Howdy folks! I’m a software developer by training and temperament. Unfortunately, I’ve been bushwhacked by the ghost of Ricardo: my comparative advantage seems to lie less in writing software and more in selling software. I started with my own niche software product (Bingo Card Creator – it makes bingo cards for elementary schoolteachers) and have since moved into B2B SaaS applications, either ones I’ve written or more well-known apps created by consulting clients, which I’ve had the privilege of tweaking a few knobs for.
And how many knobs there are! Software businesses turn out to be icebergs, where the actual product is just the wee bit above the waterline, and the great mass of the business (which, for better or worse, generally dominates results) very rarely sees the light of day. We know in the abstract sense that marketing and sales and pricing and customer support and PR and hiring and a thousand other things matter, but I think as engineers we give them short shrift relative to our part of the puzzle. In addition to vastly underappreciating marketing, we (shockingly!) underappreciate engineering, applied not just to the product experience but to the larger problems of the business. We don’t realize, for example, that there exist hard, interesting problems which are tractable to engineering-assisted solutions in, e.g., increasing the number of sales given a certain amount of visitors or trial accounts, increasing the number of visits by extending Google’s algorithms with some semi-algorithmic muscle of our own, or providing mass-customizable experiences to new visitors via product tours and email engagement.
I’ve been writing about these topics for six years now, and the good folks at Hyperink collected some of my best essays into this book. I also wrote a new essay on each of the three themes: selling software, conversion optimization, and SEO. We worked to strike a balance between giving you a variety of directions to explore and also enough depth to find actionable advice that you can go out and implement for your business today. As always, I’d love to hear what you thought about it – drop me an email. ()
