Software Business in the Middle East

From today I am on vacation - my first vacation since I came to Dubai. It is almost exactly 18 months since we started the company. I cannot say it is right time to go for vacation as there are many things going on, but 12-14 working hours a day with 1 or 2 week-end days per month during 1,5 years has done its bad job and I simply feel I need to reset my mind to keep working productively.

It will not be the same kind of vacation as I used to have while I was employed because I will check my e-mails daily and if any contract comes I would need to spend couple days working. But otherwise I will enjoy two weeks with my family and friends.

Today we’ve released a feature that we would have released for a long time back - facility for our customers to buy a license online. Currently this feature is available only from the program until we are done with our product web site.

When user clicks on Buy Online button from our program, he is sent to this site. Later, when our software web site is up and running, we will of course add this feature on it too.

There are several reasons we release this feature only now, after almost 9 months since the first version:

1. 9 months ago our software was far far away from being able to convince many people to buy it. We did want to talk to each and every customer to get feedback and we did not want to have a lot of sales as we needed more time for improvements.
2. Internet seemed to be something not so widely used as in Europe or US. It is wrong - although many pharmacies still have no Internet or very slow connections, the majority of healthcare professionals use Internet regularly at home.
3. We simply did not consider sales over Internet seriously. Bad for us - but now this is fixed!

For credit card processing we use RegNow. It looks fine, but for some reasons they include Extended Download Service to keep your link to download the software you’ve purchased for a longer period of time. It means customer must remove this option from the order, and it seems for me as not very good way to earn money as many people might be confused why there is extra $6+ added into the price. I have sent e-mail to RegNow support, we’ll see what they answer.

Found very cool web site - Web Archive: Wayback Machine. Time to time it is really good to see how your web site looked like in the past.

This is how Microsoft web site looked like at October 22, 1996. Web Archive seems to lose some pictures around, but still it gives you an idea about their web site for more than 10 years back!

This is how our company web site looked at the time we were preparing to go to Dubai. Nostalgia, really