GetSatisfaction: Is it worth it?

While working on the list of tools and services to write about as part of my Start-up Tools series, Get Satisfaction has been the hardest to decide on. After a lot of reading, I decided against recommending it, though I had to write about it because so many companies have opted to use it.

Get Satisfaction is a great concept for the most part – what it boils down to is a specialized forum service for your customers to discuss issues and ideas about your products. But it’s not quite that simple, as your customer can create a site with them in your company’s name, without your knowledge as 37signals found out – (and they weren’t happy about it). The article by 37signals goes into length about the issues surrounding the service, so I won’t repeat them all here – it’s well worth the time to read if you are thinking about using the service.

While they do offer a rather anemic free version, if you want anything useful you’ll have to shell out for one of the paid versions which start at $99/month. That’s $1,188 per year, which for most start-ups would be among their top expenses.

While they have made some changes to reduce the mafioso feel that many complained about, however the feeling that you have to participate if you care about customers still lingers. With prices ranging from $99 to $899 a month for what amounts to little more than a forum service – it’s simply too expensive for many start-ups.

While I understand that they are in business to make money just as I am, my budget is still very tight and there are many other needs fighting over that same money. Supporting customers has to be the top priority, but is this really the best way to achieve that?

To me it seems that money may be better spent on hardware upgrades to make our servers faster or some real analytics to make sure our web sites are as easy to use as possible. While the service has some nice benefits, spending over $1,100 a year for access to a locked-down forum just doesn’t make business sense.

Oh, and do you want it to match the look and feel of your website? We’ll for that you have to upgrade to their top plan at a whopping $899 a month. Yet themes are a basic feature of virtually all forum systems.

For me, I think I’ll give bbPress a shot – it’s free, open source, and easy to use – then I’ll take that $99/month and find better ways for it to serve my customers.

Adam Caudill

Declaring War on Ransomware

It’s time for everyone from the industry, developers, and the government to declare war on ransomware and make it as hard as possible for them to ply their insidious trade. There have been false starts and baby steps, diligent fighters without enough resources, and vendors that have only given a nod to the issue. It’s time to use every tool reasonably available to stop this scourge. For so many in the industry that have dedicated so much of their time and effort to this fight, this statement may seem to diminish their efforts, but that is not my intent.

Speaking at SC Magazine Congress

Last week Brandon Wilson and I gave the lunch keynote at the SC Magazine Congress event in Chicago. It was a fun, more executive level event – a big thanks to Eric Green and team. The talk was mostly an executive overview of what was discussed at our DerbyCon talk, with some updates, and some insights. Here are the slides, and a rough transcript from the event: This is based on the speaker notes – so it doesn’t include the discussion and other bits that were said.

OPSEC, The NSA, and You

It’s been two weeks since news broke about the NSA collecting massive amounts of data from Verizon; and likely everybody else. There’s also PRISM – whatever the hell that is – it seems there’s no agreement on that, and I doubt there will be anytime soon. What really matters here though, is we have proof that people are watching – and if it’s happening in the US, it’s probably happening everywhere else.

Thoughts on the iPad, from an Apple hater

Before I get started, let me make a couple of things clear: Apple is evil; pure and simple. I’m fully convinced that Steve Jobs has weekly planning meetings with Lucifer himself1. Apple’s policies are anti-everybody. From bloggers to developers2, Apple seems to make life as hard as possible for those that use their products for profit. With these facts in mind, I tend to shy away from their products when I have a choice (which isn’t always the case); though a while back I decided to buy an iPad for some reason.

Am I doing too much?

(Disclaimer: This is something of a rant, and was written at 3AM. My apologies if it doesn’t make sense. Feel free to ignore.) It’s 3AM, and I’m up reading, again. Is it the latest great novel or one of the classics that I enjoy so much? No, it’s research for my latest hobby. It’s lasers this time, but this pattern is far from new. I’m starting to think I just try to do too much, I go in too many different directions.