Why I Love Apple
“But again and again, Apple delights with its focus on the user experience. Its engineers and programmers obviously work through every aspect of how the product will be used, and refine it until they get to the slightest detail”

The High Cost of Being Poor
From food prices to auto insurance, when did poverty get so expensive?

Diseconomies of Scale and Lines of Code
The bigger your software is (LOC – Lines of Code) the longer it takes to add more features. This relationship between project size and productivity is illustrated in the article.

Open Source Reality Check
Comparing free open source software to commercial paid software

How Not to Pay Rent
The lofty ambitions of tenants of illegal apartment buildings

Top 10 Dumbest Online Business Ideas That Made It Big Time.
The title says it all.

Top 5 projects to boost home’s value for resale
The title says it all.

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In the last few days I’ve been personally working with a customer of ours to help him get his letterhear/logo to correctly print on the invoice printouts of LandlordMax. A quick related aside, we will be releasing LandlordMax 2.12c very shortly, possibly this week, at the latest next week, which will incorporate this fix. In addition, LandlordMax version 2.12c will have very significant performance increases! Especially for those of you with larger databases!

Getting back to today’s topic, in one of our last email exchanges, he sent me this comment (which he has given me permission to publish as a testimonial on our LandlordMax Success Stories webpage):

“Well again let me say thanks for your assistance, as well as again acknowledging your company having one of the best products on the market. It is by far superior to Quicken Rental Property Management.”

Thank you Ken, it’s always great to hear positive feedback!

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Just a quick update because I promised I would post an update tp the entrepreneurs following this blog, the traffic (measured in unique visitors) to LandlordMax continues to maintain at least double it’s previous best day before the we launched the new LandlordMax Free Online Real Estate Analyzer. Therefore this service continues to be a success as a traffic and buzz generating campaign!

Once at least a month has passed by I’ll write a detailed entry showing some of our results so that you too can benefit from it. But I’ll quickly mention that there is definitely something to be said about offering something of value to generate traffic and buzz!

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What do you get when you buy a product? You get the product yes, but what else do you get? Customer service, probably. What about information on how to make the product? Can you resell it? Can you repackage it as your own and resell it (for example instead of Microsoft Windows can you resell it as Steph’s Windows)? Do you get the schematics on how to make it yourself? Not likely, but not everyone thinks so!

I’ve never commented on any customer requests we’ve ever gotten over the past three years since LandlordMax has been around, but this week we received such an audacious request that I’m going to make a rule to the exception. I will however leave out the person and company’s name, as well I will paraphrase the emails going back and forth. I will acknowledge that this isn’t the first time we’ve received a unreasonable requests, however what’s interesting about this one is that it is the most audacious request we’ve ever received and it also had follow-up emails.

Without further ado the first email we received contained two questions. The first was a general pre-sales question such as will the software do this or that for a special situation. The second question is the big one. It went along the lines of:

I want to repackage LandlordMax so that I can put my company logo on it and remove your company’s logo. Is this possible? Also, can I have access to your complete source code?

Wow! We’ve received some requests in the past of people trying to resell it on their own, which by the way does require permission from whichever company makes the product (often this is done with distributors or directly with the company through some sort of arrangement). But not with this request, they wanted to brand the product as their own and have full access to the source code, the full schematics of LandlordMax! This is basically like asking Microsoft for the source code of Windows and repacking it as say Steph’s Windows. Microsoft would never do that in a million years. This is the same as Dan Brown selling a copy of his book The Da Vinci Code and with that you have his permission to repackage it under a different title by another author (for example “Steph’s Da Vinci Code” written by Stephane Grenier). I don’t think so! When you buy a can of Coca-Cola, do you get access to the Coca-Cola formula to make your own and repackage it as Steph’s Coca-cola? I don’t think so! So why are they asking? Maybe they just don’t know any better, so let’s give them the benefit of the doubt as we normally do (honestly many people don’t realize it until you explain it).

So I personally proceeded to respond to this request, more out of curiousity than anything else, mentionning that no they aren’t allowed, as well doing so without special permission is actually illegal (copyright). Surpringly they responded to this expressing pushing their request further. Here’s the paraphrase of what I received:

I’m also thinking about reselling LandlordMax as I have found the trial version to be very good. However, I would only feel comfortable selling it if I had anonymity where clients would think that this product has been developed by my own company. I am happy to pay a fee for this or work on some commission/affiliate scheme with you.

Wow! So what they’re basically saying is that if you buy a can of Coca-Cola, you only feel right reselling it if you have complete control over the product, access to it’s full research and development that took years to build, it’s secret formula, and that you can repackage it as your own Steph’s Coca-Cola. Not only that, you want completely anonymity selling it however you want, at any price you want, etc. Complete and full control? Would any company oblige to this? I highly doubt it. If you don’t believe, make this request to Coca-Cola.

Luckily for the extra sentence at the end, where they mention they were happy to pay a fee for this. What kind of fee? So I decided to push it for my own interest to see what their expections were for the fee, because at this point I knew this wasn’t going any further. To go back a second, my initial intention in my first reply was to try to steer them away from their repackaging concept and have them become an affiliate through our LandlordMax Affiliate Program. This is a great little program that benefits everyone, they get a commission from any direct sales from them and it’s automated by a third party service called ShareASale.com. It’s worked great for us and we have many affiliates this way.

However I could tell by their last email (remember I’m just paraphrasing above, and I did omit some of the content) that they weren’t interested in the affiliate program. So I did hinted that they could get full access to the source, etc., but that it would be virtually the same as buying the company and it would cost them a substantial amount. Needless to say this is the last I heard from them.

At the end of the day, I don’t mind that they didn’t become a LandlordMax customer. I suspect that the cost of dealing with them would have far outweighed the revenue they would have generated. I’m just amazed at the audacity that they had, what they expected to get when purchasing LandlordMax. This is the biggest most unreasonable request we’ve ever had which is why I thought it would be an interesting read.

And please don’t think that I don’t believe in partnerships, I do. As an example, we’re actually in the process of establish a strong partnership with a company in the UK that will sell LandlordMax along with their services and offer support above and beyond what we can offer above our own. This company was very reasonable, they understood business, and came to us with an opportunity that made sense for both of us, it was a win-win situation. If a company approaches us with an opportunity that makes sense, we have open ears.

Anyways, I didn’t want to go on such a rant (my first on FollowSteph.com because I don’t really believe in them) but I thought it would make for an interesting read!

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Today we launched our latest press release in a completely different manner than usual. Normally we would send our press release to PRWeb and have it show up online 2 days later with very good success. This time however we decided to go another route and use one of the two major press release companies, PR Newswire.

PR Newswire is very different than PRWeb. Firstly, it costs a lot more! To begin with there is a $125/year membership fee. Then for a targetted US1 Financial Services release it costs $645/release. After that they offer several highly focused lists that journalists directly ask to receive. These generally start around $200 and go up from there. For those of you who aren’t familiar with PRWeb.com, a decent press release there starts at $30 and goes up. However you generally don’t spend more than $100.

Another difference between the two is that PRWeb is mainly focused with online media whereas PR Newswire is an older company (50 years) and is more focused on mainstream media. Because of this, I’m hoping that this will give us a larger push offline, to other news outlets.

There are other differences, which I won’t go into details right now, but needless to say I believe PR Newswire is worth a try.

We just launched the release a few minutes ago so hopefully it will prove worthwhile. I’ll post an update in the next few days on our success or failure with this new press release service.

You can find it here.

Please let me know if you see anything about this press release anywhere (other than an automated feed).

Updated sightings so far:

• Bay Area Kron 4 TV News
  
• Yahoo Real Estate News

Further update:

It appears as though the press release was also sighted on 7 other news channels accross the United-States so far.

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