Automate Your Business

Posts Tagged ‘Software’

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.

I’m still playing with the theme. The latest one is created by …

… me!

Using a useful new bit of software called Artisteer. It’s a tool for creating new WordPress themes (with a version available that also allows you to create Joomla and Drupal themes as well). Whilst there are a lot better themes available, I’m sure, the ones produced by Artisteer are less “snazzy” than some of the professional ones (ie, they are easier to read and navigate round).

And if you are creating a series of blogs, but want to use some similar themes, it’s easy to pick a layout that you like, and then vary the colour-scheme per blog.

It’s worth having a look at the software if you want to be able to quickly create some themes for your blogs.