Automate Your Business

Archive for June, 2009

UPDATE : I’ve got my five beta testers, so I’m closing this opportunity for now.

I’m progressing relatively well with the social bookmarking software I’ve written about recently. The only snag is doing the work in the evenings after work and family

I’ve gotten to the point where I can create Gmail accounts on demand. That doesn’t sound like much, but it involves being able to capture the CAPTCHA images, submit them to the third-party service I’m using, receiving their response, handling configuration settings, working with proxies of various types, and creating the front end.

ie, it involved all the hard work.

From now on, it’s more of the same – load webpages, solve captchas, enter data on that webpage, submit the webpage, handle the response.

The only functional things I need to do that I’ve not done already are:

A) monitor RSS feeds and track new posts ready for future promotion.

B) monitor email accounts and respond to accounts verification emails.

C) use bookmarking sites’ APIs where they are available.

All of these I’ve done in other programming languages, so I know I can do them;I just need to translate that work into the language with which I’m writing this application.

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So I’m looking for beta testers.

5 people who are running Windows XP (I’m not – at this point – testing on Vista).

The software is a bit rough round the edges, so the purpose of this testing is simply to throw the software at a few people and see where they break it. Rest assured, it will break, since I’ve not built in a lot of error trapping. So you’re not getting a final draft of the software.

But I also want to be sure that the software – in principle – works on other people’s machines other than mine. Being a developer sometimes means I have software components installed on my machine that other people might not have on theres, and that’s the other key purpose of looking for beta testers at the moment.

There is no cost associated with this, and you’ll get all future versions of the software free – provided you actually help out with the beta testing. If you don’t respond, I’ll cross you off the beta testers list. Tit for tat, that’s the principle here.

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The next stage will be a more formal limited-feature release candidate version – all issues found during beta testing (by me or the beta testers) will be fixed, but only part of the feature set will be available: in this case, just the gmail account creation and a very limited number of social bookmarking sites integrated (ie, one or two).

Anyone interested in this will be able to pay a small one-off fee in compensation for not getting the full set of features, but there will be additional benefits over the longer term, which I’ve got a plan for, but will divulge nearer the time.

——-

So if you’re interested in being a beta tester, reply below and if you’re amongst the first five, I’ll be in touch.

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Following on from yesterday’s post about the new “SENuke alternative” software I’m working on, I’d like to gather your feedback for suggestions.

The first set of features will be:

• Ability to create gmail accounts
• Ability to create Delicious* accounts
• Ability to import RSS feed items
• Ability to auto bookmark RSS feed items in Delicious* (to randomly selected accounts)

* I’m aiming to do Delicious first, but if I hit severe problems, I’ll switch to one of the other more popular bookmarking services.

Is there anything else you’d like to see?

I’ve been looking at SENuke recently – and their business model in particular. Great product, crappy price.

I understand that there is a lot of work gone into this, and charging $100+ (depending on the version you want) for the first month is very reasonable for the feature set.

But every month after that as well? Let’s take a look at what that $100+ covers?

1. Updates to the program.

2. High affiliate commission

3. Captcha breakers (depending on which version you get).

And that’s why my beef with the cost starts.

1. Why should I pay that cost for a piece of software which has a great feature set in one place, but keep on paying that same high price just to cover field names that have changed, or a change in URL, or similar details? The level of maintenance needed to adapt to those things is much easier than writing the software in the first place. Particuarly if the software is designed with that adaptability in mind right from the start.

2. Why should I keep on paying half that fee to an affiliate? The benefit of the high residual commission is that there are a lot of affiliates promoting SENuke. Just try searching for a review that doesn’t give it 5 out of 5, and actually criticises the software. You’ll be lucky to find one.

3. If I’m not a heavy user, why should I pay a relatively high price for an army of people to break captcha codes, when there are third-party services that offer the same service for $2 (US dollars) for 1000 entries? At the rate I’m likely to use the software, that 1000 entries will last well over a month, probably 2-3 months. But I understand that some people will churn through that many captchas in a week or less. That’s fine – but let them bear the brunt of that cost.

So… I’m writing my own software that will end up doing much (but not necessarily all) of what SEnuke does. And it wil have the following benefits:

1. Higher cost for the first month, but a very low cost for maintenance thereafter.

2. No affiliate commission after the first month. Anybody who links to the program is more likely to be doing it because it’s a good piece of software, not because they are earning a high residual income.

3. The captcha breaking plugs into a third-party service using YOUR account details, so you only pay for the volume you need.

I’ll be offering this at a VERY low cost to begin with, since it won’t do very much. And once a customer subscribes, they’ll get it at that same cost from then on. As I add more features, the first-month cost and the ongoing monthly costs will rise appropriately, with the first month cost rising by more than then monthly costs.

So anyone who purchases when I first release it will get a great bargain, even if they have to wait a while to get the full feature set.

I’ve created the bare bones of the software already. I can create Gmail and delicious accounts hands-free, with the third-party doing the captcha resolution.

Oh – and one more nice thing about my software. You can minimise the Internet Explorer window during this process, or bring another window to the foreground to work on it. Something that you can’t do with SENuke – you have to leave the window full-size and on-top, so you can’t do anything else at the same time.

Neat, eh?

So if you’re interested, subscribe to this blog or my mailing list. Email subscribers and existing customers will get first go at the software, and I will be limiting numbers initially.

The reason for this is that I want to spend my time adding features, not resolving the types of issues that occur when you roll out a piece of software onto people’s PCs, where they have XP/Windows NT/Vista/Macs emulating XP, .net installed/not installed/out of date, etc, etc, etc.