Disruptive Technology and Cognitive Overheard As Measures of Success

UBot Studio is one of the most unique internet marketing products available because it’s disruptive technology.

Non-programmers can use it to build professional marketing products for themselves or for others, when before they would have had to hire a programmer, a programming team, or even outsourcers to do the job. Those non-programmers can sell that product, which opens up a whole software market to users who before relied on experts to get the job done. It puts software creation into the hands of any consumer, in the way that Adobe Photoshop puts photo manipulation, or WordPress puts website creation, into the hands of anybody with a camera or an internet connection. Or one of our favorites, Kickstarter, which puts the power to fund an idea or product into the hands of anyone who thinks it should succeed.

If you’re ever in doubt about whether or not your own product will succeed, just start to consider whether or not it helps users do something that before was out of their reach entirely — and if it does so in a way that competes with an already-existing market. If so, it’s disruptive technology, and it just might be The Next Big Thing.

A few more disruptive technologies to help get your creative juices flowing include Netflix, Youtube, Mp3s, and 3D Printers, all of which compete with an existing market by putting power into the hands of the consumer (and taking power out of the hands of the music industry/publishers, large manufacturing firms, and the big television/movie houses.)

But being an innovative product in your market isn’t the only important part of disruption. Disruptive technology must not only be innovative, it must be intuitive and easy-to-use, or else the amazing idea will never get off the ground.

This is because it can be quite difficult to explain concepts that are disruptive precisely because they are out of the ordinary. For instance, thinking of UBot Studio like the average SEO software, which simply puts the power of data (like SEOMoz), or of backlinking (like SeNuke), into the hands of whoever can afford it, is missing a lot of its potential. But explaining that you can use it to create your own SEO products, or marketing or automation tools, is a little confusing.

The solution is in design. An innovative product must be extremely simple to use or it will never catch on. In a recent blog post about “cognitive overhead,” the co-founder of the company Bump, which makes the popular data-sharing app for smartphones, writes about what makes a concept easy to understand: “how many logical connections or jumps your brain has to make in order to understand or contextualize the thing you’re looking at.”

I’d argue that this is the most important part of disruptive technology after how disruptive it is. The more disruptive it is, the less cognitive overhead it needs to use:

Every year for the past four years we’ve been the only company in the internet marketing field that’s working to help grow the software market by allowing anyone to create cool products quickly and easily (we were left off MIT’s 50 Disruptive Companies list again this year…one day we’ll be on it!).

This is partly because the software’s cognitive overhead is significant. But we’re currently working on soon-to-be-released new features to make UBot Studio even simpler to use. You’ll be hearing more about them soon. Meanwhile, as you keep looking to create the next big disruptive innovation, remember to keep lowering your products’ cognitive overhead proportionally. Do both those things and I guarantee you’ll end up with something extraordinary.

– Seth

Get Rich…Slowly?

Or, How to Build a Successful Service-Based Business with UBot Studio

Even though some of our customers may have hit it big with a well-marketed launch and a high-priced, valuable product, there are lots of ways to make money in this world – and UBot Studio can do a lot more than just one-off products. One of the more “secret” methods of using UBot Studio is to convert your app into a service (or even a Software as a Service (Saas) tool) and draw in customers and recurring payments.

Here’s how:

Software as a Service is  “software that is owned, delivered and managed remotely by one or more providers.” Basically, instead of selling a tool that your customers download, they have access to it remotely. With UBot Studio, there are several options for this.

First, remember that currently UBot Studio only compiles executable files. That means you can’t put the software you build inside UBot Studio onto a server and have someone log into it through a web panel (pretty common for SaaS) without some PHP work on your end that translates what they do on the web site into an action on a Windows Server. Unless, of course, what they are logging into is actually a front-end for the server itself, ie through a Remote Desktop or Virtual Server – and that’s what I’d recommend.

Option #1: Sell access to your VPS, and stock it with your app(s). Your clients pay for weekly or monthly access to login and run the apps  as often as they want. 

Cons: 

1. Setting up access takes time. Finding a box to host your apps on and creating access accounts for each new customer, along with the regular demands of a recurring payment, means extra work on your part on the front end.
2. If there’s a bug, your customer will have to alert you and you may have to try to reproduce it on your end – which could be difficult, and could mean lost sales.
3. Updating your app isn’t as easy if it’s hosted on a box that your customers are logged onto often. This may require extra communication.
4. In some ways, this option is a security risk. The tool is sort of out of your hands (I know I wouldn’t think of it, but how do you know extra users aren’t sharing access?). And, some nosy/greedy customers may try really hard to send your app and all its config files to themselves, which means you have to really lock down that server. Which, again, is extra work. Also, if your customers are doing anything at all questionable on your VPS, you’re going to be the one that gets the nasty letter from the VPS host, or worse still, has to deal with unhappy customers when access is turned off.

Pros: 

1. You don’t have to worry about running the service – your customers do that for you. If you’ve built a rock-solid app or bot, then once you hand out access info to your customers, you can basically just step away.
2. The customers have unrestricted access — which, depending on the privacy requirements of what they are doing, might make them happy. Some other UBot-as-SaaS models require you to ask for customer information, which in some cases, may cost you sales.
3. This method doesn’t require you to learn anything extra except how to administer a VPS. No PHP, for example.
4. You can sell simple access to multiple apps (some of which can be offered as “Bonuses”) and help increase the cost of your service.

Quick story: Once, years ago, Seth and I were sharing a VPS for work — hosting some websites or something — and my internet at home was slow. I REALLY wanted to watch a lecture series on something like Best Books in the English Language. (We’re definitely self-learning lecture geeks at UBot Studio – I think Seth has an honorary degree from The Teaching Company.) Anyway, I went and grabbed a torrent of the file, downloaded it as quickly as I could, and deleted the evidence– all on the VPS.

Two days later, work stopped completely because our access to the VPS got frozen. Seth cleared it up by letting the hosting company know that he was never letting me have access to the VPS again. I still have no idea how to connect to the VPS.

Don’t do stupid stuff on your VPS, folks. And if you want to do some self-education….there are lots of free options

Free UC Berkeley Software Engineering / Software as a Service Course Online

(http://webcast.berkeley.edu/playlist#c,s,All,93A1C8DCB4C64AB7)

On Sale Great Courses Lectures

 

Option 2: Customers pay you to run the service for them on your own machine or VPS.

This is the simplest option, but it’s also the one that requires your customers to have the most confidence in you.  They have to trust that you’re doing what you say, sometimes with a service that doesn’t produce immediate results. There are a couple of ways to overcome this, though–for instance, if your service produces results, like a scraping service might, then there’s nothing to worry about. They pay, you run the app that gets the data, you give them the results. But if that’s not the way the service is set up, then you will want to add automatic reporting data (i.e., number of URLS visited, etc), which isn’t difficult in UBot Studio. Just make sure all the variables and URLs are added to a table and saved to an excel file every loop, and you’ll be fine.

Cons: 

1. Overcoming confidence and trust issues with your customers will require extra work. Since they can’t see what’s happening, it might cost you sales early on, until you get testimonials and a strong reputation.
2. It will take you more time. Simply put, even if you have to push just a single button to get the app going, that’s extra work. So my advice is to ensure that your app requires very little upkeep, runs automatically, and if possible, is running on its own VPS. I’d even suggest you outsource the app-running itself to a service like freelancer or a VA if you can find one.

Pros:

1. Simplicity for your customer: When there are bugs, you encounter them. When something doesn’t work right, you fix it on your end. Your customer never has to know about any issues – they pay a fee, and you produce a result. This method is ideal if you’re running an SEO-service, for example, because generally customers don’t need to know the “process” as much as the results.
2. Places to sell these sorts of services abound, as do options for ideas. Check Warriorforum and Fiverr.com for anything that sounds like it can be automated entirely in a browser, build a bot, and automate the process. Think numbers when you’re trying to sell the service – (“I will give you x # of things for $”.) If you think the folks already making a killing on Fiverr aren’t already doing that, you’re wrong. It might not seem like much money, but when all you have to do is push a single button–$5 a pop isn’t too bad. Remember, with SaaS, slow and steady wins the race. $5 today, $25 tomorrow, $500 next week.
3. Expanding is easy. If you get to be too busy to run the apps, just find a friend or a VA and have them do it for you.

Take a break. Peruse a bit of SaaS data, infographstyle

Option 3: Build a web-interface that communicates directly with your bot. 

This is the only true SaaS model, and potentially the cleanest, but it also requires a bit more work.

Pros: 

1. Your customers are used to this style of SaaS, populated by sites like SalesForce, Github, Basecamp, etc, and are much more likely to get on board. The directions can be simple (login and enter your site information) and if you’re a good designer, can look beautiful.
2. The entire process can be automated, for everyone. Your customer logs in, enters or checks their info, and then logs out. Your service runs either on a schedule (daily scheduled task that pulls data from CSV or MySQL), or upon completion of your customer’s purchase.

Cons:

1. This is by far the most complicated option to set up on the front-end. It will require either additional web programming work (PHP) or MySQL or both.
2. There are a lot of moving parts, and because of that, there will be more broken pieces. Even though it’s entirely automated, you’ll definitely need to build in a lot of features to make sure that when the communication between site and server, or server and bot, or bot and data, fails, you know about it.

If you follow any of these models, you can absolutely build a successful service-based business with UBot Studio within a couple of weeks. Over time, a great service can be perfected and automated, can grow, and can give you a large list of new customers to whom you can offer bigger, better services. It’s not as exciting as a $500 product, but there’s a lot more potential in a $29 /mo service–lower cost means lower bar for entry means far more sales. You can even offer a discount for month one, or a promo to the first 10 customers, without taking much of a hit. Or, sign users up for a yearly plan at a discounted rate!

Don’t get caught up in the “I built a bot and now no one’s buying it” dark ages. A lot of people are buying SaaS now, every month, instead of one off sales – it’s the “new thing,” and it’s only growing. And you can take advantage of it with just a little work!

– Jason

Cool Games, or How to Learn to Program (If You Aren’t a Programmer and Don’t Want to Be)

I remember the first program I ever made. Well technically I didn’t make it, I just edited it. It was called “Gorillas,” and it was a game made for kids to learn how to use angles and geometry. I think it came with MS-DOS. Basically, you controlled a monkey who threw bananas over buildings to try to hit targets.

Actually now that I think of it, the game was basically Angry Birds, only with gorillas. (But the creator of Angry Birds is probably sitting somewhere on a pile of gold bars while the creator of Gorillas is peeling a pile of bananas, one by one, and crying—a lesson on marketing and hitting the right audience with the right product at the right time. Oh, and that giving away something for free only works if you have an upsell.)

Anyway, the source code for the game was in QBasic and was editable. So I opened it up and quickly saw how you could change what level you started at. I changed it and played some hard levels for a while, then went back to the code. I began to see other variables I could edit: the shape of buildings and the location of the gorillas. Suddenly it didn’t matter what level I started at anymore. I was god. I was putting monkeys in the sky and building crazy skyscrapers that broke out of the screen. And after a few minutes I realized it was more fun to play god than to play the game.

That’s what programming is, even when you’re just starting out: it’s playing god. You can tell the computer what to do and then watch it happen just by pushing a button. You can create complex interactions and solve problems. You can tell people “look at this,” and they will get excited and want to know how you did it.

Ed, who was a big part of our early Dev Team, started programming in 7th grade when he took a class in javascript. He told me,

That’s where i saw what programming was, that I could write a loop to put the numbers 1-1000 on a webpage…and I realized how useful programming is since it would take forever to type them all out. I still remember that moment.

Later, in an Intro to Computer Science class, Ed remembers having a similar feeling. The whole class was struggling with a problem, and then he solved it, and “suddenly everything was easy.”

That’s the really cool thing about programming. The bad part is actually writing code. Sitting down and figuring out syntax and what command to use and how to use it, ugh! It can take hours or days just to learn how to compile a working app sometimes. The difference between Ed and I is that Ed loved programming so much that he kept doing it. He worked on PHP sites and Flash games. He built a several puzzle games and action games that are still online. He eventually started freelance work and was building bots for people while he was in high school.

Avalanche!

Ed’s Tilt Puzzle

So, when you use UBot Studio, you’ll notice that we’ve made it as simple to program as possible, keeping all those fun elements that let you play god to the computer, while getting rid of as many of those annoying, complex commands, features, and syntax elements as we can. You drop elements of the page into your script, instead of combing through source code to figure out commands. Just drag a button over and UBot will ask if you want to click it. Pull in a drop-down item and UBot will ask if you want to choose one of the items or a random item.

We’ve used our years of programming and using the web to create an interface that just makes sense, and we also have a complete wiki and video tutorials for getting started, so you’re never in the dark. And we also include hundreds of samples of pre-written code in our Bot Bank, so you can look at what other people have done and edit it, learning how to program just like I did. I understand that not everyone wants to be a programmer – and that’s perfectly fine. With UBot Studio, you don’t need to be. You can create software and automation tools, enjoy the process of building them, and sell them the same day you download UBot.

Ed has this advice for new users:

If you’re really interested then just start making stuff, even if you dont know how to make something, think of something you want to make and learn everything you need to know to make it.

Try it out –and you can be the one sitting on a pile of cash (and not sitting on a pile of bananas). You can relive my childhood by playing Gorillas here at Kongregate, and Ed’s by playing his version of Tetris here.

– Jason