Over the last year or so, I've been trying to manage my time better to give all of my projects time. However, I've tried to put the big earners first, but still give all my projects some of my time.
I haven't done any work on my kids program since July and I have millions of bug reports and uninstall questionnaires to wade through, then summarise then fixes to make.
It not so much that its been shoved to the bottom of the pile, more that I've felt that other project never get any time where it did use to get a lots.
Now I've not got any great hope that my kids program will suddenly start to make a lot of money. However I still do sell licenses for it every so often.
Should I work on it now?
by JM
What other projects do you have to work on? Do they
ReplyDeletehave more opportunity to make money?
How did your experiment on the KMF sales/ downloads
(the one recommended by blue) work out? What did you
find out?
Had 2 sales in February, which is 2 better that January.
ReplyDeleteSo its hard to tell really with so few sales.
I guess I wouldn't be grumbling so much about doing an update, but I never seem to be able fix my bugs. This could be due to a number of things.
It always seems like things work fine on my pc and fail on other peoples.
To surmise, I feel like I'm going round in circles.
I guess at the end of the day, if I have bug reports, people are having problems and I'm loosing potential sales.
Maybe this time will be different and I can post my code to the coding forum, where I go every six months and my programs will be fixed.
Are the bugs uninstallation bugs? How do you get the
ReplyDeleteuninstaller reports?
I think there's a couple of major threads to product management. The first is collecting information on problems and providing updates in an organised fashion. The second is adding new features to make the product attractive to a wider audience.
ReplyDeleteYou seem to have part of the first route nailed in that you have a decent system for collecting bug reports. The question is how you handle the addition of new features.
The way we develop products in my day job is that we try to put as much of our available resource as possible into developing new things. Where something is borderline between a bug/ feature change we try to roll that into a major new version of the product. Minor
versions tend just to mop up little bug fixes. The reasoning behind this is that fixing bugs inthe existing version just plays to your existing audience/ market and the whole point of the game is to attract new customers.
My recommendation is to work on new versions with significant feature additions and treat bug fixes as a secondary thread of development, i.e. plan a set of feature additions over a number of versions and then decide which bugs will be fixed in those versions. The odds are the code causing bugs will be changed in the new version anyway - and you'll no doubt introduce new
ones too!
I think before anything, I will look to see what the bugs are and its theres any significant trend in the usage stats.
ReplyDeleteWhen I compare my sales with my other products the ratio per download has to be a lot higher. As I get massive amount of downloads for kmf.
I feel like I've already put tonnes of features into the program already. I've regrouped and revised a lot in the past.
However, you could be right more new features could be the answer.
I think I'll see what bugs are and the usage stats though.
I've really no idea about the percentage of people who have bugs and who have tried the program successfully.
Hmmm.
ReplyDeleteI can easily select all and save to a text file all my emails in a certain folder in outlook.
Wonder if its worth my writing a small program to analyse my uninstall questionnaires.
LOL another project.
Might be quicker for me in the future to see what the stats show.
Maybe I could do it in C# to make it more worthwhile.
LOL, can believe I've suggested more work for me to do :)
Don't let me confuse you! You could interpret what I was
ReplyDeletesaying as "add more features to sell more". However,
you could also interpret what I was saying as "if you
have no more features to add, how can you sell more?".
Analyse the stats as far as you can. For example, if 50%
of downloads don't work for some reason then correcting
the bugs might double the sales. However, if 10% go
wrong, fixing the bugs isn't going to gain you much. You
then have to decide whether it's worth the effort of fixing
the bugs or just doing something new.
Yep good point.
ReplyDeleteI've never really looked at bugs like that. I've always thought that I needed to fix all bugs.
We can never fix all bugs. You will always carry a few.
ReplyDeleteDefine the feature roadmap for a product and fit the
bugs in as a secondary consideration. Fixing minor or
infrequent bugs isn't going to bring more sales.
Unless of course the product crashes all the time as soon
as a trial user runs it for the first time! These kind of
bugs must be fixed ASAP.