We often receive compliments about the support given for the Ventrino product. I am humbled by these as they really should be directed to users of the script as they often prove to know better, rather than technical solutions.
A little history of the traffic exchange script can help understand Ventrino support. It started in 1994 as a tool to help bank managers locate interesting sites. I modified the concept later to reward surfers for visiting sites. It was fun taking cash from rich PR companies responsible for the lame advertising of the 90’s.
Every PC delivered with Windows 95 had IE and included the new ‘Frames’ standard. This was an opportunity to move the application on to the web, the right place for it to be. The concept of the ’surf bar’ was created and soon I had many 10’s of thousands of people surfing daily.
My ISP struggled with the ‘unlimited’ free hosting they offered, on one hand they wanted to charge mega $$$ on the other they did not want to lose the traffic. At the time I did not own a domain name (in those days it would cost $150/year). Running from a free sub domain given by my ISP I gave them a one-line advert on the front page with a link to a signup form. I didn’t make any money from the script but I know the ISP got weekly signups, and they never shared a penny of it :–(
I published an email address but never received anything, not even spam in the beginning, the business Iif you could call it that) grew on its own. Perhaps the concept was simple enough, put your link in, surf, and have your site visited by other surfers.
Then I lost my job.
The UK government introduced two changes that had an effect on IT sub contractors: A new tax called IR35 which meant “we don’t like the fact you guys make so much money so we’re going to take it from you” and the other the introduction of free working visas to any foreigner who claimed to know something about IT. Apparently the UK lacked IT skills. This of course sent our heritage abroad. Any IT skill was snapped by USA, Canada and Australia. Poor Britain was left with an IT work force that barely spoke English but at least it was cheap.
I wasn’t ready to leave the UK permanently. I did have a growing business in the USA that looked after itself, and while I love America and Americans there is an attraction to Blighty that you can only acknowledge if you are a Brit abroad.
I developed the traffic exchange script for resale. This is the moment I understood the need for support. Other developers produced clones of the traffic exchange script. Support, rather than the quality of the script, was becoming crucial to sales.
As the script moved from a drain on resources to producing income so to the nature of support changed. The script cost $695 and for that I made sure everything worked the way is should. I was asked to develop exclusive code but this would compromise the time I had for support. Instead I developed non exclusive new features (still the way we do it today). The only advantage you get would be the time to the next patch (3 months at best). Still the orders came in.
Jake joined us and I dropped the price to $395. Support would move exclusively to the forum. Everyone ignored that and we found 30 to 40 new tickets each morning, every single one of them asking a question that was already covered in the FAQ or elsewhere on the forum. Their complaint that $400 should be enough for support too had a ring of truth to it and it would have done to us had we been selling 10 a week.
The price dropped eventually to its current value of $195 and we were determined technical support should be handled in the forum. I increased Jake’s hours and asked him to focus on non-support issues. He is not a programmer anyway.
Because of the volume of questions arriving Jake learned a few things and tried to answer as many as he could, this led people to think he was a techy after all and sure enough the sales ticket system descended into the support system we did not want it to be.
In the mean time some fantastic work was being done by many of the script owners themselves. Remarkably one guy who didn’t even own a script was helping out. For a small fee he will fix practically any issue you have. And it was (and still is) a small fee. To my deepest regret we had a misunderstanding and I remember saying something I am not proud of. Can you believe it? This man was helping me. I was guilty of not researching the original problem and under pressure of the moment got a bit snaky. He has since forgiven me and continues to offer great service to other forum members. We have in fact made it more formal allowing him to produce tailor made applications just for you. With a huge knowledge of our script he creates solutions for any requirement. Check him out, his forum name is raydube and he speaks French and English, his website is www.raydube.com.
Adam and I do the development work. Although Adam was 7 when the first script was released he is responsible for moving it to PHP in recent years. CGI Perl/C and ASP have all been used in the past. Switching to PHP has meant anyone can get involved in third party development. An increase in support is down to peoples understanding of PHP, because they know more, there is more to ask.
This lead to a rally of development. We actually took a route that would be a serious no-no in my apprenticeship days. Better known as “get it done, damn the consequences”. My peers consternation is duly noted.
So an increase in support was on the cards. As integrating a design generates most support we put effort into producing an easy to use system. Offering two methods of integration our template system is so flexible we have competitive script owners switching to ours and using it to “make it look like xxxx’s script please; I don’t want people on the forum knowing I have switched to Walker!”
Adam and I embarked on the next version. This is a radical change in so many ways. Some may think of it more of a “nuke” type script for marketing. Unfortunately it has not been a smooth ride to date and that’s all down to the support for the current script.
On one hand we have people itching for the new script wanting to know where we are with it, on the other people who have just invested in the current script wanting support now.
How can we please both? The first thing I decided was to drop the price and free installation. You save $97.50 but in return you must install yourself. If you must have us do it then we charge $67 but you can get someone on the forum to do it for $40 or less. Remarkably this lead to one person demanding free installation as that was on offer when he viewed our website, the fact that when he bought his script the price had dropped to just $97.50 had ‘nothing to do with it’. Jake gave him short thrift and he has now posted that Ventrino is a scam on ‘900 thousand’ websites. Could we ever get any better advertising? I thank him from the heart of my bottom because if anything sales have increased since he said that (although it may have something to do with the lower price too ;-))
I decided that with the script at its lowest price ever we should experiment by telling Jake he was only allowed to deal with sales enquiries through the sales system. Pre-sales can sometimes require technical assistance but even these, even if he knew the answer, should be redirected to the installation forum. The current version has been around long enough for all installation issues already covered in the FAQ, User Manual or for those who don’t like to read – they can ask on the forum too.
Tags: Support
