One of the best ways to make a product viral is to put your branding on your product or service so that when other people see your customers using it, they will learn about you also. Apple does this with their trademark white logo on the back of their laptops. Hotmail does this with the free ad at the bottom of their emails. DropSend does this with their website. (when you use it to share files, those you share with see the logo and learn of the service)

This biggest problem with this strategy for businesses though, is that most businesses don’t want your branding visible to their customers. Your heaviest users in particular – the ones who would most likely spread the word about your – are also the ones who are most willing to pay a little extra to have your branding removed from their site.

Carson Systems, the people behind DropSend, for example, recently introduced a new business plan that costs quite a bit more but offers the option to custom brand your site. Ryan says they’ve seen some great uptake for this new plan, but at what expense?

How do you get small businesses who use your service to tell others about your service without compromising on delivering your customers what they want?

Leave a comment...

Indigo Moon Systems mentions us along with some other easy business tools. I like his description of Sproutit Mailroom:

I just came across this one-it’s not free, but it’s interesting and I have at least one current client I’m going to recommend it to. It’s an online automated e-mail management system, using basic artificial intelligence to receive and sort mail coming in to common addresses (like “sales” or “support”) and automatically produce recommended replies, reducing the time to manage each individual piece of mail. This has long been a function available in helpdesk software, but that’s either very expensive or very complicated to implement-this is entirely web-based, easy to get started with, easy to quit if it doesn’t work well.

Leave a comment...

We now have a staging server for Mailroom setup, which has already helped us catch at least 4 bugs before they ever saw the light of day.

They were relatively minor and somewhat obscure, but… having that server setup allowed the entire SproutIt team to hammer on development code and iron out most of the remaining wrinkles.

If you run a web business and don’t have a staging server yet, after recent experiences I would have to highly recommend acquiring one.

A hosted VDS (or VPS), which is basically like a segmented time-share arrangement on a much larger dedicated server, allows you to have root and full control over your OS.

These can be had for anywhere from $69 / mo. down to $29 / mo., depending on how much CPU, memory, etc. that you’ll need.

I generally wouldn’t recommend them for production usage for a large-scale application, but they work well for a staging server or place to run your personal blog.

You generally only run into problems with them, I’ve found, when someone else on your box is really hogging the CPU. (or, you’re the one hogging the CPU and they kick you off!)

The Joel Test for Web Apps

If you are a fan of Joel Spolsky’s writings on coding and the business of software development, you are no doubt familiar with his Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code.

Some of the commandments like ‘Daily Builds’ are not as applicable to webapps.

IMHO, having a staging server, where you have a daily or even hourly process that automagically updates the server with the latest development code, and is accessible by your team to be tested and hammered on from anywhere, is the closest thing to a daily build you’ll get for a webapp.

Hosting solutions plug: We’ve had great luck with OCS Solutions and AVLUX. They are especially well-suited for shops running Rails / Subversion / Lighttpd.

Leave a comment...