Selling Your Software - Gurock Software Interview

In this feature, we talk to Dennis Gurock, co-founder of Gurock Software, makers of SmartInspect a logging tool for .NET, Java and Delphi (see The Bitwise Review), about the pleasures and pains of setting up software company.

http://www.gurock.com

Huw: What are the biggest pitfalls to watch out for when setting up a software company? What have been your biggest mistakes?

Dennis Gurock: Looking back, our biggest mistake was probably the fact that we ignored the marketing side of the business until the launch of our first product. We generally underestimated the effort required to market and promote our product and just concentrated on the technical things before the launch.

Huw: If you did it all over again, what would you do differently?

Dennis Gurock: If we were doing it all over again, the first thing we would probably do is to start blogging even before the first line of code was written. A blog gives you many great opportunities to learn about your market, connect with people and potential customers, promote your product by word of mouth and improve your blog and company website for search engines.

Huw: What do you do in order to protect your software from being illegally distributed?

Dennis Gurock: Since the SmartInspect trial edition cannot be upgraded to the full version by, for example, simply entering a serial number, we had fewer problems with software piracy than we expected. To upgrade to the full SmartInspect version, our customers have to login to our customer portal and download it. SmartInspect is additionally protected by a license key that contains some meta information like the license count and possible expiration dates.

Huw: So does that mean you haven’t had any problems with software piracy?

Dennis Gurock: Our trial edition has been cracked a few times and the time limitation was removed. But this didn’t affect our sales much due to the fact that the full SmartInspect version contains additional benefits like the full source code of all libraries and other things.

Huw: Is the software obfuscated (for Java and .NET?)

Dennis Gurock: We decided against obfuscating our .NET and Java logging libraries for two basic reasons. Reason one being the fact that we ship the source code of the libraries to our customers anyway and we didn’t want to ship binaries that our customer cannot rebuild themselves. The second reason why we don’t obfuscate the libraries is the fear of introducing new bugs. Obfuscators change the code, after all, and we don’t want to risk any subtle and strange bugs because the obfuscator did something wrong. Other parts of SmartInspect, like the monitoring application, are written in Delphi and don’t need as much obfuscation as .NET or Java binaries anyway.

Huw: How important do you think obfuscation is for .NET software?

Dennis Gurock: I generally believe that developers care way too much about protecting their software. I think it’s better to invest the time in developing new features or in promoting your product.

Huw: How do you license your software? What measures do you take to make sure that each product you sell can only be used by the registered purchaser?

Dennis Gurock: SmartInspect is licensed per developer. This means that every developer who uses SmartInspect to develop, debug or monitor an application must have a valid license. The libraries, on the other hand, can be distributed royalty-free. Because it’s licensed per developer, we allow our users to install the product on more than one machine. Especially for developers or power users who often use different machines, this is an important clause in a license agreement.

Besides license keys we currently don’t take any measures to ensure that customers bought enough licenses or to ensure that only customers can use our product. I’m not a fan of product activation as it can easily fail (servers that are down etc.) which then results in unhappy customers.

On the other hand I know that a lot of development tools use special network protocols to broadcast their license to other users on the same network. They then check if a license is used multiple times and refuse to start if this is true. I think this is a valid way to keep honest customers honest but we decided against such a mechanism for now.

Huw: Finally, do you have any other comments or tips on software protection, licensing or piracy issues?

Dennis Gurock: Andy Brice described a very smart way to reduce piracy and increase returns in Joel’s Business of Software forum. He added a page to his website that he optimized to rank very high for terms like “crack, serial number, warez” in conjunction with his product name PerfectTablePlan. On that page he tries to convince people who search for PerfectTablePlan cracks to purchase his software instead of stealing it. I think this is a great idea and I’m sure he will have success with it. We are planning to do a similar thing for SmartInspect and I’m curious to find out if it works for us.