This has been a bit of an odd week for me.  Aside from being laid low by the worst flu I’ve had in years (Japanese socialized medicine to the rescue!), I’ve gotten no less than four inquiries from people at taking up various positions at their various software ventures/uISVs/etc, and all of them have cited Bingo Card Creator (the business more than the software) or this blog as the reason for extending the offer.  I’m quite flattered, and almost scared (c.f. Groucho Marx, on his opinion of a political party which would have him as a member).  When I started this blog I had vague dreams of perhaps eventually using it as a portfolio of sorts in case my next position required writing on a regular basis, but I hadn’t ever thought people would actively seek me out over it.

That being said, until next August when my next day job starts I have far too many irons in the fire to be taking on additional projects: in addition to increasing demands of my time at the day job, Bingo Card Creator, and all things a 24-year old can find to busy himself with (aside from giving this apartment a good cleaning, which it has really needed for a while now), I’m shortly going to be starting an intensive search for my next “real job”.  If you think that you have just the job for me, by all means feel free to send me an email.

I saw my first line of Java code today in over a month.  One of my recent customers had a very severe showstopper bug (not being able to print) caused by an edge case which I knew was out there but hadn’t been planning to fix until v1.05 (it involves breaking my assumption that most teachers usually print to the default printer).  I had considered fixing it in 1.04 but thought it would take up too much time to do so.  It ended up taking less than an hour, AND I threw in an improvement on another feature while I was at it — my printing code is a big ugly hairy beast so when I go to fight with it I intend to come out with a freaking pile of treasure to justify my time.

1.05 isn’t released yet but, seeing as how I have a holiday on Thursday for the first time in a month or so, I think I’ll spend half of it going down my new features checklist and the other half with the deploy-to-the-Internets procedures.  I love RoboSoft — set it and forget it.  Memo to self: include the holiday lists just in time for Turkey day and the rush of consumerism in its wake.

Payloadz just announced that they are rolling out a service to sell downloads through Google Checkout.  That might be of interest to some uISVers, particularly those who are just starting out and have maximum flexibility with choosing a payment provider.  If anyone ends up using it, please, tell us how it went down.
I, for one, will be sticking with e-junkie/Paypal. I’ve used Payloadz in the past and, while I’m sure they are an excellent service for some people, they aren’t quite right for me.  Their payment structure is tiered based on sales, and the tiers compare very disfavorably to e-junkie’s flat $5 a month payment.  (Example: $15 if you sell $100 to $499.99, $29 if you sell $500 to $999.99).  Thats a bit more money, and potentially quite a bit more money, for a service which does not justify the price differential to my point of view.  In any given month, I’m right around that $500 level, and getting whalloped for $29 for what I can get for $5 doesn’t strike me as a great deal.  Even if you count the $1.02 I’d save per Paypal transaction (my current spending on AdWords means Checkout would be free for me until $900 in sales a month) I’d still be a bit behind.

Additionally, Payloadz does not have the great, responsive customer service that e-junkie has.  This isn’t to say that its noticeably bad or anything (they didn’t respond to my one email inquiry, but hey, I understand how that can happen), its just that, well, e-junkie made an API change for me within 48 hours just because I asked for it.  That sets a pretty darn high bar for me in terms of what you would have to provide as a competitor.  I mean, if you said “Abandon e-junkie and I’d give you a next-generation console”… well, make it a Wii and I’ll entertain the notion.   Briefly.  Before rejecting it.  They made an API change which saved me hours of Perl coding.  Seth Godin, feel free to put that in your next book about making your customer feel special, because it sure as heck worked.

Now how would my customers look at me changing over?  Well, the messages Payloadz sends on my behalf were, well, less “on brand” than I wanted my messages to be.  They included the payloadz URL (sidenote: neither Payloadz nor e-junkie is a name which says “I am an upstanding businessman, wouldn’t you agree Mrs. Middle School Teacher”) and text which was irrelevent to my customers but which I couldn’t customize.  e-junkie gives me total flexibility (double-plus important once I finally roll out the Japanese version) and I can hide their URLs from the vast majority of my customers.

Additionally, Paypal is, believe it or not, a trusted name in my market.  70% of my customers have verified addresses on Paypal — i.e. they’ve got a Paypal account (not just a credit card) and they’ve done business with them before or went through an extended process just to give little old me $24.95.  Google has a market penetration of, and this is just a round number estimate, 0%.  While they’ve got a good name and good image, I don’t know that either says “You can trust me with your money, Mrs. Doesn’t Really Use The Computer Much Mother Of Two” yet.

I’ll re-evaluate this decision in the fullness of time.  In particular, I’d re-evaluate it a lot faster if I only had to change one service, not two, to take advantage of that free 5% boost to my profit margins.  (Hint hint, e-junkie.)

So I’m strolling through the mall (mostly to get out of the rain), minding my own business, when suddenly I pass in front of the video game shop:

Store Manager: Excuse me, young man!

Me: Yes?

Store Manager: You asked about Wii pre-orders earlier, right?

Me: Yep, thats right.

Store Manager: We started taking them today.

Me: Oh, lovely.  Can I put one in?

Store Mananger: Certainly.  What is your name and telephone number?

Me: Patrick McKenzie, 555-1234-5678. 

Store Manager: OK.  Would you like a call on release day?

Me: You’ve got to be kidding me.  I mean, no, I won’t need the call, thank you. 

Store Manager: OK then.

Me: …

Me: So this is the point where you ask me to sign up for a $500 bundle including $200 of games that you would not otherwise be able to sell and pay all of it as a deposit, right?

Store Manager: Oh, you silly Americans and your sense of humor.

Me: Wait, you mean you let me pre-order just the console, without putting any money down, and you guarantee that it will be available on launch day?  And this for the hottest product this year, which folks are probably pitching tents for as we speak in downtown Tokyo, the level of anticipation for which is so high that South Park made an episode about one of their characters wanting to by cryogenically frozen to avoid having to wait for a month?

Store Manager: I’m sorry sir, I hadn’t realized you didn’t know what “pre-order” meant.

Me: I guess I didn’t.  Thanks for clearing that up.

“Hmm, I wonder why I’ve gone three days without a sale.  I don’t suppose it could be that my trial version got corrupted again.  *click*  Well, that answers that question.”  Time to have a quick chat with GoDaddy and figure out what the heck is going on on their side, because I’m positive that that file was good an hour after I uploaded it.

Update: See Nick Hebb in the comments for something I didn’t think to check for.  This won’t work.  Ahh well.  I’ll leave it up for posterity.

I guess I shouldn’t be mentioning this but, hey, I’m a giving type of guy. One of the best decisions I made during the creation of Bingo Card Creator was cutting my web site designer out of the budget and going with a design by Sang Nguyen which I found on Open Source Web Design. This is my advice to anyone who is wondering how to cut a major expense item out of their budget while not compromising the customer experience much — I am positively thrilled both with my design and with the amount of work I didn’t have to do to get it running.

There has been a discussion on the Business of Software boards recently about whether paying a web designer is a good idea. Cards on the table time: I think not, unless you are getting a site which has functionality in addition to eye candy, an under-market rate, or a web design which positively sings to you. Here is my trump card for the superiority of oswd over a designer: the designer won’t give you a PR8 link to your site for nothing. I just discovered oswd will do that. Granted, its not a maximally effective PR8 link — it will eventually scroll from the front page of links (faster as more people come to know about it — at the moment it appears to be close to the best kept SEO secret on the Internet ;) ), so it won’t be at one click of depth from the front page (!) for forever. But hey, which part of “free PR8 link” are you complaining about?

… it WILL be your trial executable, without fail.  Murphy’s law.  One freaking byte on disk got corrupted at some point within the last week and I just found out about it today, by someone who was kind enough to write in and say “Heya, this won’t install, says the file is corrupted.  And I downloaded it three times”).  One quick download later and I was able to reproduce the error, which is funny because I haven’t uploaded anything to that directory on the server in literally weeks.  Did a quick hex diff and, boom, one byte out of place, which called NSIS to say “Uh oh, checksums don’t match, I’m out of here”.  *sigh*  Well, better to know about it and be able to fix it than to not know about it, right?