How TO Sell Software - JetBrains responds

This morning I was pleased to find a comment to yesterday's blog post about JetBrains from Alex Tkachman, COO of said company. He was very apologetic about the problems with their site, and generously offered me a free license to Resharper. Thanks Alex!

In contrast to my earlier post, this is a very smart way to sell software. "But", you may say, "they haven't sold anything". And that's true, so far. But what they have done taken a disgruntled prospect, who probably wouldn't have purchased the software at this point anyway, and turned him into a potential advocate for their software.  At best, I may like the product so much that I recommend to my co-workers that we buy more licenses. At worst, they've addressed a public complaint and generated some good will. This is one of the beauties of the software business, by the way - it doesn't actually cost them material goods to do this. Just an email containing a license key.

Kudos to JetBrains for keeping their ears to the ground and staying engaged in the community. Even with a lowly ZZ lister like me.

I stand by my contention that time-limited license keys are a bad idea, though. Had the software simply been time-bombed from the install date, I might have been a real paying customer from the get-go.
 

 

 

2 Comments

  • equally, time bomb products lose business when the customer installs a product but then don't get around to using it in the time period and when they eventually get around to actually making a buying decision finds it doesnt work anymore

  • The guys behind ReSharper are also the greatest! They have also several very active newsgroups for support. I have been using ReSharper for about 1.5 years and I can guarantee you that you will love it!

Comments have been disabled for this content.