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ME: 6 months with PHP and mySQL HIM: Professional developer
US: 2500 twitter followers, 20k unique page views per month HIM: 9 twitter followers, page views unknown
US: Marketing a basic subscription at $9/mo, up to $99/mo for high-volume biz customers HIM: Free.
We currently have paying users from our content-paywall model, and we have been around for over 2 years. He's toiling in obscurity now, but he's one tweet away from becoming a serious competitor. I've reached out to him to see if he's interested in working together, but the response has been unenthusiastic. The only saving grace is that we still have a pretty massive user base to whom we can market this product. He is starting from 0, effectively.
This is the first time in our history that anyone has presented competition. As the only programmer on staff, I am worried. My programming skills pale in comparison to his. Although I'm learning at a breakneck pace, it is discouraging to see him progressing much faster. As hard as I am working, I get a pit in my stomach thinking about what will happen if he both beats us to market (likely) and gets media attention (possible). I have to keep track of his progress, but each time I check in I get dejected and lose my motivation to work. I am sure most of this comes from insecurity in my own skill set since I'm still very new to programming.
I know this feeling is not new territory. What do you do to push through it?
I've seen software like Bugzilla and FogBugz for issue tracking, and I plan to play around with those shortly. We currently have Redmine installed as a stopgap for our Wiki project, but I don't much care for it.
Most of the support ticketing software seems straightforward and easy to test. I'm looking for software that will run on my server and will let me easily generate a Wiki of some kind. Emphasis will be on ease of use, since the majority of the other guys aren't as technical as I am. It would be ideal to have a system that handles support ticketing and documentation at once; linking to "knowledge base" articles from within a support ticket seems great, and building a KB article from a support ticket would also be good. Perhaps something with a tag/category system, so that a staffer could just look at all past issues of a similar nature?
I started my biz as a one-man blog, so I didn't go in with any real plans for scalability. It's all been shooting from the hip and hoping I get it right. So far it's all gone right but I want to be proactive and ensure that, in the absence of a current staff member, I can slot someone else into the job with a minimum of fuss.
For reference if it matters, we're a daily publication in the trading card game industry. We produce written content and data-focused analytics to people who make money by buying selling and trading cards. The majority of our support tickets are billing-related, but we occasionally get reader feedback and writing submissions. The majority of our internal documentation revolves around the editorial/content submission process, but internal technical matters are quickly requiring a lot of documentation. I hope some more experienced entrepreneurs can lend their expertise. Thanks!