Software Project Update – All Systems Go!
People have been asking for an update on my software project for ages and the reason I haven’t posted one was mainly because progress was very slow but also because it’s mainly technical. I’ve been making more progress with it over the last few weeks so I thought I’d post something but this will get a little techy in places :-)
What it Does
When I first came up with the idea for this project it was really quite vague but over the last few months I have been clarifying it a little more. In a nutshell I am developing tools that will automate some of the manual tasks done by Internet Marketers – mainly in the name of building links. The first tool that I will develop will be a social bookmarking submitter.
We’ve all seen those before of course and I’ll be the first to admit that what I am developing is not especially new but that’s just the first tool. I have some ideas for future development but they are still a little vague right now and of course I don’t want to give it all away just yet :-)
Technology Basis
The site is being developed from scratch using the PHP language. At first I toyed with the idea of using a content management system as that does a lot of the work for you. I tried out Joomla and Drupal but I concluded that I would have to put so much effort into trying to bend those systems to do what I wanted that I may as well build from scratch.
What many people don’t understand is that this is not some teaching-based membership site like many others around at the moment. I’m not teaching anything – I am providing tools. The idea is that members have an account which they login to and then they submit jobs for submission which the software automates on their behalf in the background. The tools themselves are the crux of the project and so I need to develop that myself – CMS systems don’t help with that.
However, when I say I am developing it ‘from scratch’, that’s not entirely true. I am using a PHP framework as a basis. There are several major ones – Zend, Cake, CodeIgnighter are the three that I looked at. I picked Zend in the end due to the support that is available for it.
One of the disadvantages of working at home on a solo project like this is that if I do get stuck on something I have nobody to turn to but the Internet. I can’t just pass my problem over to a colleague like I would when I was working at a regular job. Therefore having good community support is a huge factor in my decisions.
Member Management
This is another area that has been a point of confusion when I have tried to explain it in the past. There are two distinct areas of member management that I have to deal with.
The first is that of authentication – this will be a paid site so obviously only paid members can login. Well I shall have a free version too but those free members will still need to login. This is the kind of thing that I don’t want to code from scratch as security is such an important issue. I decided to use aMember and this has been working well.
The way this works is that for areas of your site that you want protected from the general public you insert a little piece of code which executes the aMember script and requires the user to login before he can see the content.
However, this is not the only member management issue I have. My software also needs to keep track of members because it will need to store their data in a database. For example I will want users (yes I keep using the words user and member interchangeably!) to be able to setup bookmarking jobs to be submitted so the details of those jobs have to be stored along with their username. Furthermore, this has to tie in with the aMember user.
So what I have done is written some code to check when a user logs in using aMember and then create a corresponding profile in my own database so that their data can be saved. This is where a PHP Framework comes in handy as the code to manipulate databases is really quite simple using the Zend Framework.
The Software Engine
This is something I am still working on… The idea is that users can setup jobs to be submitted and then the software will toddle off and do it on its own in the background. This is different to how some of the other social bookmarkers work as they require you to manually click the submit button for each site. I wish to automate the entire process as much as possible.
I’m not entirely sure how I am going to do this yet. A lot will depend on how much of a load there is. I will restrict the number of members when I first launch and I may even put a restriction on the number of jobs that can be submitted so I can control how much work my server has to do. I have never written this kind of software before so I wouldn’t want it to collapse in a heap under the strain!
Feasibility Testing
One area that has been a sticking point for a while is that I knew what I wanted to do with my software but I had no idea how! I knew it was possible because there are some competing programs out there that do the same thing or something similar so I just had to figure it out.
Thankfully I recently made that breakthrough and was able to automate submission of some social bookmarks to several sites. Now that I know how to do it in a basic way I know that the idea can actually be done so I can move forward properly now. Many sites that I wish to submit to have some issues that I need to get around so I still have much work to do.
For example, many sites use a captcha image to ensure that it is a human doing the submission and not a robot! This is something that cannot be fully automated that I know of so I will probably have to have some sites that are only partially automated and still require some manual intervention by the user.
But in order to get something working I shall leave sites using those kind of techniques until later.
Promoting the Paid Version
I’m going to have a free version and a paid version of the software. The idea of course is that the free version acts as a pre-seller for the paid version. Initially my plan was to have free members put on an email list and promote the paid version from there but of course the rules with any email list dictate that subscribers may remove themselves at any time.
At first I was trying to find a way to ‘force’ members to stay on the email list if they wanted to keep their account and I wrote a post explaining how I was trying to do this with aWeber but the more I thought about it the more I realised it was a bad idea and not really necessary anyway.
Instead, when a user logs into the site I have a small section in my layout that will show the latest new developments of the paid version. Also… and this part is genius even if I do say so myself… I am going to release every new feature to all the free users before it gets integrated into the paid version! That probably sounds odd so let me explain!
I am quite aware of the fact that this is a learning curve for me and although I am a reasonably good programmer, I am not familiar with web development so I could and probably will encounter all sorts of problems. I don’t want that to happen if I am charging people money! That’s a BAD thing! So ideally I want to find people to test the software first – who better than users that are already using it?
By releasing each new feature to the free members they get to test it for me and they get a freebie for a while. I don’t know yet how long each feature will remain free for – I’m thinking maybe something like 7, 10 or 14 days. This should be enough time for the users to know if this is a feature they would be interested in and may just provide an incentive to pay for the full version.
Pricing Considerations
I can announce now that the first version of the software is almost certainly going to be released at $49 per month and it will become more expensive from there. With any product, pricing is a very important factor and you really have to consider your target market when making a decision.
My target market is Internet Marketers, and more specifically, those that are already making money with successful sites. I am not targeting newbies with this software and that’s why I decided to start out with a fairly high price point. Somebody who is already making a decent income from their sites will think nothing of spending $50 a month on something that will save them hours of tedious work but try explaining that to a newbie!
As an incentive for early signups I will be fixing the price upon initial sign up. What that means is that whatever price is paid when a member signs up will be the price they will always pay as long as they stay a member. I intend to release new features as often as I can so over time the software becomes better and better value.
I could release at a much lower price, say $19 a month instead in order to make it more available to a wider audience but to be honest due to the technical considerations I mentioned before I would actually prefer to have fewer members at a higher price than the other way around to ensure that my server can cope with the load!
Release Date
I am not ready to mention any dates yet but hopefully a test version may be available to play with in the not too distant future. Though saying that I am going to on holiday at the end of August for 2 weeks so I probably wont release anything until I get back which will be September.
An Aside – July Stats Will Be Delayed
I am going away for a long weekend and I wont be able to do the July stats until around the 3rd August so the figures will be slightly off but it can’t he helped!
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Peter Buick
July 30, 2009
Well I’m priced out then :-)
For $47pm I’d hope it was very automated, so captcha should be gone.
It certainly is possible.
You might be able to glean how from the 7 day trail of this desktop agent which does it;
http://reachfor.us/senuke.htm
That’s $97 pm, it allegedly does everything, including video marketing sites, and I can’t justify that either :-)
I appreciate you are going for the premium market and if you can give them value, that will be a life time earner!
But I’m not even going to charge $47 for ViSiTeach, which is a complete training delivery system including payment and membership gateway. (Well not as a starting flat fee anyway. I charge a token per member after a threshold, to manage the heavy users).
So $47 for just social bookmarking, (which one can outsource), seems high, UNLESS you are going to create and manage accounts for them, more like some other services do.
That would be a different ball game! If I can use “your” (out sourcers) accounts, rather than mine. That I can see may soon be worth $x per month.
Same engine! So no worries there :-)
Just you may need to have an option to add in some preset accounts (by niche topic obviously).
I think that would add the mashup value that we spoke of previously.
Whatever it is I hope you release it soon.
Peace and light.
Peter
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