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The trial is for 30 days, but it only counts days you actually run it, so if you use it infrequently you could easily go six months or more before it times out. How long do you allow people to use the trial version? System administrators use it for migrating servers, web developers use it instead of a traditional FTP client, and non-techs use it for backups or synching their laptops and desktops. IвЂ™d say more than 50% are programmers, but thereвЂ™s definitely a wider audience.

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We still have a fairly wordy page title though, and I think thatвЂ™s entirely for the search enginesвЂ™ benefit.ДЄre most of your customers programmers, or does the software appeal to a wider audience? IвЂ™m sure some of those changes helped, since we ended up adding more descriptions and using more synonyms, but it was primarily a case of asking how we could make it easier to find the information someone would want and expanding on that. For v3 we took a different approach and redesigned the site to make it more accessible to potential customers. We had a company help with SEO for a lot of the 2.x lifetime, and theyвЂ™d suggest tweaks to improve things. has an enviable Google page rank of 6 and ranks second for вЂњfile comparison softwareвЂќ. We do spend some money on Google AdWords, and we hired a company to periodically submit our site to search engines and download sites, but weвЂ™ve never run a print or banner ad. WeвЂ™ve had lots of customers tell us that they brought BC with them when they switched jobs and ended up getting their companies to spring for larger licenses. We rely almost entirely on word of mouth. What are the main methods you use to promote Beyond Compare? That allowed us to keep competing even when we were lagging in other areas. In our case BCвЂ™s directory comparison is much more powerful than the alternatives, and we have viewers for other file types like images, binary files, and data files.

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We work 8 hours a day on it, which gives us more time to develop new features than someone doing it as a hobby, and we can afford commercial libraries that someone providing a free utility canвЂ™t.ДЄs for the commercial competitors, itвЂ™s mostly a matter of providing something that they donвЂ™t. The big advantage we have here is that people are paying us for the software, so we have strong incentive to provide good tech support and to provide the features they want. How do you manage to run a successful business with so many competitors, many of them free?Д¬ompeting with the free tools hasnвЂ™t been as hard as I expected. There are lots of different file comparison tools. ThereвЂ™s one other full-time developer, one part time developer, two in tech support, two in sales, and our president, who handles everything else. How many other people work on Beyond Compare on the business side and on the development side? My non-development tasks include managing the build process, interfacing with our component vendors, keeping track of any interns, and tech support, when thereвЂ™s difficult questions or when the dedicated staff donвЂ™t have time. Most of my time is spent working on the directory comparison and the virtual filesystem layer (ftp, zips, version control), but there are very few places in the program that I havenвЂ™t worked on. IвЂ™m the lead developer and I started here in late 2000, a few months before significant development on v2 started.

How long have you been working on Beyond Compare and what is your role?

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I did a lot of programming for fun before then, but this was my first professional job and my first introduction to Delphi.

I started at Scooter Software straight out of college. How had they succeeded despite ignoring much of the conventional wisdom? Craig Peterson of Scooter Software kindly agreed to answer my questions.Д¬an you tell me a bit about your background before working on Beyond Compare. But I was intrigued by some of the unusual decisions they had taken: competing in a market with lots of free alternatives going 6 years between major upgrades re-writing from scratch releasing a Linux version and having an extremely generous trial policy. It is a very polished and powerful piece of software with a big following. I am a fan of file and folder comparison utility Beyond Compare from Scooter Software.