we fighting garbage? →

John Gruber is right:

If you want to block all advertising, I don’t understand you, but I won’t argue with you either. No one’s going to stop you. But most people just want to block garbage — privacy-invasive trackers, JavaScript that slows our devices and drains our batteries, obtrusive ads that cover the content we’re trying to read.

Are we fighting ads, or are we fighting garbage?

I’m on the side of content blockers and agree with John. When it comes to blocking ads, this is the feature of content blockers that appeals most to me. Truth be-told, I don’t mind good, targeted ads that introduce me to great products and services.

The garbage ads are the ones that offend me. The ads the pop-up modally and force me to wait to close, for me to read them. These are the ads I want the option to block.

I’m in the fighting garbage camp but how would this be distinguished? How is a content blocker now supposed to show me ads someone has deemed “quality”? I’m not sure this is not just another can of worms.

Taking the Side of the Content Blockers

UPDATE: Marco pulled Peace from the App Store today. Such a shame but I get it.

I’ve been following the debate lately about the ethics of using content blockers. The argument falls on two sides, those serving and hosting ads and the rest of us that are tired of all the junk loaded in our web pages. The average user browsing a web page is often faced with a barrage of ads and popups all while being tracked with every click they make.

Ghostery

I’ve been running Ghostery for a few weeks and the experience is great. A couple things I’ve learned in the time I’ve been using Ghostery:

  • The shear number of trackers on most web sites
  • How fast the web is without all these being loaded
  • How my WordPress sites were loading trackers I wasn’t even aware of thanks go some plugins

Think this isn’t really a problem? Visit the CNN main page. How many different mechanisms are either tracking you or serving an ad?

CNN

See that little red “14” next to the address bar? Yes, that’s how many. What are they you ask?..here’s a sample:

Ghostery

No, it’s not OK.

Mobile Content Blocking

The introduction of iOS 9 gives users the ability to use content blocking on their mobile devices too. Developers have stepped up right away and given users good add-ins. One such content-blocker is Peace, which uses Ghostery data to do it’s job. Peace is developed by Marco Arment.

Today, I’m launching my own iOS 9 content blocker, called Peace, to bring peace, quiet, privacy, and — as a nice side benefit — ludicrous speed to iOS web browsing.

This is really a game-changer. It’s not the only content blocker, there are a ton. This one uses Ghostery which works really well, so this is at least a solid place to start.

We depend on mobile more and more. Blocking content here helps us reduce bandwidth and speeds up our experience. Even Marco blocks the ads displayed on his site:

The Deck is unusually well-behaved for an ad provider: its ads are small, unintrusive, non-animated, and classy, and while it’s loaded by a third-party JavaScript include, it doesn’t set cookies or perform any tracking. That’s why I publish Deck ads on this site, and why many of my friends and colleagues do as well.

But Peace uses the Ghostery database, and Ghostery includes The Deck. It’s classified as “Advertising”, and even though it’s far nicer than most other entries in the category, it’s fair to call it advertising.

Who Loses

Obviously traditional advertises and tracking applications appear to be on the losing end of this wave of content blocking add-ins. The problem is, consumers aren’t respected..tons of trackers and advertisements are forced upon us. I don’t mind ads from networks like the Deck, they are very tasteful.

Tasteful, unobtrusive should be the goal of advertisers. Ad networks need to rethink how to make this work, take lessons from those like the Deck.

Many people are not happy with content blockers, calling them unfair. What’s unfair unknowingly being tracked and advertisements in our face.

Two thumbs up for the content blockers. Go try Ghostery and Peace and see how your web experience improves.

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From Products to Platforms – Stratechery by Ben Thompson →

I watched the Apple Special Event on September 9th with excitement. The iPad Pro was announced and has been on my wish list for a long time.

Ben Thompson had an excellent piece on Stratechery, which highlights some points about the event and iPad’s future that I hadn’t considered.

Talking about Tim Cook’s iPad Pro introduction:

Note that phrase: “How could we take the iPad even further?” Cook’s assumption is that the iPad problem is Apple’s problem, and given that Apple is a company that makes hardware products, Cook’s solution is, well, a new product.

It sounds good, Apple recognizes the need for a different iPad, something with more. Bigger, with needed peripherals to make the user’s job easier, better.

My contention, though, is that when it comes to the iPad Apple’s product development hammer is not enough. Cook described the iPad as “A simple multi-touch piece of glass that instantly transforms into virtually anything that you want it to be”; the transformation of glass is what happens when you open an app. One moment your iPad is a music studio, the next a canvas, the next a spreadsheet, the next a game. The vast majority of these apps, though, are made by 3rd-party developers, which means, by extension, 3rd-party developers are even more important to the success of the iPad than Apple is: Apple provides the glass, developers provide the experience.

So right. The iPad is an excellent device I use everyday, often for long periods of time. 90% of my usage is as a consumption device and very little to produce content. Why? Well, there’s not a lot of applications that transform this piece of glass to a device running software I can’t live without or use on my MacBook.

It becomes apparent the success of the iPad and now the professional iPad Pro is reliant on developers. Developers who can and are willing to create great apps to take advantage of what these devices can provide.

As an iOS developer, I can attest first-hand how hard it is to make a living on the App Store. It can be done but it’s not easy. Apple needs to change the way the App Store works, the way developers have been saying they need it to work:

The problem for iPad developers is three-fold:

First, the lack of trials means that genuinely superior apps are unable to charge higher prices because there is no way to demonstrate to consumers prior to purchase why they should pay more. Some apps can hack around this with in-app purchases, but purposely ruining the user experience is an exceedingly difficult way to demonstrate that your experience is superior.

Secondly, the lack of a simple upgrade path (and upgrade pricing) makes it difficult to extract additional revenue from your best customers; it is far easier to get your fans to pay more than it is to find completely new customers forever. Again, developers can hack around this by simply releasing completely new apps, but it’s a poor experience at best and there is no way to reward return customers with better pricing, or, more critically, to communicate to them why they should upgrade.

That there is the third point: Apple has completely disintermediated the relationship between developers and their customers. Not only can developers not communicate news about upgrades (or again, hack around it with inappropriate notifications), they also can’t gain qualitative feedback that could inspire the sort of improvements that would make an upgrade attractive in the first place.

The introduction of the iPad Pro is an opportunity for developers and for Apple. It’s a chance to truly be able to develop pro-level applications, but it won’t happen if things don’t change for developers. We have to be able to charge a reasonable amount for our hard work and allow users to try it out. We need to be able to charge for upgrades without having to resort to obscure tactics.

Ben also discusses this in more detail on his Exponent podcast with James Allworth in the Segue episode.

Apple, it’s obvious you need the support developers to continue to grow the iOS platform.  Apple it has to be more about getting developers to write software for free so you can sell more hardware. 

Source: From Products to Platforms – Stratechery by Ben Thompson

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On the iPad Pro and the Constraints of iOS | carpeaqua →

I was hoping we were going to hear some really special news about the new iPad Pro from the recent Apple event. I hoped we were going see the iPad Pro running OS X and an Intel Skylake processor. Why? This would allow such a wide array of existing great applications. Applications like Xcode, Microsoft Office or the Adobe Creative Suite.

Justin Williams beat me to the punch with his thoughts on the iPad Pro:

In their current incarnations, I believe that Windows 10 is better suited to the Surface than iOS is to the iPad Pro.

Granted both Microsoft and Adobe demonstrated tools developed specifically for the iPad Pro and the Apple Pencil. It’s a clean slate and the invented-for-ipad-pro apps are very few. There are so few apps that even look good and even fewer designed for the iPad today.

And we haven’t even started talking about the third-party ecosystem for the iPad. I can count the number of apps on my left hand that are thoughtfully designed for the iPad screen size. Most are, for lack of a better phrase, blown-up iPhone apps. Just this week, Twitter updated their iPad app to be exactly like the iPhone version but with a bit more padding on the edges to make up for the larger screen size. That’s fine for the iPad mini and mostly tolerable for the Air. On the iPad Pro? That’s approaching clown shoes territory.

I had dreams of using my iPad Pro with Xcode as Microsoft Surface Pro developers are fortunate enough to be able to do with Visual Studio. A truly portable, pro-level, device with powerful applications.

iOS may be a better choice of operating system than OS X here but iOS is the limiting factor. I doubt we will ever see Xcode running on an iPad Pro. Developers are one example of pro-users, that means we have to stick with our MacBooks for the time being.

Source: On the iPad Pro and the Constraints of iOS | carpeaqua