Gautam Jain's Blog » Software Services

ASP chooses a sensible name

Gautam Jain — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 12:08:45 +0000

The Association of Shareware Professionals has renamed itself to the Association of Software Professionals (ASP).

Details of the name change can be found here.

I have been a member of ASP for many years now. If you are running a software company then I strongly suggest that you join the ASP. The members’ discussion group (newsgroup) will give you valuable tips for marketing your software, SEO, software registration, protection, new product development, product ideas, website feedback, product review etc.

Moreover, members of the ASP offer their products at discount price to other co-members. I take this benefit each year and save hundreds of dollars.
Thanks.

The Association of Shareware Professionals has renamed itself today to the Association of Software Professionals.

MailChimp – Email marketing service

Gautam Jain — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 09:01:15 +0000

When sending our email newsletters to our customers, we were always worried about our emails being marked as SPAM. And we didn’t know how to get away with it. We kept improving our email copy (subject, content, format etc), but still Gmail and others would treat it as SPAM.

For the launch of our product RecentX, we wanted to fix this for sure. Seeing the potential of this product, we want each of our customer to know about it. So we asked the geeks at Business Of Software forum. We were quite confident of getting a solution because all of us mISVs face this problem.

And yes, we got the answer – MailChimp

In our experience, this is a simply fantastic mass mailing service. We wanted to solved the SPAM problem. Period. And MailChimp did solve it. The emails which we sent from MailChimp was authenticated. So it did not get filtered by most of the anti-spam systems.

MailChimp website’s usability and looks are very impressive. They also have something called “Inbox Inspector” that sends the email to all major webmail services (gmail, hotmail etc) and verify whether it reaches their inbox and not the SPAM folder. Plus it shows how your email looks in each of those webmail services.

The campaign report shows all the required details. How many opened? how many clicked which link on your email?, supports Google Analytics etc.

MailChimp is free for 100 subscribers. I strongly suggest that you have a look at this service.

Thanks.

Free icons at IconPot (For both personal & commercial use)

Gautam Jain — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 07:35:23 +0000

Here is one very nice site which links to other websites that give away icons for free ( both personal and commercial use) – IconPot

IconDock – Impressive Stock Icons

Gautam Jain — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 09:24:34 +0000

I am very much impressed with a stock icons vendor IconDock. They have limited but very nice icon set. What is special about them is that they sell individual icons too.

Their website is very well designed.

Here are some of their limitations (as of today):

They sell only 16×16, 32×32 and vector sets. It is developer’s responsibilities to use a vector image editing software such as Adobe Illustrator to edit their vector sets to any size they want. Not all developers (especially uISVs) own a license to Adobe Illustrator.
They do not design custom icons. If you don’t find all the required icons in their icon sets then you are stuck. You can get the additional icons done by them.