Why I Love Being an Entrepreneur
Because everyday is different! It’s as simple as that. You never really know what to expect tomorrow. For example, a couple of days ago I wrote an article about how the downward trend of the USD dollar versus the CDN dollar has affected our revenue. Then today I found out we’re on pace for another record month for revenue! We’ve already beaten last month’s total revenues (although May is not a good benchmark because it’s never been a good month for us). At our current pace it looks very good that we’ll beat April’s sales record.
For a lot of people this would be nerve racking, especially the ups and downs in revenues. For me I really enjoy this. You always have to be prepared for the unexpected. The more challenges you face, the easier it seems to get. And this is why I love being an entrepreneur.
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The Effects Of Currency on Pricing
You would think that a smaller company like LandlordMax would be immune to international currency issues, but quite the opposite is true. You see LandlordMax is a Canadian company where the majority of our customers come from the US. And because of this, the currency values between the two countries, that is the difference between the Canadian dollar (CDN) and the US dollar (USD) has affected our bottom line.
Over the four years since we’ve been in business, the USD has steadily declined in comparison to the CDN. In the past we used this difference as a competitive advantage over our competitors where for example if the USD was 20% more valuable than the CDN dollar, we could then sell the software for about 20% less to make the same profit (assuming the same costs). Although this isn’t entirely accurate, it’s a good enough example for today’s discussion (in reality most of our expenses are also in USD).
Up until today, we use to charge $147 USD and $170 CDN for LandlordMax. Initially the difference between the two currencies was higher, but over time as the USD has dropped in value this difference has gotten closer and closer. Today, we’ve adjusted it to $147 USD and $155 CDN. Almost no difference at all. At this point the CDN and US dollars are almost equal.
What does this mean for our pricing strategy? Quite a lot actually. We no longer have the luxury of using the currency in our pricing model. Actually if we look at just the trend over the last five years in the graph above, we really have to consider the probability that the USD will continue to decline below the CDN. Therefore there are really good chances that our USD price will have to increase. We won’t do it today, but with the next release I highly suspect that we will somwhat increase our prices to cover the currency difference (especially if the CDN overtakes the USD).
The good news is that although our income has decreased because of the currencies, so have many of our expenses. Most of our advertising, server, etc. costs are USD. So although our profit margins have decreased along with the currency, they don’t match up exactly (it’s a much much slower downtrend on a per unit basis). However our margins have decreased enough that I believe it’s time we increase our price to compensate when we release the next major version of LandlordMax Property Management Software. I don’t know by how much just yet, but you should expect to see the price of LandlordMax go up to at least match the currency changes over the next little while.
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LandlordMax Sales Revenues
It’s been an interesting ride getting LandlordMax to where it is today. We’ve had many bumps and twists along the way, and we’re still in the thick of things. The good news is that we’re definitely showing revenue growth, even amongst the real estate market downturn in the US (the majority of our customers are from the US). I won’t get into it here, but I think this is good business wise for LandlordMax. Its unfortunate for the people who will lose their investments but I believe it will strengthen the astute real estate investor. In my personal opinion the real estate market downturn will reduce the number of “hobby investors” and lead larger real estate portfolios by professional investors. Whether this is good or bad overall is another question, but I do suspect this will lead to more sales of LandlordMax (our average customer has anywhere between 5-1000 units). In any case, this ia a discussion for another day.
Getting back to LandlordMax, I decided to quickly create a graph of our sales revenues (not profits, just revenues) over the last few years which you can find below. I didn’t have the data for version 1.00 easily accessible and hence it wasn’t included (it was only two months before we released 1.02 anyways). As well, these numbers are approximations. In any case the graph below gives you a ballpark idea of where we stand in terms of revenues.
As you can see we’re definitely growing! Our best revenue for a month in 2004-2005 is now pretty much our worse revenue for a month in most of 2006 (excluding the first two months) and all of 2007.
I also included the major released of LandlordMax along the way, to see what impact they had. Version 1.00 to version 1.02 did have an impact, but again unfortunately I didn’t have easy access to those numbers to display in the graph. Actually if you look at the graph, all new major versions seem to have positively affected our sales revenue except for version 1.08, which didn’t seem to do much either way.
This is an interesting anomaly because if you look at the release notes, we definitely added a lot to the software with version 1.08. My guess is that we didn’t as many new “major” features as we thought, they were probably considered more as enhancements and niceties by our customers: more reports, a Late Fees button, accounting filters, due dates, partial payments, etc. With all the other versions we added at least one major component. For example in version 1.02 we added the concept of landlords, in version 2.12 we added pictures, table sorting, etc. For version 3.11 we added huge performance enhancements, receipts, preferences, etc. For the upcoming version we anticipate (this is not an official list of features, this is what we’re currently working on and hope to have available for the next release if all goes well) adding Quickbooks support, charts for the reports, etc.
All around it’s very exciting to see the sales revenue climb over the years. As you can clearly see from the graph, we’re about to beat our best fiscal year (our fiscal year ends in the fall). To be honest, we’ve already beaten it by 10% as of last month and we still have some months to go! Very exciting times!
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Can a User Review Be Considered a Testimonial?
As part of releasing an updated version of LandlordMax Property Management Software we contact all the shareware sites to let them know about it. In the past we used a service by Rudenko with great success. This time however we decided to try their software RoboSoft and do it ourselves. It’s been a very positive experience and we’ll be purchasing it shortly. In any case, as part of testing out RoboSoft I was randomly looking at some of the sites it submitted LandlordMax to verify it actually worked as expected. At about the third or fourth site I saw the following “User Review“:
“Does not limit you to how many properties that can be entered.
Keeps track of everything even tentants their roommates as well as being able to list every appliance for each property (fridge, oven, dishwasher, water heater, furnace etc.) This is the most comprehensive program that I have been able to find to date! For the price it is a bargain. Most other programs that I have looked at have been less appealing and didnt offer as many features/reports (this one generates hundreds of reports including cash flow for each property!!!) The main advantage that I liked is that the number of properties that can be entered is limitless (as many as you want this program will handle the work load!)”
This is a great user review! To me it’s also a great customer testimonial. Is it really though? Should we use it on our Success Stories and Testimonials webpage? This is my dilemna. What do you think?
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LandlordMax Version 3.11c is Now Available
We just released the latest version 3.11c of LandlordMax which resolved a few minor issues. You can find the complete list of fixes here. The biggest fix included a bug which sometimes didn’t save the second modification (or further modifications) to the tabbed data panels if there were intermediatary saves done between each modification after the second time. Please don’t ask me to explain that more clearly, it’s a very specific (consistent) sequence of steps which caused this issue.
The other biggest change is that the Suggested Invoices/Receipts End Dates are now pushed back by one day. This is so that if you do a monthly Invoice/Receipt, it will be from the 1rst to the last of the month and not the first to the first. In mathematical terms instead of first + 1 month it’s now first + 1 month – 1 day.
There are some other minor changes, but these two are the most noticeable ones. It’s not a major update but we always do recommend upgrading if you can.
Also as an insider tip, we anticipate adding a new feature in the next version to give the software the ability to upgrade itself, so that you won’t need to manually download and install the upgrades. It will of course ask you before going ahead, but other than pressing the Ok button you won’t need to do anything else. This is on our list of new features for the next version.
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How to Get Published?
In my last entry I wrote how I was interested in writing a book about marketing and sales for small businesses (all small businesses, not just software based small businesses). It was received with good enthusiasm based only on the summary. Several people commented that they would buy it. I also received a number of personal emails saying the same. Therefore I’ve decided to go ahead and write the book.
And like everything I do before I fully commit, I researched my options. I spent the last week analyzing what options there are to authors like myself, and its amazing to see how much the publishing market has changed. In the past you pretty much had to go with a major publication company to get your book out, and even doing that was a challenge. The odds of being selected for publication were really low, never mind actual success. You could also look for a small presses, which is almost the same as large publication company but without all the benefits. In any case, you needed a publishing company to get your book out in the world.
There was also another option, you could self publish. This however was, and still is, a very costly endeavor. You need to have a lot of seed money to truly self publish, you have to cover all the expenses. Let’s say you decide to print 100, 1000, or even 5000 books (for an initial print run), you personally have to cover that cost. That’s above the costs of writing the book, creating the artwork, getting the ISBN, hiring a copy editor, marketing etc. It can be a very profitable venue, its just that you need a substantial bankroll and expertise to go this route.
Today the market has changed for the better, there’s more options. Although most people still prefer going with a publication company there’s a couple of new ways to publish that are easier, quicker, and more affordable. The main ones are POD (Print on Demand) and ebooks.
Print on Demand is where you partner up with a company like iUniverse to print your book on demand, be it one at a time, 20, 100, and so on. You don’t need to make runs, your book can be printed one at a time if need be. However to take advantage of this with Print on Demand you do have to spend a bit of money to get your book ready and into the “system”. The fees aren’t astronomical but they aren’t cheap either. For example iUniverse has packages ranging from $299 to $1,199 (not counting editorial services, etc.). This is great when you consider you can be self published without have to do a full print run of your books.
How do you make money using this service? Like most publishing companies, it’s mainly through royalties. iUniverse gives you a 10-20% royalty depending on what options you want to use. Another benefit is that they’ll sell you copies (again even one at a time) of your book to you at a heavy discount.
The option I investigated with POD and traditional publishing is ebooks. Ebooks are basically books sold in digital format (generally PDF) that you can purchase and download online. I’ve purchased at least a couple dozen myself and I’ve even sold one in the past. Ebooks can be great because the costs are only your time to write and market the ebook. Each sale goes almost directly to your bottom line. The downside is that it’s generally less credible, harder to sell and market. People prefer traditional books over ebooks.
After looking at all the options, I’m strongly leaning towards Print on Demand (POD). You don’t get some of the benefits of a publishing company (big distribution, some marketing, etc.), but you make up for it in other respects. With POD, you’re guaranteed to have your book published, you’re publishing it! With POD you can also get your book to market much quicker. With traditional publication companies getting through the approval process can take months, never mind going through all the steps and negotiations. The difference is 2-3 months versus a year or so. Personally I just don’t have the patience for that anymore, I’d rather just go ahead and get it done. That’s what being an entrepreneur for so long does to you.
As a disadvantage you don’t get your book professional edited for you with POD. You need to do this or hire a professional editor. That’s ok with me because I don’t mind hiring someone for this. Also, you don’t get the full distribution of a publishing company. Your book will not appear in bookstores across the nation, at least not unless you’re a proven bestseller. That’s ok I can accept that. Another disadvantage is that you need to provide all the marketing for your book (books don’t sell themselves). That’s ok too, the topic of the book is about marketing and sales after all. If I can’t do that I shouldn’t be writting this book. Something to also remember is that publishing companies will only continue to market your book as long as it has a return on investment otherwise they’ll leave it entirely to you. Either way you’ll still need to do a lot of the marketing yourself.
Having looked at all the options, the benefits and disadavantages, I believe I’ll proceed on the Print On Demand route. I like the timelines. I like the control. I don’t mind doing all of the marketing, that’s something I know (its definitely a serious consideration for most people). I also don’t mind the loss distribution, my plan was to focus mainly on sales through Amazon anyways. I plan to emulate the success the authors of the book Call To Action had using their own techniques (great book by the way, I commented on it back in July 2005). I can’t find it anymore, but I remember reading somewhere that they didn’t want to sell the book directly on their own website, even if it was for a much higher margin! They wanted every sale to go through Amazon.com so that they could increase their Amazon ranking, giving it some serious momentum (there’s more to it than that, but that’s for another day).
Another factor that really helped make my decision was a book I recently picked up at my local bookstore called Get Published. It’s written by the CEO and editorial director of iUniverse so its very skewed towards iUniverse, it’s almost a sales pitch. But even with that it was a great read. I read most of it in one sitting. Again, there’s no doubt its a book to sell their service, they have testimonials of iUniverse sprinkled throughout, but it still clearly explains a lot about the publishing world. The fact that even with their sales pitch I’m still recommending the book should say something. They really do explain how things work in the publishing industry. They really do tell you the good and bad of the different types of publishing methods available to you (traditional, POD, etc.). They don’t try to oversell you on iUniverse, they tell you what they can’t and won’t do for you. They tell you exactly what the differences are and what you’ll need to do to be successful in both. For example, they tell you that you will need to do 100% of the marketing for your book with iUniverse, they won’t provide this for you. Again I strongly recommend Get Published if you’re looking for information on how to get a book published.
When will the actual book be available? My personal goal, which I’m publicly sharing right here and now, is to have it written before the end of summer. It’s an aggressive goal but I think I can do it. Add another 2-3 months to get printed by iUniverse (ISBN assigned, printing, edited, cover design, etc.) and I’m hoping to have it available for purchase on Amazon.com by late fall to early winter. Let’s see what happens!
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How to Save on Bandwidth Costs
Reading many ISV (Internet Software Vendor), uISV (Micro ISV) blogs, etc. you often hear how bandwidth costs can sometimes quickly escalate with success. Jeff Atwood of CodingHorror.com posted an article (with a nice follow-up) on this very subject describing many things you can do to minimze your bandwidth costs. These are:
- Switch to an external image provider.
- Turn on HTTP compression.
- Outsource Your RSS feeds.
- Optimize the size of your JavaScript and CSS
All great options, no doubt about it. But another option that is very often overlooked by software companies is the size of their software installers. It’s very easy to forget, never mind completely miss, the size of the installer. For us here at LandlordMax it was always an issue because we also install a local JVM which is considerably large. With each new version the size of the installer steadily increased until it was about 36Mb. This might not seem so big compared to some of the other larger software applications in the market, but when you’re looking at thousands of downloads a month this quickly adds up to a lot of bandwidth.
Late last year we changed the software we used to create our installer to Install4j (you can read my review on this great installer here) and it was able to drastically reduce our installer size by about 50%! Yes, that’s a full 50%! What does that mean? Well if you consider that the majority of our bandwidth is used for downloading LandlordMax, then we were able to reduce our bandwidth by about 50%.
None of the suggestions above could have reduced our bandwidth nearly as much as this one change to the installer. On this blog (FollowSteph.com), the above four suggestions do indeed have a very significant impact, but on LandlordMax because of the nature of the website, the change in the installer completely overwhelmed any of the impact these changes would have had. This is not to say that I don’t strongly believe you should do them, but that in this particular instance another tactic to reduce bandwidth was much more crucial.
So the lesson of the day, other than to do the above great suggestions by Jeff (especially for blog type websites), is to look at your software installer and see if you can’t reduce its size (assuming you’re a software company). The impact may be more significant than you might realize.
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LandlordMax Sales Record
I just finished all the revenue/sales tallies for last month (March 2007) and it looks like we broke our sales record again! Last month was our highest sales revenue ever for a single month, beating our previous record set in October 2006. It wasn’t a large difference. Actually the number of units sold was exactly the same which in itself is quite remarkable! We broke our sales record within a couple hundred dollars simply because we just shipped a higher percentage of CD’s last month than usual. Like I said, if you look at a difference of a couple hundred dollars over sales in the thousands of dollars, we barely broke our sales record. But nonetheless we did break it (in February we just missed breaking our record by a very small amount which was frustrating).
As for our net total (profits), March definitely wasn’t our record month by any means. We had much higher than normal expenses this month for several reasons which I won’t go into today.
All in all though I’m very excited about March, it turned out to be a great month for us in the bigger scheme of things. And looking at April, if things continue as they are now, we’re looking at another very good month. We’ve already at least matched the number of sales for this time in March today in April!
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LandlordMax version 3.11b is Now Available!
Well it’s official, we just released version 3.11b of LandlordMax. As I mentioned in my last post, this latest update was probably our biggest update (not including any major upgrades) in terms of effort yet. There were a lot of Vista specific issues that we had to work through for LandlordMax to fully support Windows Vista, some of which even included bugs within the programming language itself! This doesn’t even mention the new hardware and software we had to purchase and setup just to get our test and development environments going.
In any case, we just released version 3.11b of LandlordMax today, so you can now download it. And on top of fully supporting Windows Vista, we also added several smaller fixes for everyone else. You can find the complete list of the latest fixes and changes in the release notes.
Now our main efforts are going to return towards getting the Mac version of LandlordMax ready as soon as possible. Hopefuly that won’t be much longer now too.
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LandlordMax on Vista (The Story)
As several of you already know, we’ve been working extremely hard, harder than usual anyways, to get LandlordMax up and fully running on Windows Vista The reality is that Vista has been a harder than usual update for us. The good news is that we’re getting very close to releasing an update of LandlordMax to version 3.11b. If everything goes according to plan, you should anticipate the release of version 3.11b by the end of this weekend. I believe we’ve now got all of the major issues resolved, we’re just finishing with the details and doing some final testing.
Having said that, I thought I would take the time today to write what we’ve been through to get LandlordMax fully Windows Vista compatible. What we’ve been doing behind the scenes, what challenges we’ve been facing, and so on. So without further ado:
Unlike previous Windows upgrades (98 to Me, NT, 2000, XP), this Windows Vista upgrade has been a real challenge. You would think we wouldn’t even need to upgrade LandlordMax to support Vista, especially since it’s Java based, but the reality is that it’s been a major update. With the prior Windows systems, the LandlordMax updates were minor if at all (for example we didn’t have to do anything special to move from Windows 2000 to Windows XP). But as I just said, Windows Vista has turned out to be a very different story.
For our customers who tried to run LandlordMax on Vista, the first thing you saw was an “Error loading Look and Feel” message. In most cases you could just ignore this message and proceed. However by doing so, because the expected Look and Feel wasn’t available, many of the screens became useless. For example, in the screenshot below, you can see that a portion of the Scheduled Accounting entries form is missing. This is because the visual components (text fields, combo boxes, etc.) didn’t display as expected (actually even the font style, combo box styles, etc. are all off). The software worked as expected, but the screens didn’t. Well actually that’s not fully true, we had to resolve a few very minor coding compatibility issues with Vista.
In any case, this quickly lead us down a very slippery slope. What started off as one small change quickly grew. And not only that, along the way we found some new bugs in the Java language that are Windows Vista specific (for example Bug 6434444).
Before getting too far ahead here, let’s get back to the fact that the Look and Feel didn’t work in Windows Vista only. What does this mean? Without being too technical, it basically means that the Look and Feel definition we’re using in LandlordMax wasn’t supported for Windows Vista and it therefore automatically changed to its first available Vista Look and Feel. For our Look and Feel, we use JGoodies Looks library which is an amazing open source library. In tandem with this, we use JGoodies Forms library. Great libraries, I can’t say enough about them! In any case, after a little bit of investigation, we found that we had to upgrade the JGoodies libraries to the latest version to get full Vista support. Since we’d last upgraded LandlordMax, the Looks library had itself upgraded a full version which ended up meaning that we also had to do some code changes in LandlordMax to support the Looks upgrade to version 2. As we were already in the midst of this, we decided to upgrade the Forms library which turned out to be a very simple upgrade.
After we finished coding for this upgrade, we then realized that we also needed to do a Java upgrade to the latest version. The current Java version LandlordMax uses is the 1.5.0_09 JVM and the current version available is now the 1.5.0_11 JVM. Not a major upgrade, but as we bundle it with the installer, this meant that we not only needed to upgrade our development environments (and test for any issues) but also our installer.
Once we were done with these upgrades we found we were still experiencing other issues on Windows Vista only. One of the less obvious ones that took a long time to track down is that Java Swing will sometimes increase the size of the table column headers to something that’s really awful (especially when screen space is limited) only on Windows Vista (again Bug 6434444). Why did this take so long to track down? Firstly because it only happens on Vista, and secondly because this is a newly documented bug within the Java language and therefore there is no real documentation on it other than the Java language bug reports.
Knowing this doesn’t help resolve the issue though. And if you look at the Bug report, you’ll find that there is no known workaround at this time. People are asking for it to be resolved ASAP (I personally found several other related Bug reports open under different numbers). We can’t wait for a Java language update for LandlordMax to be Vista compatible, so we had to discover a workaround that solved the issue in Vista but yet didn’t break it in the other Windows versions. As you can see from the screenshots below, we’ve been able to do that. All I can say is that it wasn’t my favorite solution, but it’s one we’ll have to live with until there’s a update to the Java language.
As you can already see, we’ve had a few bumps on our road to releasing a LandlordMax Vista version. The good news is that the major hurdles are pretty much done, we’re now just tweaking the last details. On top of the Vista issues, we’re also including some minor bug fixes which will all be included in the release notes when it’s released.
All in all, what we thought, well at least what I thought, would be a simple Windows update turned out to be our large update. I can now appreciate why many software companies will not update their current/past software versions and only offer Windows Vista compatibility at an additional charge (for example Quickbooks 2006 will not support Windows Vista, you’ll need to upgrade to Quickbooks 2007 for that). I don’t necesarily think that’s fair, but I can appreciate it having gone through the pain and expense of making LandlordMax Vista compatible. We definitely won’t support Vista on prior versions either, but the current version of LandlordMax (version 3.11) will support Windows Vista at no additional cost to legible customers.
Because of the time it’s taken us to get Windows Vista support for LandlordMax due to all the above difficulties (and others not mentioned), I’d like to thank all of our customers for your patience in letting us get this LandlordMax Windows Vista update out to you as fast as we can. Thank you.
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