PreEmptive Solutions Shelf Life Case Study
Entrepreneur ISV Refines Software Product Just In Time for Launch all while Protecting Intellectual Property and Fighting Piracy
Customer: Lazycat Labs, LLC
Web Site: www.ezblueprint.com
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Information technology
Customer Profile
Lazycat Labs, LLC develops floor plan software for real estate and property management professionals. The flagship product, Easy Blue Print, is a simple software program used to easily create floor plans for office and home layouts.
Software and Services
- Runtime Intelligence Services
- Dotfuscator Professional
- Obfuscation
- Tamper Defense
“PreEmptive Solutions has helped us through the process of transitioning an idea for a software program into an evaluation version, and finally into a market opportunity.” Lars Gregory Johnson, President, Lazycat Labs, LLC
Lazycat Labs is an entrepreneurial ISV launching Easy Blue Print, a simple software program used to easily create floor plans for office and home layouts. While initially looking to secure intellectual property and reduce the risk of piracy, Lazycat Labs soon recognized that being able to monitor adoption and behavior of early adopters offered material and unexpected value. “Runtime Intelligence Services gives us insight into actual usage helping us to more quickly and effectively improve the quality of our software,” says Ela Truty, Vice President, Lazycat Labs, LLC
The Situation
Lazycat Labs, LLC develops floor plan software for real estate and property management professionals. The flagship product, Easy Blue Print, is a simple software program used to easily create floor plans for office and home layouts. With over 1,500 users, maximizing ease of use and application quality is essential to scaling their business.
“We get about 25 downloads a day and we need to convert that into 25 happy customers a day,” says co-founder Ela Truty. “We also need to get some idea of where prospects will 'drop out' of our 'sales funnel'. Of the users who download the program, we need to know what percentage actually try it out. We need to know what features they use. We need to know what features they get frustrated with. We need to know what features might be causing the program to crash.”
Solution Easy Blue Print development recognized the efficiency of combining analytics, tamper defense and obfuscation as a post-build step in their release process. Their evaluation of Dotfuscator and Runtime Intelligence Services led them to select PreEmptive Solutions to meet all of these needs. In the customer’s own words
Product functionality
Feature level tracking has given us insight into our sales funnel, and find potential problems with customer dropouts. Data extract reports give us the potential to develop our own application usage metrics as well.
Our product needed to use F#, a new language from Microsoft that would not work with other obfuscation products.
Product quality
We actually like the standalone program, even more than Visual Studio (which we love too). It is simple, and well-organized. The program is solid, and never fails.
Customer Service
By far, the most compelling feature is the people who work at Preemptive. The original goal for doing work with Preemptive was just to get a piece of software that would hide our source code. The real value from Preemptive, however, has been the people (and their technologies for gathering usage metrics). The people and technology have helped us through the process of transitioning an idea for a software program into an evaluation version, and finally into a market opportunity. Specific examples of technical support help we have gotten would include getting set up with feature-level tracking, ideas for creating reports and advice on how to use/interpret reports.
Benefits
Before using Runtime Intelligence Services from PreEmptive Solutions, our only insight into how people were using our program was through technical support. We had several complaints about our program crashing. After looking at the different usage patterns of our install-base, it became clear that users who used the “draw window tool” in our program would get an application shutdown/restart. Similarly, users who used the “add symbol” feature nearly always ended up getting a program crash. Runtime Intelligence analytics helped to identify these issues leading directly to product quality improvements. Furthermore, we had absolutely no idea how many people actually ended up using our program after their initial download. We were surprised by how high the numbers actually were. While this was initially gratifying, it also pointed out the fact that our dropout rates were unacceptably high. We even appeared to have significant dropout rates between download and INSTALL. So, our next business challenge will be to use Runtime Intelligence analytics to help diagnose and reduce our dropouts.
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