Step 1: write a POS shareware app. Step 2: promote it

How did I get here? Why did I feel the need to start a blog?

Googling my way around the globe trying to improve the popularity of my shareware web site http://www.dolesoft.com/ by submitting to search engines, directories, etc I got to met some very interesting sites like http://waiterrant.net/ and http://new.horsefeathers.com/.

The idea came to mind that it might be 'blogical' to start an weblog about my pos software developing project "the DigiWaiter Suite" and see if it might speed things up.

First a bit about myself, my name is Michael I live in the Netherlands near Rotterdam and I'm thirties.
I work in a company as a system engineer we delivery the DIY stores with wood, fly screens, sliding doors, etc, etc.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, what I do is maintaining the 70 computers and 10 servers in our company, I take care of our ERP application. Program it to suit the needs of our users and do some programming stuff in MS .NET / flash. I always have trouble to find the right english word for the job I do so if someone can give me a better word for it as 'system engineer' please do so.

In the middle of my intro (I wanted to do this at the beginning but who cares...) I'm sorry for making typos, misspelling. The Dutch usually speak 2 or 3 languages (dutch, english and some speak french / german too) but to speak a language and to write in one is a different thing so please don't flame me...
In july we will be going to Lancaster PA to visit family so I can catch up on my english I hope...

Back to the popularity / web site thing, I started to write a Point of Sale (POS) application in .NET a couple of years ago, after in 2003 I launched with mixed success a vb application to create cd-covers which was called scan4cover.

You can still download it on the web (for instance at download.com) and since jewel cases where a lot more popular a few years ago I guess it's been download about 20,000 times (that's a rough guess, download.com tells me 7,500 and if you google for scan4cover there are about 2350 links with other download sites.

I protected my precious software with a serial and a 10-use trial, set up an account at http://www.shareit.com/ so that they could handle the 'flood of 14.95$ donations' from people who after were affected by the superb 'ease of use' of scan4cover couldn't do without anymore...

30 hours after I launced s4c I googled for it to find out that the first 8 hits were from sites related to one of Arnies famous lines 'hastalavistababy' yep they'd cracked my (not so) fort knox protection.

Up till now there have been if I recall right 7 or 8 people who payed the 14.95$. I still send them a card every christmas!!
I had to wait 2 years for shareit to pay me my first 50 bucks, they only pay out if your 'revenue' is > 50, they charge a percentage on every sale so it took my this long.

But then again it was worth it 100%!!! The feeling I got when I saw the first e-mail telling me about Order no. 1 for Scan4cover:

Dear Mr./Mrs. Michael van den Dool,

We have received an order for your product "Scan4Cover".
The credit card charge has been authorized.
We sent out the license code of the program to the user:
Program = 183036
Number of licenses = 1
ShareIt Ref.No. = 6202236
Reseller =
Promotion =
Net sales = USD 14.95
Net Discount = USD 0.00
collected VAT = USD 0.00
Shipping = USD 0.00
VAT on Shipping = USD 0.00
Our service fee = USD -2.50
VAT on service fee = USD 0.00
Total = USD 12.45

Not to mention the sight of 'my proggie' at korean, japanes, german, australian, etc sites.
It costed me 75$ to publish it on download.com but they have a whole lot of related sister sites (e.g. zdnet) so you can speak of 'a snowball effect' when your software's listed at download.com

After scan4cover MS launched .NET 2003 and I tried to get familiar with the object oriented OOP thing with which I have my bad and better days...

I don't know what exactly got me interested in the restaurant / POS stuff but one day I had the thought that with .NET and especially the compact framework I would be able to create an application on a handheld with which waiters could take an order and send it "Wireless" to the kitchen.
An excuse was born to get myself a 'cool' (otherwise totally unnecessary) Dell Axim!

Call me stupid but I didn't do any research on exisiting POS software, I never do I'm getting warmed up about something and I want to go for it.
Searching the net for existing software would for sure be 'demotivating' for me, sure I could learn a trick or two from it but with scan4cover I googled before I started out and seeing my competitors made me almost think: 'hey why bother, you can't compete with this...'

I started programming with great enthusiasm and because of the lack of knowledge (because I'm not really a full time / trained dot net programmer) it always took me twice the time to learn how to do 'a trick' and I have to double that because it's always implemented wrong the first (2) time(s) ;)

The problem arose I had to create 2 applications if I wanted to succeed, one (receiving) server and one (sending) client.
Because I only know the restaurant business 'from one side of the steak' I made the assumption that the appropriate location of the receiving server app. would be in the kitchen so the cook(s) could see the orders 'coming through'.

I ran into a million of minor and major problems:`

• The server had to be able to 'talk back' to the clients.
• How would the client know the order got through all right?
• What if the server app 'crashed', the intended platform was xp / 2000 ;) , would the clients be able to reconnect.
• How would I be able to add a 'memo' to an "order line", for instance if I wanted to let the cook know that the steak for table 5 had to be medium?
• How would I handle the process of 'picking the orders', what would be the procedure if there was a mistake, how could one correct an existing order.
• 100 x etc, etc
  

In addition to the server and the PDA client I decided there should also be a desktop client so for instance bartenders could also use it to send orders to the kitchen. Better yet the desktop client should make it possible to "pick orders" to (like the server app..) because that's what a bartender does, doesn't he? (he 'picks the drinks')...
So I ended up building / maintaining 3 apps, if I changed something in the PDA client I had to change it in the Desktop client too %-((

• Then there were problems like:
• Protecting my applications with a time limit.
• Creating installers so installing the apps would be a matter of clicking a link (hard part, especially the PocketPC application).
• Making it able for the users to register there version / remove the time limitation.
  Decrypt all of my code so it would be a bit harder to reverse engineer my code.
  

When I after a couple of years if finally had 3 more or less stable beta versions (yep sometimes more sometimes less stable), I really wanted 'to get the stuff out there..'

I created all necessary PAD files (same as I did with scan4cover), they prevented me from having to do a lot of work every time I wanted to submit my software to the shareware sites (especially because I'd have to do it 3 times per site...)
Submitted to a lot of shareware sites and search engines and tried to improve my popularity on google with special Internet Business Promoter software by changing keywords, meta- tags, etc.

Up till now I have about 10 users a day, I had 40 a day in February but it turned out to be (what I think of now) a Google ad-sense scam or something like that. Every day for a 15 minute period I got 30 visitors each 'consuming a few kb (20-40 kb) and after I informed google and e-mailed 2 or 3 times back and forth with my site statistics it stopped.

So now I'm enduring a continuous 'brainstorm' how to attract more potential customers, uhh correction my primary goal is to find serious beta testers because I don't really believe there's already anyone out there who's willing to pay for an unstable beta...

So that's why I got in to this blog and that's why I'm already typing for 3 hours now and I really like it better every hour ;))

But seriously, hit me with your comments, take a look and hey what the hack: 'burn down my software / site if you have that feeling about it' but remember two things:

• I am an will be an amateur ;))
• I am Dutch so I'll always defend myself by saying; 'hey, that's not what I intended!'

I'm pretty tired. I guess I'm gonna hit the sack...
You all take a look and take care!

Oh and uhh, best thing to start with is my flash demo:
http://www.dolesoft.com/flash/digidemo.swf

Michael