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I conclude my discussion of marketing with two articles about the other side of marketing: marketing communications, or marcomm. You have many different ways to promote and tell the world about your product. SourceGear primarily uses only two of them: trade shows and print advertising. Of these two, trade shows are my favorite. This article is a journal I kept during a trade show in 2004.

Two things you need to know about me: First, I believe magazine advertising is a terrible way for a small ISV to do marcomm. Second, my company spends hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on magazine advertising. Someday I’ll figure out how to reconcile those two facts. In the meantime, feel free to call me a hypocrite.

If this article doesn’t seem to be about sales, keep reading it over and over until it does.

Most geek entrepreneurs ask the wrong questions about pricing. I regularly see people on forums asking for advice. Usually they’re trying to decide between three price points like $39, $49, or $59. That’s a valid question, but only after you have contemplated whether to price your product at $499. Geeks hate the subject of pricing. We like things to make sense, and it seems like pricing rarely does. As developers, most of us had to take lots of math classes. Math involves numbers. Pricing involves numbers. In math, there is only one right answer. In pricing, there is almost never one right answer. Who made these rules anyway? Suppose I want to buy a wristwatch. I can spend anywhere from $3 to $30,000. Regardless of how much I spend, I get something I wear on my wrist that tells me what time it is. What’s up with that? Get over it. The first step to understand pricing is to stop expecting things to always make sense.

My first interaction with a sales guy happened while I was at Spyglass. The company had several sales guys, and they were truly outstanding. I learned a lot from them. Many developers resent sales guys and see them as little more than leeches, but the fact is that they play an important role in our industry. Nonetheless, every small ISV should ask themselves whether they really need a sales guy on staff at all. It is a legitimate choice not to have one.

Perhaps the most common mistake is wanting to create a software product and never doing anything about it. Nike started telling people to “just do it” back in 1988. Even though its never-ending barrage of advertising has made this slogan a cliché, sometimes there is no better expression available than these three little words. I conclude this book with a short blog entry I wrote not long before the manuscript for this book was finalized.