I’ve posted the links in the Stuffed Guys Blog, in the Company News forum and also sent an email to approximately 700+ registered users of the forum who opted to receive emails from the forums administrators when they registered.

Hopefully that would make things going.

http://groups.google.com/group/factory-nova.
http://groups.google.com/group/factory-nova/subscribe?note=1

Be so kind und publish the message to general discussions of the support forum of FN so at least the subscribers get notified.

Thanx

We will see what comes out from it.

We had problems with support not because we didn’t have money to pay to a dedicated support person. The problem is that it seemed to be impossible to find such person due to the reasons I outlined in the post above.

Also, just to make this clear, the company did not end. We had to end what I call a “Phase 2″ of the company. The company exists from 2001, but our Factory Nova and Stuffed Tracker 2.x-3.x were created only in Phase 2. Phase 1 was basically me alone selling very simple Stuffed Tracker 1.x written in a different language (Perl instead of PHP) and doing consulting work.

Phase 3 seems to be quite possible. Based on all the experience we’ve got so far and given that we will be able to solve all the problems that we’ve encountered (like this support challenge).

I too found Factory Nova in December by accident. I was searching for a software like this a long time. Factory Nova is a very nice software, but it isn’t promoted well. If you had sold more you possibly had money enough for support people.

I wanted to buy an unlimited version of FN in December but was shocked after I read about the end of your company. So I had to search again and lastly I found a software which fulfills our needs: OpenGoo.org. It’s very nice too.

Happy New Year and I wish you all the best for your life.

Karl

Well I certainly would not like to spam all the users with this, but I can post a link to the group:

1. In a blog post in the official Stuffed Guys blog.
2. In a news forum over at stuffedguys.com so that the post would appear on the front page.

well again my question: if I setup a FN google group, would you send an invitation mail to registerd users of your forum with information about the group?

You can be (un)oficially owner or moderator of the group (under a nick) so if the group gous in the wrong direction, you can lock/delete it.

Opening “unofficial” forums is a nice idea, but this implies that someone else does this, not us. If this happens I can announce this on the Stuffed Guys site, no problem.

And finally, of course, closing down support and forums was not my devilish plan to sell software without support now on. I only did this while still keeping the ability to purchase the products because I thought someone would still like to use and buy our products even when officially there is no more support (or planned updates) for them for the time being.

We virtually cut our spending to 0 now on the products, so no sales is ok for this in-between-the-phases business model.

If the phorum is only for registerd users, spam should not be a problem and I guess moderation would also not require much time.

Well, or entirely basic solution which might work, is to create a google group (I can do it) and you could invite into group people, who have purchased FN or registered into the phorum.

But anyway from a long term perspective, if you want do sell your product you will have to solve the support this or the other way, there will not be many people who buy it without that. I guess you are aware of that.

Closing of the support forums was not an easy decision. You have to imagine my position — I certainly don’t mind users helping each other on their own in the forums. As you correctly point out, I’ve actually suggested this solution myself in my blog post.

The problem is that somebody still have to moderate the forums (to filter out spam if anything else). We certainly can’t do this anymore ourselves. So the most obvious choice was to lock the forums in the read-only mode.

Maybe somebody from the people active in the forums would like to become moderators, that’s a good idea as well. But even in this case, it will be risky for us, since such moderator won’t have any obligations to continue moderating. Now he or she is interested in doing this, in a week they’ve lost the interest. What should we do then?

Having said all this, I’d love to find a way to allow users to communicate with each other even now. Maybe you’ll have some suggestions?

nice that you started a blog, in fact I wanted to writeto stuffed guys longer time ago,in this way, it is “direct” so even better.

There are several things I wanted to write you, so lets go one by one:

1. SW Factory Nova
What a great piece of SW! I bought the Factory Nova for our company about 2 months ago. I did a lot of research and went over dosens of hosted, server based, open source and paid solution.
I found FN more or less by accident (there is much to be done in matter of promoting the product, far to little mensions about it in net) – and after I tested it, the customer value seems to me much higher than of competitors. The funkcionality and usability is really great and it seemed to me that somebody programmed it with passion – I am glad that you confirming that ;-).

2. Closing the support phorum
I think that was not a good decision. It is ok to stop official support, but why did you stop users to help each other?! Even in this post you state, that the users support is a value, so why stop them?
Definitely a bad idea.

3. Support company
Your offer sounds interesting to me. Infact, we needed some customisation of FN (worklog reports by month/employeee, multitask worklog input etc.) and as you had no capacities we did it by ourselves. We thought we might offer this customisation to you or other users via phorum (there were some requests for such features).

I really like the FN, and as we will work with it in the company, support/implementation of it for some SMEs might be an interesting diversification of our present activities.
We also operate and develop an etravel system: relaxos.com/.ru and head to some other ecommerce projects, so Stuffed Tracker might be interesting for us (we currently use http://www.qualityunit.com/postaffiliatepro/ – which might be compared with some features to your SW) – so that might be interesting for us too.

By the way have a look at other products of that company http://www.qualityunit.com/, they also offer great value.

Well have a nice end of the year and a lot of success with phase 3 of your company. And… , thanx a lot for your with passion created SW ;-)