If it’s easy, everyone will go for it.

Only a small fraction of people appreciate the benefits that can be realized from complexity and the true power that comes from being able to completely fine tune everything to perfection.

Most people aren’t perfectionists.

Make it simple to use and obtain.

Make it easy to understand.

Make it relate to their problems and frustrations of everything they have seen so far.

Experienced skepticism aside, people appreciate “free” beyond anything else.

. . .

These lessons, which much like any business book are just common sense, are seriously starting to make me reconsider how we manage the sales, distribution and positioning of all our products.

Question being, how quickly can you expect to see ExchangeDefender or Exchange hosting provided for free?

I still haven’t quite put the finishing touches on the masterpiece that will be the “Vladville Launch of Shockey Monkey” – stay tuned for that. Launching it to my fans isn’t quite as easy as hiring a PR company and going to a trade show. Mostly because you know the truth. It’s hard shadowing over “If I spent less time writing funny blog posts maybe this thing would have launched 2 years ago”

We are still tweaking and perfecting things on a daily basis and taking massive amounts of feedback that I intend to take most of this week to fully collect, process with the team and offer manageable, reasonable timelines and expectations. Given the Duke Nukem history of this piece of software, I hope you can all appreciate the extra caution I’m using in putting things out there.

Below is a portion of the newsletter I sent out to my partners on Friday – they were the first to hear since I wrote it for them. If you’re curious, please hop on in. If you’re a competitor, join in as well – since the official launch of Shockey Monkey I’ve received no less than a dozen “you beat us to it” emails so this place is about to get a lot more crowded.

Tune in.

Check it out.

Hopefully it’s funny.

If you can, aim for the noon webcasts. I actually have content for those. The midnight ones are just me getting drunk followed by an hour of of Arnie and The Siols of Chaos tribute band featuring the hits from ZZ Top’s Sharp Dressed Man to Simon & Garfunkel – The Sound of Ping Silence from a dead SAN.

…

I know sometimes folks don’t like to read. I’ve got your back. And just to show you how much I believe in this, I will be talking about it live next week. But wait, there’s more. I will double that offer – if you can’t make it Monday at noon, I will do another presentation Wednesday at noon. Tune in and let me show you all the awesome things this is going to do for your business. Here are schedules that are hopefully convenient to all my American and European partners.

United States & Europe
Mon, Aug 16, 2010 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM EDT
Register Now!
Wed, Aug 18, 2010 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT
Register Now!

But what.. there’s more! What about Australia? That’s 2 AM my time Vlad!!! What about us? If you sign up for a webinar right now, I will stay up till 1 AM to talk to you too! Here are the Aussie webinars.

Tue, Aug 17, 2010 12:00 AM – 1:00 AM EDT
(Tuesday, 2PM in Sydney)
Register Now!
Thu, Aug 19, 2010 12:00 AM – 1:00 AM EDT
(Thursday, 2PM in Sydney)
Register Now!

We launched Shockey Monkey. This is probably the only place I can be honest about it so pardon the rambling. And to be honest, after years of development and feedback and making sure we have a platform to grow our partners and our business, I’m pretty much dead tired. Let the following be the bottom line as far as I’m concerned.

How did it go Vlad?

This is my gift to the business community that made me who I am. Personally. Professionally. Thank you. It’s free. Really. No catches. You don’t have to buy ExchangeDefender. You don’t have to join the partner program. I won’t sell your contact information to the Nigerian mafia that I pay to SPAM you with 419 letters.

Seriously. It’s free. Enjoy.

The launch went much, much, much better than expected.

That’s sort of a total lie. We spent a lot of money on the event and counted on launching it on Tuesday morning to coincide with the room drop at CompTIA. So everyone was supposed to go home, take a long nap, wake up at midnight and get ready to do last minute checks and polishes.

At 6 PM on Monday, Frank Gurnee from CharTec texted me to congratulate me about Shockey Monkey. How did he hear about it? He got the room drop. 2 seconds later, text from Stephanie: “Hey, they decided to do a room drop tonight instead of tomorrow.”

Now here is the really cool part: The www.shockeymonkey.com at that time had a blank page (intentionally because we didn’t want to be in the search index, the signup page had the payment gateway disabled, the documentation page had a test CSS my layout monkey wanted me to vote up or down and the contact page I had requested just that morning was pointing to a non-existent file.

So the plane started taking off, and in the clear violation of FAA rules, I was texting fantically to wake up the monkeys and get them to get ready to fling poo faster. I was texting about 3 words a txt, mostly because the 10 year old next to me was staring at my phone expecting it to crash the plane at any moment, and partially because I didn’t know at which point the 3G would go to Edge and be dead.

My texting stream ended with the following response from my developer:

“Plz stop. Each time you msg me my blood pressure increases. Let me handle it… I have about 2 hours right?”

fml.

But wait, it gets better!

I get on the Airtran wireless network and start trying to condense the 8 hours of work and review I should have done weeks ago – in a 2 hour flight. Apparently, I’m very efficient when 30 people aren’t asking me questions.

The only thought that was racing through my mind was: WTF am I the one doing this stuff.

So we get to San Antonio, wait for an eternity for our swag (300lb of shirts which BTW the tshirt company shipped to the wrong address and we couldn’t even overnight them on time) and get to the conference. Of course I see like 20 people that ask me to come down to the bar. Alright, gotta be a ho.

I walk downstairs to the bar.

First person I say hi to is Bob Godgart.

Vlad: Hi Bob!

Bob: You know Vlad, real CEO’s don’t write code.

Mother@#%. That’s OK, I got him back. Later that evening I introduced him as “This is Bob, he’s the Arnie Bellini of Autotask.”

Spent a little bit of time at a bar saying hi to everyone and then decided to go back to my room, order room service and just knock out the rest of the stuff I had on my to-do list. Thankfully, nearly all of it was completed in a few hours so I got to sleep by 4.

At 5:30, Kate called me to tell me she missed her flight.

All things considered, it was still the best 90 minutes of sleep I got all week.

The rest of the week is sort of a blur.

I’ve spent the past few days answering questions. Here is one that I’d like to answer with as much profanity and sincerity as cleanly as I can:

How does Shockey Monkey compete with Autotask and ConnectWise?

Here is the PR answer:

How does this compare with the Autotask, ConnectWise, etc
To be honest, it’s not even close. Mature PSA solutions are flexible, customizable, offer variety of deployment methods and have a very sophisticated ERP, CRM, billing and sales management process. If your business is at that level, please contact the providers and don’t even look at Shockey Monkey – it’s not for you.

We designed Shockey Monkey from the ground up to be simple. As veterans of the software business we had to take a hard look at the mirror and see what kind of software we were developing – selling features, selling enterprise quality and support. We simply could not write such a solution and make it available for free. Over the past few years the Web 2.0 has caught a lot of hype and popularity because it focused on the users, not the system and the IT. We wanted to create an environment that was easy to use, easy to configure and start managing right away. We also spent a significant amount of time to make it easy for you to upgrade to the professional services automation platform and currently have Autotask ready to go. We also created an XML export so you can integrate it into any other solution that supports XML import and data mapping.

Now here is the actual answer:

For the past 2 years we’ve been developing a ton of software for both Autotask and ConnectWise. Between them, they control 99.999% of our MSP client base. Plus like two dudes in Texas that use Tigerpaw.

The notion that we’d write a software product to compete with Autotask and ConnectWise is pretty idiotic. To be honest, I didn’t even want to call our thing a PSA but the common agreement on our team was that we needed to give people an acronym that they were familiar with. So here is what we went with: “It’s the gmail of helpdesks that also manages your calendar, billing and clients.”

Not a day goes by that I don’t wish we could outsource our Exchange.

Then there is a sad realization that we make millions of dollars hosting Exchange.

The idea behind Shockey Monkey is simplicity. It’s the anti-PSA. The un-PSA. It won’t show you a sales opportunity funnel. Or the Gannt chart. If you need that, or if you even know what that means, Shockey Monkey ain’t for you.

Listen.

I’ve spent the past 2 years talking to a ton of partners and the part of the final chapter of Vladville will clue you in on the fact that the End of IT World 2012 as Mayan’s predicted it isn’t coming in a form of IT – it’s coming in a form of people entering the business of technology from the completely opposite angle many of us did. I’m here because I love computers and I was too bad at thermal physics at UF that I had to resign to the life of writing software instead of designing chips.

The new crop of IT people come from business schools, car lots and mortgage industry and they’ve likely never even seen a server in their lifetime.

In order for technology companies (like mine) to stay alive we need to design the software that is free of IT and full of common sense.

My 2 year old knows how to run an iPad. He knows how to change cartoons, how to open applications, how to get to individual parts of it.

My dad can’t figure out how to deposit and withdraw funds from Ameritrade.

When I look at the future of IT, I am far less concerned about designing software for my 63 year old dad and far more concerned about designing software for my 2 year old son.

So Shockey Monkey is free.

Does this suddenly invalidate the whole complexity thing and put all of us out of business? Well, I sure hope not – or I would have written a perfect poison pill. My thinking is that by providing something free and simple gives a very broad base of people a shot at designing a process oriented system. When they reach the level of success that needs to be managed with the likes of Autotask and ConnectWise, we’ll make that transition seamless. But we are not going to be able to grow our reseller base or the business base of MSPs without providing the onboarding solution that will help people get into business, sell all our services, support them better and report true value to the clients.

The future is simplicity.

If we make it easy for people to give us their money, I’m confident they will.

It’s all about priorities

Back in the 90’s I wrote my first web hosting control panel simply because there wasn’t one out there. It allowed me to be unique, to be competitive and in a sea of millions of web hosting providers (even free) I was able to grow.

In 2010, I’m hoping the Shockey Monkey creates that opportunity for everyone I know that this blog and my voice can reach.

There is no bad blood here between OWN or Autotask or ConnectWise.

And before anyone else asks me that question again, let me be quite clear in my response: You’ve got a very narrow view. Companies like Google and Microsoft have thousands of developers to make sure IT world as we’ve grown up in ceases to exist. If you’re trying to find conflict among the few companies that are championing the channel and empowering it’s members to grow and succeed then allow me to suggest that you’ve got to redo your priorities.

In a nutshell

I owe my business and my success to the thousands of people that have sold our products, helped build our services and constantly work with us even when we’re being DDoS’ed off the planet and server resources go to 0 and slow everything down except the heart rate.

This is my thank you to all of you. I always say thank you, I spend a lot of time and money on my partners. And this, wholeheartedly, is the most sincerest way I can say it:

We’ve built something that’s genuinely all yours.

We don’t expect anything in return.

We’ll find more people that feel that way and will help fund your growth just for the attention you give them and their products.

Enjoy: www.shockeymonkey.com

P.S. I’ll explain the product and announce it a bit later this weekend after I’ve had about 30 hours of sleep I’ve missed this week.

This seems to be a popular topic so allow me to address it. If you’ve never been a manager and suddenly you become an entrepreneur with employees (and don’t build an HR department or someone to baby your children) you deal with employees failing you in the worst of ways:

“Your job could be done by a monkey. It would be cheaper and easier to train a monkey than you.”

Ouch. So a bunch of us started referring to our front line infantry as monkeys. Fast forward a few months to an event where a buddy of mine had issues with his staff. While he was gone they “let the fire burn” and when he came back to kill them the following line ensued:

“I could make more money by setting it on fire and burning it than giving it to you to do your job.”

And then.. this cartoon came out:

Any time you can get something that can bring a smile to your face when you’re dealing with difficult stuff.. you use it.

So there you go. From an inside joke among friends to a hopefully biggest gift anyone has ever given the MSP community. Enjoy it: http://www.shockeymonkey.com

So earlier yesterday we were going over our launch plans for our PSA integrations and one of the API’s just doesn’t have the same level of functionality to create and manage contracts and companies remotely. And as I mentioned here, if I do something for one group and not the other the holy war ensues.

So here is the problem we are trying to address: Most of OWN’s services are subscription based and the quantity of subscriptions can vary from month to month because the only way you can make money in services is by giving the end user full control to add / remove / modify services when and how they please. This creates an awesome income effect, until the last of the month when you have to reconcile the accounts between us and your PSA.

Now, you could just enter the service changes into your PSA as OWN notifies you of new services and changes. And I’m the bunny Vlad that makes the cookies.

The So-so-solution…

Yesterday we talked this over and we just can’t find a way to make it happen with a 2-way sync as we do in the other PSA integration.

So I coined a new phrase: 1-way automation. It works like this:

Just tell them to create all the contracts manually. When a new contract is created, we’ll just automate our side of notifying them to create a contract so we can update and modify it remotely.

You call it a crappy email alert. I’ll call it 1-way automation

Now obviously that still falls into the category of “your job is so worthless it could be done by a retarded monkey” so it’s a no-go. We also have no proactive way of running a kick-start script as we do with the other PSA.

So the only thing we got left is screen macro playback. This is the software used in software testing where you can record case scenarios and the software moves the mouse, fills in input fields, scrolls down, fills pages, does stuff in sequence. We can automate creation of a macro that would go through your software, locate company, locate appropriate tabs, create products and services and notes – so we can then automatically sync them via API.

If this were the only way to shave off what is at least 2 hours a month in double data entry, would you do it? Got a better idea? Please voice all your comments and ideas to your OWN/ExchangeDefender Partner Account Manager (not me, please don’t bother as I’m not touching the @vladville.com email until next week as previously noted)

We’re still planning as next Monday being the launch day for all our PSA integrations, 1-way or otherwise

Every now and then we come to the difficult decision, or a set of decisions, that might impact the way our partners work. This is my personal attempt, as the guy who is paying to make all this happen, to explain our situation and answer the questions before you’ve had a chance to form your opinion based on the first few keywords that upset you.

Later this month we (Own Web Now Corp) will be announcing our next generation integrations with Autotask, Connectwise and yes, even Shockey Monkey. This is a significant effort, a significant gesture – because it is in no way a part of our products functionality – to help you think about OWN a lot less and make a lot more money. I will go a step ahead and even say that what we are bringing to the integration picture (and beyond, in custom software for the platforms) is unlike anything available on the market… and if you’re an MSP you owe to give us a look.

On to the imaginary questions:

Q: How are we going to implement the integration? Can I have the white paper? Can you walk me through it?

There are two possible ways to get Own Web Now integrated with your PSA deployment:

Supported – Under this scenario we will offer you the whitepapers, create the integration workflows, queues, service boards, dialin numbers, offer best practices and support the integration when it breaks. This service will come at a reasonable one-time cost and will include training and ongoing best practices from others that use it.

Unsupported – Under this scenario we will send you the whitepapers and wish you the best of luck. This will be available free of charge and will include all the features of our integration suite. No support is available. If you choose this route you will not be able to upgrade to the supported product in the future. I know, I know, while it may make sense for you to try it on your own, fail, and then blame my staff into doing it for you for free while also training you to use your PSA, it is really not a fair scenario and not one I expect to see – you know exactly how much time goes into supporting, managing and billing the solution, so if there is even an ounce of question of whether our service is worth $500 then you have more serious questions to address.

The integration is available between us and Connectwise, Autotask and Shockey Monkey.

Q: We use ____ PSA? Will you integrate with that? When will you integrate with it?

No, we only integrate with Connectwise, Autotask and Shockey Monkey. We never (ever, ever) expect to integrate with anything else. If your product doesn’t contain Connectwise, Autotask or Shockey Monkey we will not integrate with it.

Q: Will the integration be different between different platforms?

While we have tried to bring the identical level of integration to all platforms, there are many factors prohibiting us from offering the same feature set across all platforms. Things contributing to differences between platforms can be attributed to the maturity of the API we are using to integrate with your platform, similarity of data types for services / contracts / products, vendors willingness to assist with problems, vendors restrictions of features across product lines.

Most importantly, our technical inability to create an integration point because of our unwillingness, incompetence and BSTDWOT (better “stuff” to do with our time). It’s not that we are bad people, it’s that your feature request will never generate enough money for us to justify writing the software in the first place.

Q: But..but..but… Vlad! If you can make this work with Autotask, why can’t I have it in Connectwise? Why does it work on the dedicated installation of Connectwise and not hosted? I have this feature in ConnectWise but I’m moving to Autotask Go to save money, I can just assume it will work the same right?

I don’t want to oversimplify this but here it goes: If you see a feature that you don’t have in Connectwise, it’s Arnie Bellini’s fault. If you see a feature you don’t have in Autotask, it’s Bob Godgart’s fault. If it’s a feature that you don’t have in Shockey Monkey then it’s coming in the next release.

Joke aside, see the above answer. The platforms are too different for us to offer the same feature set. If you see a feature in Connectwise that you need in Autotask or your business will implode, please switch to Connectwise. Or vice versa. Again, we are not bad people, we just need to explain that it’s not really apples to apples out there:

All OWN workflow and order management is designed on top of Shockey Monkey. That work is then ported to an extent to two different sync APIs. Some stuff will work with your PSA, some will not. That’s just the reality of software development.

Q: Is this just an elaborate ploy to sell more Shockey Monkey?

No. As a matter of fact, we will not take competitive orders for people looking to switch from Autotask or Connectwise. Truth is, we develop software for our platform and then extend it, within reason, to our partners platforms. We do not have any more advanced access to either platform than any other vendor, we are bound by the same legal and licensing as every other vendor and it’s a leveled playing field.

Q: When will you do ____?

Official answer will always be no. I cannot stress this enough, we are talking about software and features that save you money and make you more productive – I do not want to put more pressure on my staff or shift their focus from our tasks. We don’t write our software in India or China for $2/hr so the feature you are looking for will be available in the next release (maybe not the very next one)

This may sound harsh, and I wanted to give you an idea of the possible conflicts I see in this initiative so you can know where our line is drawn. We will do everything in the power to help out the people that see the value in this.

By all means we’re going to do everything in our power to give our partners an advantage with their PSA choice. All of the above will be made very pretty contract language with blog posts and screenshots to follow.

We’re looking for ConnectWise volunteers / victims to test out our new support system integration. If you use OWN service and ConnectWise, please drop me an email.

We need: 1) Access to your ConnectWise system 2) Your system needs to be SMTP enabled to send out alerts 3) Permission to access your OWN account 4) Permission to setup a new alert and open/update tickets in your ConnectWise system and 5) We need it by tomorrow at the latest.

P.S. This will complete our integration portfolio between Shockey Monkey and Autotask, ConnectWise, Kaseya, LPI, Quickbooks, MYOB, Office (SBA/Excel) as well as our own WMI agent software. We also have the Zenith Infotech code in place but without the ability to test it with them.. well, you know.. it might happen but don’t hold your breath on that one for SM3 release.

We’re ready to start beta testing Shockey Monkey 3, launch of which is anticipated in May. Only a limited number of slots are open and participation is mandatory. If you have a heavilly used Shockey Monkey deployment (as in used every day), or if you are waiting to be turned up but do a lot of business with OWN (and are willing to deploy the Shockey Monkey remote monitoring / management tool at some clients) we want to talk to you.

Expectations are having at least 10-20 minutes a week to spend in one-on-one conversations with me and listen to a 10-20 minute a week presentation on new features/use. All of these would be conducted throughout April.

If this all sounds good, vlad@vladville.com is a place to reach out to me.

If you work with me, you will be getting an email from me over the next 24-48 hours from now. It’s pretty important (to me, to you) so I hope you take a moment to go through it and see if you can benefit from it at all.

To sum it up: Things are going really well at OWN, we are taking advantage of the economy and we’re about to embark on an insane release schedule to expand our solution portfolio which is why we’ve been relatively silent on a number of fronts since last summer. Generally, there is a lag between us announcing something, partner signing customers up and then realizing there are missing pieces. I’m offering some incentives to be more involved in the OWN design process.

This is the extension of the “V…” newsletter, only applied more closely with what I actually work on. While I gave the open community one a shot, I am tired of trying to figure out where the line between the personal and business stuff happens to be – if it doesn’t apply to sleep, it doesn’t apply to newsletters

One of my greater joys in business over the past two years has been the development of our PSA. In the process of studying just how much we suck (and the extent) I’ve really gathered an alarming amount of data points that explain just where we suck but also the uniform way in which our client base is retarded. Naturally, it’s our fault.

Earlier today one of the kids from the Leesburg office drove down to frigid 60F Orlando and we took him out to lunch. We talked about some of the more advanced topics regarding ExchangeDefender. It’s so nice to see people interested in your work.

It’s also quite a pleasure to explain the actual meaning and implementation of the system and watch their dreams shatter in front of you. “Well, yes, that’s how we explain it. Here is what actually happens on the backend.” What can I say, my job is to deliver a message to destinations that are setup by a combo of a laid off IT helpdesk employee, part time lawyer and his wife, the disaccredited CPA. The miracles we perform to get mail to go from point A to point B deserve some sort of a sainthood.

So today we made some slight changes to the support system.

See if you can tell which one is for real.

This is the official business version:

Better Support Escalation

This dropdown allows you to select the service that you are requesting support for. This helps us route the request to the most qualified individual on the support team that can address your request quickly.

Note that when you select an item you will be presented with a checkbox to tell us if this is a service outage. If the outage affects the entire organization, and you check this box, we will escalate the request for free and bump you to the front of the queue.

Now, since I wrote the whole thing this afternoon, allow me to take you through the development process and the reality behind the sugarcoated marketing speak:

Business Problem Definition:

1. These jackasses aren’t reading the documentation.
2. Support team spends all day copying and pasting KB articles.
3. People shouldn’t pay for urgent support if there is a system down issue. We aren’t going to waive charges for urgent support. Meet me half way!

Business Problem Analysis:

1. Nobody reads our documentation.
2. Nobody bothers to file support requests with enough detail, only bare minimum.
3. Nobody reads anything we write or do.

Solution Matrix:

1. How about we hide a setting for our literate partners that lets them get free support?
2. What about embedding help right when they ask the question, maybe it temporarily distracts them and they forget what they wanted.
3. Maybe we can route these requests better around the clock, skip the middle man.

Voila.

Now, true: I wrote this to help my partners and make my staff a lot more efficient and provide more value along the way.

However: Things would cost so much less and perform so much better if we were not stuck in the baby sitting mode training people how to use the products they should have learned in less than 1 hour of video sessions.

This, IMHO, is what sucks about IT and what makes most people throw their hands up in frustration and they end up compromising for Google Gmail and the iPhone. Neither is a serious business solution, but serious business people are about money and efficiency – not about throwing money down the IT Strategic Initiative toilet, hoping to have something valuable at some upgrade cycle in the future.

Ballmer is under fire for some statements he made today. For what it’s worth, I defend the guy for being up front about the problem and what is going on. We can no longer afford little incremental fill-in-the-gap solutions. It’s all or nothing, black or white, people simply won’t put up with limitations in reliability. If they have to put up with limitations, they will go to the shiny crap or free crap – because let’s face it, if it’s all crap anyhow you may as well not pay for it and at least get some joy out of looking at it.