Weekly Site Reviews - Monday, March 10, 2008 10:54 - 4 Comments

Weekly Site Review - PTH Consulting

This week’s Weekly Site Review is of Paul Haddad’s PTH Consulting, a microISV selling PTHPasteboard Pro, a Mac clipboard utility ($24.95 USD).

[Note: Right up front I should note that this review was paid for by Paul, falling somewhere in between the regular volunteer free site reviews I do here and the fixed price confidential site reviews I do for clients. As you’ll see, this does not mean I went easy on Paul, but it does mean he got to see it first, had the option of adding comments (not changes) and that I covered a couple of specific issues re his software with him privately.]

Overview:

Paul Haddad’s an extremely experienced Mac software developer and his microISV product PTHPasteboard 4 Pro has a variety of features differentiating it from other Mac clipboard managers. It’s clear from pth.com’s site that Paul has been successfully developing commercial software for other companies - too clear.

Paul - like many, many microISVs who are breaking out of the contract programming trap - makes a number of key mistakes that need substantial remediation if Pasteboard 4 Pro is going to sell up to its potential. Let’s take a look at these issues, and how they may be affecting your microISV sales.

Before we get to the Hook - or in this case the lack of it - The most glaring issue the site as whole suffers from is that it is a decent site if Paul wants to generate more software development work, but it’s not a microISV site. At some point, you have to bite the bullet - or at least have a site that sells your product first and everything else a distant second.

If you click through to PTHPasteboard Pro 4 real home page - which unfortunately most first time visitors will not do - you get a much better presentation. But there’s a problem here: Paul has a competitor on this page that right now looks nearly as good as what Paul wants to sell you: his Free Edition.

Creating a Free Edition of your for-sale product is a mistake many microISVs make - I made it. A year before I released my pay for product, I did a free edition. Forty thousand downloads later of that free version, with visions of giant yellow dump trucks of money coming to me because so many people were using my Free Edition, I released my Pro version, and I learned the hard way a hard truth: free versions cost more sales than they make.

30 day trial version? Absolutely! Free version you have to support, that pulls attention away from your real product (let alone having a different codebase, a mistake Paul did not make) - No way in hell.

For the rest of this review I’m going to focus on what’s happening on the PTHPasteboard page of Paul’s microISV site because it really should be the home page.

Continue…