Tell us what the offer is.

How you popularize it depends on what it is.

You will need to create demand for the ISVs. The ISVs customers have to be asking for such services before it will become a priority for ISVs. You need to target the site developers who now use MySQL. Do you have marketing research that shows that these people will actually switch to MS SQL? Knowing the anti-MS sentiment that drove the adoption of MySQL, I wonder.

Are there things that MS SQL does better than MySQL? You might build an app that leverages those things. If that app can be viral, then it should popularize itself.

Software tools look like a market, but geeks play. They don't pay.

MS SQL is certainly a great piece of software. But MySQL is too, and it's open source.

I see a lot of developers using both. But I've never run into anyone who needed to convert from one to the other.

I would imagine it would go more towards open source than away from it.

Who do you see using this? And why?

You can rent a list of ISVs and send them a mailing, no problem. You could also advertise here on SoftwareCEO. I highly recommend that, in fact.

But it is better to market only to those ISVs who have the problem your software solves.

To find those ISVs, you have to think about the problem from their perspective... What problem do they think they have? Where would they look for information to try to solve it? What language would they use to describe the problem and the solution they are looking for? What else are they buying to try to solve it? Who are they asking for help?

All of those are points to start your marketing.

If you target a market that doesn't exist, all the money in the world will not create a market. Spend a little money to find that market, before you spend a lot of money for nothing.

In fairness, I think that there may be some demand for this type of service. When I sold software products based on databases in the past, we always chose a "lower cost" alternative the expensive, marketing-leading products like MS SQL and Oracle. We didn't want to put that huge cost burden on our customers, and wanted to be able to keep our prices low.

But we invariably ran into potential customers that had a corporate database standard based upon one of these brand name products, and didn't want another database engine in their company. They would only buy if the product used their preferred database engine. Invariably these were very large companies--and therefore strategic customers. So it made sense for us to port our product to that engine, based on the single large deal alone.

So it may find it's demand not so much in "switching" completely from MySQL, but providing a secondary alternative for customers who absolutely require it.

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
Moretti on Management Blog
http://twitter.com/TechnologyGuy
+1 858 792 1062

OK, given what you have said, it seems to me like the place to start would be online portals where people who use MySQL hang out. Right?

The points where you say that the thread is shifting are points that you have to define the market. You say that you are having trouble "popularizing" your product. You said that you tried online advertising and press releases. We offered ideas about why you may not have found success in your marketing techniques and they might be deeper issues with the viability of your product offering. You requested that your specific question be answered and the answers were to do online advertising and press work with CIO magazines.

You've come full circle.

Lisa

Online portals do work, but you can't just post advertisements. You have to respond to messages in a genuine fashion. Or spend money on advertisements. Or upload a press release about your offer.

You need to figure out who you are aiming at as a target market first. Just saying "users that want to switch from MySQL to MS SQL" isn't enough to define the customer.

What type of users? ISVs? Corporate Developers?

Your reach these two targets in different places, through different methods. In the scenario I laid out earlier in this thread, the people that I was talking about would be ISVs--doing the port to please specific, large corporate customers to make a big deal happen.

Is there also a scenario whereby in-house corporate developers would also want to make this switch? It's possible, I don't know enough--hopefully you do. I think Lisa's comments are compelling here, for why they wouldn't want to switch -- why didn't they chose MS SQL in the first place?

But all you've defined about your market so far has been from a technical perspective. You need to understand better who your potential customer really is, before you can decide where and how to market to them.

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
Moretti on Management Blog
http://twitter.com/TechnologyGuy
+1 858 792 1062

How many existing customers in the ISV >$5M US market do you already have? How did you get those customers?

Lisa

It can be a rhetorical question and I don't expect you to put the answers here. It's marketing basics. You have existing customers, you know your defined market, so you look at those existing customers and you determine where they were found, why they were found, where they do business, who they know, how they decided to use your solution. In your existing customers and the process to convert them you will find keys to which marketing was successful.

I don't need to know any of the above answers, you do. Get on the phone and talk to them. Ask them how to find others like them, what they would respond to, what they did respond to, if they have any referrals, any ideas for you. Find out what pain they had that you solved, how much money you have saved them, will they let you write a case study about how your solution saved them.

Figure out the monetary gain from using your solution, put that in dollars, prepare information that will tell your potential clients how much money you are going to save them with your option and what specific pains you will solve.

Instead of telling us that you'll give us a white paper that tells us how much better MS SQL is than My SQL and why, tell me, as an ISV, what spending $10,000 is going to do to make my software development life better. What will I get for switching my database? Think of me as your potential market, I've given you a ton of valuable, free information to help you.

Lisa