Automate Your Business

Posts Tagged ‘SENuke’

OK, I’ve closed the competition, and over the next day or two I’ll pick the best name from the entries to be the winner (and as promised, even if I end up using a name I choose, the prize will still go to the best entry.

I’ll post again soon. Good luck to all who entered!

I need to come up with a better name for my forthcoming software than “SENuke Alternative”.

I was thinking something like “Underground Lead-Lined Bunker”, but that doesn’t explain what the product will do!  So I thought I’d throw open the doors to you, my faithful readers.

The competition: Suggest a name for the product (which – eventually – will provide the same set of functionality – approximately – as SENuke), but at a cheaper ongoing cost. Have a read of SENuke.com if you want to see what my software should eventually be able to do.

The prize for the winer:

1. A free copy of the software, for life.
2. $50 worth of credit into your captcha-breaking account once you’ve got the software installed (good for 25,000 captchas, which should keep you busy for a while!).
3. A 5% commission on all income generated by sales of the software (both the initial cost and the ongoing monthly fees) for the first year it’s available.

Just submit your suggestions as comments to this post, using the “comments” link below - they won’t get approved automatically, so they won’t be visible immediately. I’ll comment-out your actual name, then publish your comment, so you’ll know I’ve got your input.

The closing date for the contest is the 1st September.

If by some chance I think of a name myself that I actually use, or if I tweak the best suggestion slightly, the prizes listed above will still go to the best submitted name.

The winner will be announced here (unless you’d rather remain incognito).

[UPDATE: Competition closed. Winner to be announced in separate post in the first few days of September.]

I’m progressing well with the “SENuke alternative” software, with the result that there are a couple of features you might like:

- The browser remains invisible, and becomes visible if there’s something it can’t process normally. So you can carry on working with “real” work whilst it does it’s thing in the background.

- Get this: even the CAPTCHAs can be processed whilst the browser is invisible. Neat, eh?

- It’s got built in debugging that should (if your proxy and router allow it), let me debug “live” whilst you run the software on your PC, so I can more easily find out what’s happening if you encounter problems.

- It’ll have plugin functionality similar to WordPress. So if some clever programmer wants to write an interface to post bookmarks to (as an example) Delicious.com before I’ve had a chance to write one, they can take my template plugin, modify it, and make it available to download for users of my software.

- It’s actually two softwares in one: A web-based app to do all the stuff that it possibly can without you even having to have your PC on, be in the country, or even be awake. And a desktop app to do the CAPTCHA-specific stuff (and maybe a few other things in future, we’ll see how that goes). Both will have the plugin functionality.

- Virtually everything will be done via plugins (which will be free to users if I write them). So for example, the CAPTCHA breaking is done by one specific third-party service at the moment. If they close down, put their prices up to much, start performing badly, or otherwise cause me to look at other providers, I can fairly quickly write a plugin to work with another provider (if they support software integration, of course).

I must say, I’m enjoying this work!

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.